Whole 02: Understanding the Power of Awe (& How You Can Experience it Today) Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Laura Wifler: I will never forget this time my husband and I were in this tiny little country of Slovenia. We were going through the Julian Alps. We had rented a car. I remember driving through these crazy mountains at very high speeds because it was probably—basically the Autobahn or something. I can't remember. I just remember there were a lot of racecars around, and we felt like we were driving fast, but everyone was passing us on this mountaintop.
That's not really the point. The point is, the water was so crystal clear, and the mountains were so tall. There were snow peaks. Then there was lush vegetation at the bottom. It was one of the most wild days of my life—both feeling like, "Is this real life? Is this even my life? Am I really here?" but also like, "Whoa, God can do some really incredible stuff." I will never forget that day—just how nuts it was to see God and how incredible he is and how small I was. I felt so small.
Emily Jensen: Wow. Man, I have those same feelings on my favorite walking trail in Iowa. [Laughter]
Laura: Oh, I guarantee you, girl—it would be close, but Iowa cannot come close to Slovenia.
Emily: That is true. I feel like there is something about mountains that just—it gives you—
Laura: And waterfalls. Iowa is pretty great. I'm not going to lie. I feel it too, at times—there have been moments. Our sky.
Emily: The sky, yes.
Laura: The Iowa sky—we have more stars than anyone else, I swear it. I swear we do.
Emily: I can be caught in my backyard or even on a trail, literally just staring at a flower. I just can't. The color is so vibrant. There are little intricate patterns inside. The other day, I actually was gifted some roses. I didn't even know that this variety of rose existed, but I was sitting there in the kitchen. I just kept peeling back the rose petals, and they just went on and on and on. It felt like hundreds of layers of petals. Then inside, there's the most gorgeous little center. It's orange, and it's got all this pattern in it. I was like, "What in the world? God is so cool that he makes something like this, and for why?
Laura: For why? That is the question. For why? You just know he's just showing off. You know he's like, "Look at, look at. This is a tiny little bit of what I can do." [Laughter]
Emily: What we are talking about today is that awe feeling we get when we see something in creation—when we see something that God created, and it just stops us in our tracks, and it takes our breath away. We feel like this is so important to the greater series that we're talking about, which is the ways that we can feel like we've lost ourselves after we become moms. I think in that new motherhood stage—whether you've just got one baby or maybe you've got a toddler and a preschooler and a baby and all these different things—you're just kind of so focused on what's right in front of you.
Having to be reactionary and put out one fire and then another fire—it can feel like your whole day is just wiping counters and wiping up spit-up. Stepping on crackers that were spilled on the floor. There's whining. There are tantrums. We can lose this sense that we are part of something spectacular and magnificent and great—that there is all this beauty not only in what we're experiencing but beyond what we're experiencing too. We feel like awe is one of those ways that we recapture that.
Laura: Yes, and I'm betting that everyone can probably draw to mind a moment like my Slovenian experience, where they were just dumbfounded by how incredible God was. But we also want to talk about these ways to cultivate little things, like Emily's rose, that in our regular lives as moms—how do we cultivate awe? Because awe, wildly, can be cultivated. It is not something that you have to just get dropped on you because suddenly you're in the right place at the right time, but it is something that we can actually practice.
What's really interesting is that this feeling of awe—it's hard to describe. What is awe? We all know it when you're in it, but to describe what exactly that feeling is—I think it's interesting because it's something that pushes you to feel like you're transcending your understanding of the world. That suddenly, it's being pushed out— how you understand the world. There's also a bit of mystery, I think, that comes with it. Something that feels like—like you said—it's bigger than yourself. It used to be something that I think, especially for a long time, was experienced as more like a virtue but even now—science. You can listen to tons of podcasts now about the science of awe, and they're taking this feeling as a very serious thing that humans need.
Emily: Of course. I feel like the modern scientific podcasters are always behind what God has already—
Laura: [Laughter] It's so true.
Emily: —said. Obviously, it feels so—some people would describe as transcendent or existential or even spiritual because it's our heart and soul responding to the God of the universe and having almost our breath caught by who he is and how incredible and big and unfathomable he is. Where do we see this in Scripture? I know that God is all over Scripture, and there are so many incredible, big, epic moments, but where do we actually see awe in the Bible?
Laura: I think one of the things that we have to first do with the meaning of awe is separate it from our cultural moment. I think a lot of us think of the word “awesome” as similar—like, "I'm in awe; it's awesome," about the new line of Cheez-Its or some TV show or the new iPhone or something like that. Historically, the meaning of awe—and biblically—it translates more into fright or terror. I think if you even look at the Webster definition, it says it's a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder.
When we look at it in Scripture, awe has to have two main components. It has to have a trembling—so coming from being in the presence of something much bigger than us: God—and a fascination. That feeling of being astonished or dumbfounded. In Scripture, it's often translated actually as “fear.” You might find “awe” or “awesome,” even, depending on your translation, or even “filled with awe.” I think that's one people use a lot.
Emily: This is what happens to my brain when I start to think about billions of galaxies, and you look up in the sky, and you're thinking about it, and you're like, "It goes on forever, but where does that end?"
Laura: Or like heaven. Goes on forever.
Emily: Then, all of a sudden, I'm terrified, and my brain is hurting, and you're just like, "Raaa, I can't think about that anymore."
Laura: That's a good description of awe.
Emily: There you go.
Laura: You know that you have no control. You’re totally out of control. That's where we see it—in the Old Testament, it's usually when people were reflecting on God or God's attributes and when they were confronted even with God's presence. Exodus 3—God appearing to Moses in the burning bush. Isaiah 6:5—when Isaiah saw the Lord, remember his glory fills the temple or the train of his robe. I always think of that. Psalm 119—David talks a ton about awe. In 119, he says, "My flesh trembles in fear of you; I stand in awe of your laws" [v. 120]. Or Habakkuk—it's in there where they're talking about, "Lord, I stand in awe of your deeds."
Old Testament—it's very classic, God-is-big-and-we-are-small—whoa—kind of vibe. The New Testament—really, it almost always describes people's reactions to either Jesus, who's working all these incredible miracles, or to the works of God. After Jesus ascended, we know that the Holy Spirit came down. There's a lot of examples: things like when Jesus raised the widow's son. You guys can look these Scripture verses up. I don't want to—I was about to say bore us, but this is awesome.
Emily: Never boring.
Laura: This is awe-inducing. Raising the widow's son—it says they were filled with awe and praised God. Acts 2—the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the early church— everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. Matthew 17—the disciples were “terrified” after the transfiguration, which also can translate to awe. Mark 16—the women trembling and bewildered after they discovered the empty tomb and saw the angel. Trembling, bewildered—those are often words that can also be translated as “awe.” Last one I have for us is Acts 9, where Saul sees Jesus on the Damascus road and has that incredible, meaningful interaction with him there.
In all these examples, something that I think is important—it's more than just emotional. People in the Bible—when they experienced God and experienced the feeling of awe, they would start to think about God. They would contemplate him. They were in submission to his will. They were humble.
Emily: They'd fall flat on their face.
Laura: Yes, it's not just like, "Cool." It's much more to say, "Whoa." There was a deference. There was an understanding of what his power, his might, his majesty was—of God's work and God's plans. I think that that is something that we’ve got to separate out—how we feel about really awesome technology and our awesome God. Those are very different.
Emily: And really, what all of these biblical examples are showing us is that God has a purpose to us experiencing awe. There is a function in it.
One of those things is that it can develop, I think, a real posture of thankfulness and gratitude. In Luke 7, it says everyone, when they saw what Jesus Christ was doing, was filled with awe, and they praised God. Because our response to something amazing and beautiful and incomprehensible should be an overflow of thanksgiving for what that is. I also think that—you were mentioning this earlier—it gives us a sense of smallness and humbleness when we realize who we are and where we fit in the grand scheme of things and how little we deserve all the good things that God has given us.
Whenever we are praising him for something incredible that he's done or something that we just can't possibly understand, and it's so magnificent and beyond us, that gratitude is coming from a place that says, "This is undeserved, and I don't deserve to be feeling this or experiencing or seeing this or even being in the presence of God." I love that humility piece that comes in with awe as well.
Laura: Awe can foster so many things. Even science—you're talking about humility—science shows that people who experience awe tend to be more altruistic and that they do more things like volunteering and helping and assisting people—showing hospitality.
There is an aspect to awe that I think reminds us, like you said, that life isn't all about us. I think that that's this incredible piece to it. It also helps us to be more industrious, more purposeful, more creative. Again, there's science to back this up, but then I think our own life experience proves this time and time again to be true. That when we experience awe, and you see this—there's probably a billion dopamine hits that you're getting from it, I'm sure. But suddenly, I think that we're more industrious with our parties or with our hospitality or at our work. There's a motivating aspect, I think, to awe to say, "I want to work hard and do well at the things that I'm doing."
Emily: It's interesting too to think about how it can unify us with other people when we have a mutual experience of being amazed at something God has done or created. I even think about something in our own family. When our son who did not walk for many, many years—when he took his first independent steps in the house and my husband and I were there, and our kids were there, we all just freaked out. It wasn't like the miracle that you think of in the Bible where it was the lame man and then suddenly, he jumps up and he gets up his mat and walks. It was this climax of all of these years of therapy and prayers.
To see him do that, it's just—we all had that experience together and we still talk about that. We still are like, "Remember that day and remember what was going on?" It was this unifying thing for our family and a moment of collective worship. I think whether it's in response to something like that, where you get to witness a miracle, or it's going on a family vacation and being at a national park and all standing over the same outlook, there is something that knits our hearts together.
Laura: It's a core memory.
Both: Core memory locked. [Laughter]
Laura: Another one—and this one probably particularly feels very meaningful to me with my journey with struggling with some doubt that I've been fairly public about. Awe actually even deepens our faith with God. We can look at that biblically—those examples we talked about where so many people came to the faith when they experienced awe. Think about Saul and his conversion to Paul. That happened because of an experience of awe on the Damascus road.
I think that that is something that—for me, the more that I can feel small and the more that I can feel and remember that I did nothing to create this life or this earth or this world, it reminds me that there is a bigger intelligent God at work in this world. You may doubt that God is loving, you may doubt that he is kind, you may doubt that he even exists. But with all of those things, you can't help but look at a beautiful sunset and think, "Oh, that God doesn't have love in him." There are little things I think that we can take from when we experience awe that help spur us on in the faith.
Emily: You found this really interesting fact that awe can actually help our health too. What sickness is this this winter?
Laura: Isn't it wild? Like what?
Emily: It's so wild.
Laura: I found this wild study that's hard to talk about because it uses lots of—
Emily: —Technical words.
Laura: Technical language, but essentially, these researchers found that awe has been linked to lowering your levels of inflammation, and so it helps your overall health. We'll just link the study in the show notes because it's pretty technical, but essentially, awe was the strongest predictor of lowering that inflammation and even stronger than other positive emotions like love and joy. I thought that was just super wild. Even when you were talking about your family's experience of awe. That's another weird study that I came across—where it talked about when you experience awe with other people, your breathing and your heartbeats start to regulate and match one another, which is just crazy to me.
That's part of why it's a core memory and why you lock that in, because there's something about that that really does—humans are experiencing this transcendent feeling, and suddenly, your bodies even start to move in the same way.
Emily: It's crazy that—well, it's not crazy. It actually makes a lot of sense because God would do that—designing us to biologically respond to him. There is this sense of calming down that happens in our hearts when we recognize who he is. There's that cheesy saying we've all heard—"there's a God-shaped hole in your heart”—and yet, like this is almost the—
Laura: —That's a good point. I haven’t thought of that.
Emily: —the super practical version of this. Our bodies were made to respond to God. We actually calm down, and inflammation reduces, and our breathing slows—all of those different things. The dopamine hits, and really, that's just us responding to our Creator because we love him so much. You’ve got that God-shaped hole in your heart. There's probably something really theologically wrong about this too. [Laughter]
Laura: I got to love it though. I love it. We're going to take it for today.
Emily: Anyways, all of that is just to say that, as women who are Christians—who are following the Lord—this is something we think we can tend to lose in motherhood. We lose a little bit of sight of it. We're not cultivating it. We're not really thinking about it. I'm not waking up at eleven o'clock to go out and look at the stars. Are you, Laura?
Laura: I actually have before. I'm sorry.
Emily: You probably have before but on a regular basis?
Laura: I'm sorry. Get that star app on your iPhone. It's awesome, but, yes, not on a regular basis. You bet.
Emily: We don't tend to make time for this or even really to sit and be in awe of what God has done in our lives through Christ. I sometimes have that feeling of awe when I just look back over my past, and I think about my testimony, and I think about where I would be today apart from Christ. Even that type of meditation and thinking on those things brings my heart to that place of awe.
We want to talk about some practical ways that we can cultivate this in our lives in the midst of all the things—the things our kids need to get to on the calendar, the laundry that needs to be folded, the meals that need to be made. We think it is still possible to cultivate this even in the midst of that.
Laura: Even before we get to how, I think it's important that we point back to the fact that, biblically, it says believers are encouraged to cultivate these things. We can look at Isaiah 29:9—that believers are encouraged to be stunned and amazed. In Job 37:14, God says, “Stop and consider my wonders.” There are definitely—and David. We can just go to him all the time. He's constantly modeling that for us, and so I think it's important to see that it's actually a spiritual practice to do this, and it's not just for funsies. We're doing this because this is a way, like you're saying, that I think we can experience God in the everyday.
I think that's the cry of every mom's heart—"God, more of you. More of you. Help me." That is one way that I think, when we stop and say, "I want to cultivate this awe feeling," it's really saying, "I want to cultivate my relationship with you, Lord, because I want to experience you." What's really cool is there's a million ways to do this. We're going to list a handful here for everybody, but there's probably so many more.
The first one we'll start out with is art. My dad's an artist, or was an artist for a long time, and I grew up around a lot of art.
He took us to all these art museums all the time. Sure, I didn't value them for a while, but at other times, I did as I got older. I think there's an element sometimes of standing before a piece of art, or you can even see tons of this on Instagram these days.
Emily: Go on Instagram and you see those colored pencil drawings that look like a real picture. Have you seen them?
Laura: Okay, we're going specific. I'm listening.
Emily: They zoom in really close, and you see they're literally using my kids' colored pencils.
Laura: Like you're watching them create the art yourself?
Emily: Yes. Then, at the end, they put the art up, and it looks like a photograph.
Laura: I haven't seen that.
Emily: It's that accurate. It is mind-blowing.
Laura: I haven't seen that. I was going to talk about the Chicago Art Institute.
Emily: Yes, do that.
Laura: [Laughter] The point stands, regardless. There is an element that—I think you can see art that is so beautiful that it almost violates your expectations. That's what you're saying, right? Your expectation isn't that it looks like a photograph—no one can possibly do that—and yet they can. I think there's something in that where art can compel you to see something in a new light. It can compel you to want to learn more about a subject matter. You can be mesmerized and transfixed by how they're creating it or even just gazing at it for a long time. That can really induce awe.
Emily: Another one is music. Certainly, we've probably all had that feeling of getting chills or goosebumps—
Laura: I love it.
Emily: —or tearing up. You don't even know why it's happening to you, but you're listening to a song, and it just grabs you from your stomach.
Laura: It is true.
Emily: It's funny because I'm not a big country music person, but my husband likes country music, and he loves those songs that are just ridiculous and sappy. That'll be about a daughter, and then she's a baby, and then she's older.
Laura: No, he does? Oh my gosh. I didn't know this about my brother.
Emily: He loves listening to these.
Laura: No. No.
Emily: I don't know if it's funny—
Laura: I don't know how to feel about this.
Emily: —but he just loves them. I eye roll to no end, and I'm like, "I already know what's going to happen in this song, and the dog's going to come back round at the end.”
Laura: For sure.
Emily: Whatever. I'm like, "I could write this." There was this one time we were driving. I think we were leaving your house, and we were in the car, and this song came on, and he was like, "Oh, this is a good one." All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I just uncontrollably started sobbing. It was like the song grabbed me.
Laura: It's right time, right song. There's something to that. You hear at the right time.
Emily: I was also, at the same time, going, "This is so cheesy. Why am I crying?" Music can just pull that out of you. I love even listening to scores or pieces of music that are set across a whole movie or a whole musical because often, the composer has done some incredible things where, if you start to listen closely, you can hear melodies repeated or things called back or, "Hey, this is a theme for this character," and every time they're on the screen, their theme plays in the background. It's just so complex. I'm like, "Who? How?"
Laura: That you don't notice until you try to notice.
Writing. I think that this is something that hopefully everyone's experienced, where they've read some words and they're like, "That was so beautiful." It compels you to worship, or it compels you to think about something in a new way. Maybe it puts words to something that you've always felt but never been able to articulate. I think poetry does that for me. It's one of the reasons why I want to write that. I want to hopefully do that for other people. I'll get chills when I read beautiful words.
Emily: Of course, we've already talked about this, but it's worth saying again: get out in nature. If you want to be in awe of God, spend some time outside. Start looking around—everything from being amazed at the creatures that he created to, again, the flowers or the trees. Or just even being able to go on a trip somewhere if that's— take some time to go listen to the ocean and actually experience it. It helps to not just even be outside but to intentionally think to yourself, "I'm going to turn the podcast off. I'm going to turn the music off.”
Laura: Yes, silence.
Emily: “I'm going to turn the Voxer messages off." I have had so many walks that have been refreshing to me because I simply was silent, and I literally was just looking at creation. It is so refreshing.
Laura: Then even other times—I don't know. I hope everyone's had this experience, where it's just an ordinary moment, but it's almost like you have this wild out-of-body experience, and you're just like, "Whoa, everything in this life is so impossible, and it's so precious. Yet, it's also wildly intentional and full of blessing.” I think that it could be seeing our children playing with our husband in the living room. Usually, it's looking at people. I feel like it's not just looking at my house. It's something where there are human beings in my home.
I remember at my wedding, someone gave us the advice to step back and go to the very back of the wedding at the reception and just look at all the people who love you and are celebrating you. Do it for two minutes. That was such great advice for my wedding because I now have that mental picture of all these people laughing and spending time and eating and celebrating. I think that we can cultivate those moments by stepping back for just a second and thinking, "Whoa, this is such an incredible life that I get to have. My husband loves my kids. He plays with them so well. My kids play together so well. Oh, my kids have great friends." Whatever it is that you're viewing, take that moment to step back.
A tangible example—this is a little bit different, but I remember I was struggling to trust God and to feel like he was worthy of my trust. I was grumbling around. I'd been praying for a week or two about it. Finally, I was just praying like, "God, I want to trust you, but I can't. I just feel like I can't." Then, throughout the course of the day, it was wild, because suddenly I was reading a—in my book, there was something about trusting God. Then I remember one of my kids was like, "You just got to trust God."
Then I turned on a podcast and it was randomly—it was just phrases. It wasn't like the whole podcast was about trusting God, but I heard that phrase and read that phrase I bet five—six—times in a day. I remember literally being like, "Okay, Lord. Got you. I hear you." It was this moment where I felt awe of—God cared enough to just soothe my soul with making sure that that message got to me. This truth that he says over and over to me, but I usually don't have ears to hear. Then there was just this one day where he made it very clear like, "Knock it off. You can trust me. I'm going to make sure you hear this 100 times."
Emily: Hopefully, as you've listened today, you have been inspired to try to cultivate the feeling of awe in your life. We really feel like this is something that helps us orbit our hearts and our lives around God, which is what this whole series is talking about. We're not here to only be responsive to and reacting to and orbiting ourselves around our motherhood or around our to-do list that day or around whatever thing it is we feel like we absolutely have to do. We want to be remembering that we're part of something bigger; we're part of a grander story. When we experience awe, I think it's a lot easier to do that.
