I re-visited one of my favorite places on the planet recently: the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. An annex of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, it’s packed to the gills with flight hardware, artifacts, and more. A plane nerd could spend days there but for someone like me, there’s only one reason to visit: the Space Shuttle Discovery. NASA’s Space Shuttle program was a crowning jewel of American history so it’s no wonder that I love the Shuttles as much as I do. Discovery isn’t even my favorite (that title goes to Endeavour) but she is beautiful in her own right.
I had already visited the museum a few months prior so I was familiar with the layout, the highlights, the best places to get pictures. I beelined straight for the space wing and found Discovery waiting for me. I browsed through the rest of the space exhibits: satellite replicas, space-flown capsules, heat shield samples, engine mockups. But at the end of all of that, I still had time on my hands.
So I went back to Discovery. If you force yourself (or are forced to) look at one thing for an hour, you either lose your mind or find breathtaking beauty. With Discovery, it was the latter. I stared at her for an hour and learned more in that time than I had in previous visits to Endeavour, Atlantis, and Discovery combined. I learned to meditate.
Space Shuttles defy classification. They are the ugliest glider, the most rugged spaceplane, a political compromise, a work of genius. If you’re me and you grew up on Shuttle flights, you know all the major highlights. 135 flights across five vehicles. Delicate silica tiles for the underbelly, a technician’s nightmare. Reinforced carbon-carbon panels on the nose and wing leading edges. Thermal blankets everywhere else. Behemoth RS-25s in the back for raw power. Canadarm, the pride and joy of our northern neighbors.
If you’re even more of a nerd, you know where to find new details. The star tracker covers just below the cockpit windows, the “cut here for emergency exit” panels, the OMS pods, and (as Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame pointed out) the tiny paint bleed on Discovery’s name, a human touch on a miraculous machine.
But what if you stare at Discovery for an hour? You’ve already seen all of that in the first 15 minutes. Turns out, you go from passionate to full-on obsessed.
And in the wonder of getting lost in Discovery, I learned how to see God again. You see, it’s easy to visit God like a museum relic, especially through Scripture. The outdated language, bizarre metaphors, and indecipherable prophecies make it feel like it belongs in an exhibit on ancient literature. But what if we forced ourselves to look beyond the highlights? What if we dove deeper than the flannel graph stories, the five-minute devotionals, the occasional fridge magnet? What if we forced ourselves to stare at the same thing for an hour? Well, you either lose your mind or you find breathtaking beauty. Discovery taught me to choose the latter.
There are two ways to meet this God: glancing or gazing. Far too often, we glance. The glances are not bad. They tell you in a moment the essence of the thing you’re looking at. Glance at Discovery and you’ll see black, gray, red, white, and blue. Gaze at her, though, and subtleties emerge. Stenciled words stand in sharp relief to their background. White streaks slash through a sea of black. Faded carbon contrasts with burnished metal.
Glance at God. What do you see? It’s a portrait that’s probably been colored by your experiences, your upbringing, your philosophy. You probably reflexively revert to character traits you’ve heard frequently. God the Father. God the Son. God the Holy Ghost. God the Provider. God the Healer. But if you ask your soul to gaze at God, what do you see? For too many of us, it’s a question we don’t want to ask. Why? Because we see a God we don’t really understand, comprehend, or maybe even like. If you start prodding the core of your being and asking it what it really thinks, the truth comes out. You’ve heard God is a Father, but you’ve only ever known Him to be a grumpy, possibly wrathful disciplinarian. People have said that Jesus loves you, but in your experience, He’s an older brother who hasn’t visited in a few years. Testimony after testimony claims that God is Healer; so why are you still unwell? You might be thinking that any of those ideas of God are preferable to the one you have. Because the God you know has no personality at all. He’s just a blank page, an unknowable wall, a philosophical figment of imagination.
And this is why we don’t like gazing. The longer we do, the more uncomfortable it gets. But if you want to actually enjoy being in the presence of the God you serve, you have to gaze. You have to push through the discomfort. Have you ever met a person who spends hours in the presence of God, in prayer, in Scripture, in song…and comes out happy? It’s not that they’re more spiritual or just built different. They’ve gazed at God. They demanded a level of attention and commitment out of their spirit that most people balk at. And what do they get in return? Breathtaking beauty.
Ask Abraham. On the verge of sacrificing his son, he’s granted a mediator in the form of a ram. What would you call a God offers a substitutionary sacrifice? A glance would have called Him “Provider” or “Deliverer.” Abraham calls Him YHWH Jireh, “The God Who Sees,” a subtlety in that name could only come from someone who gazed at God.
Ask Gideon. He was so in tune with the mythological tales of God and the present suffering of his people that, when greeted, “God is with you!” (a prophetic Emmanuel a few centuries early?) he quickly lays out the case that maybe God had not been around. A glance would have called the mysterious visitor in the story “Sir” or “Lord” (as Gideon himself does at first). When he is finally convinced that this person is more than mortal, Gideon declares Him YHWH Shalom, “The Lord Is Peace,” a declaration of faith that stood in brazen opposition to the active dictatorship Midian was imposing on Israel.
When you gaze, the glances become more true, not less. They transform from standalone vignettes to a cohesive portrait. The Healer is the Father is the Spirit is the Peace is the Son is the Provider. Each facet amplifies the other and in turn, is amplified itself.
Gazing, when done right, inherently ignites curiosity. Again, Discovery taught me this. For such a hardened machine, she’s covered in gentle, sweeping curves that take your breath away. Scars dot the underbelly, a reminder of the heat endured during dozens of reentries. Nozzles that blended invisibly into the frame are now unmistakably visible. And for every new revelation, a thousand new questions arise. Why the cut here? Why the scar there? Why the blankets on those pieces? Why? Why? Why? Before long, your inner monologue sounds like a three-year-old questioning the sky’s color.
And that’s the point. G.K. Chesterton once said:
A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’, and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony…It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence, it may be a theatrical encore.
At some point, repetitive questioning is forced out of our character and we call it “growing up.” But that’s not what Moses, Abraham, Job, David, Gideon, or the God-lovers did. They kept asking the same questions over and over and over to the point of foolishness because their childlike wonder couldn’t help it. Their questions begot answers which gave birth to even more questions. To read Scripture without asking like a child is to grow older than our God. When you gaze rightly, you will instinctively seek to gaze more, a constructive cycle of ever-amplifying wonder that inevitably concludes in the song of the living creatures around the throne of God: “Holy. Holy. Holy.”
So, what’s the point of gazing? Does this not all sound like the musings of an unemployed monk attempting to rationalize his existence? Perhaps. But now we turn to the life of Moses. The prototypical Messiah, Moses faced a critical juncture during the wilderness escapade with the Israelites. God had reached an apparent breaking point and commanded Moses and the people to continue on with an angelic guide — but critically, not God himself. Moses pushes back and, roughly speaking, says, “If You’re not coming, we’re not going.” (Exodus 33:15) God relents on account of two reasons: “You have found favor in My sight,” He tells Moses, “and I know you by name.” (Exodus 33:17) What sort of God is this? What deity concedes the fact that He knows one of His subjects on a first-name basis? What divinity permits friendship as a valid legal argument when He’s the presumed defendant?
And in this moment, Moses loses his sanity, his decorum, his common sense, and requests the Fire and Thunder on the mountain, “Please, show me Your glory.” (Exodus 33:18) The words of a madman? Or the heart of a gazer? Moses recognized something: YHWH, the unpronounceable, unknowable, fear-inducing, sea-splitting, mountain-melting God called him friend. And friends, Moses surmises, usually know what the other looks like. God responds and graciously offers Moses a fraction of what he requested, allowing him to see the divine back (what does that even mean?) and introduces Himself anew: YHWH, a gracious and merciful Elohim, eternally patient, overflowing with chesed and truth for a thousand generations, overwhelmingly forgiving and unwaveringly just. (Exodus 34:6-7)
Moses instantly plants his face in the dust in worship (Exodus 34:8). Short of dying on the spot, what else is a human to do in the face of this majesty? After forty days on the summit, Moses makes his way back to base camp. And when he walks down from the mountain, carrying ten words etched by the finger of God, his face was not smeared with dirt. It shone, radiating the glory he had been gazing at for the last six weeks.
And this is why we gaze. Moses wasted a month and a half of his life on a mountaintop but I dare you to ask him if it was a waste. He went up with God on the verge of scrapping the exodus but came down with Emmanuel — God dwelling with the people of God. And in the bargain, he became supernaturally bioluminescent, a physical manifestation of the glory he had been dwelling in. When you inconvenience yourself to stare at the mystery of God, something inexplicable happens: you became what you behold.
Ask Moses what it’s like to stare at the same thing not for an hour, but for forty days. I imagine he’d say the same thing I did. You either lose your mind, or you find Him unimaginably irresistible.
Which path do you choose?