  I sometimes wonder if all of creation literally isn't crying out for attention, but we're simply too preoccupied with our cell phones, satellite radio, broadband internet connections and Ipods. How often do we simply overlook the profound because it's so dreadfully ordinary. Truthfully, that's what I love the most about God: the mechanical monotony of creation.
Contrary to David Hume, what does God tell the sun each day? "Rise, Set; do it again; do it again. " G.K. Chesterton mused that part of God's infinity is found in a little child's ability to exalt in the monotonous. Somehow in the melee of each day, I find myself increasingly out of touch with just how extraordinary the ordinary is. One of the reasons that I so tremendously adore Krystof Kieslowski is his ability to make ordinary objects and colours extraordinarily artistic and beautiful.
I sometimes wonder if God yearns to do the same in our own lives? Correct that, I don't wonder - I know God does. Perhaps you're weary of crawling out of bed at the exact same time every single morning; weary of the same face in the mirror; weary of those same uncomfortable boots that were a gift from your significant other; weary of fighting the endless armies of traffic; weary of heart-broken moments of despair; weary of a world that shatters lives in pursuit of progress.
Take heart, the Master Artist and Creator is dwelling in your midst just crying out to breathe new life and beauty into the cracked and aged canvas that has become your life. What then will we choose? Renewal or Complacency? Beauty or Obscurity? This week Hurricane Alex slowly crouched up the Eastern Coast, yawning with fierce wind, rains and oodles of drama amongst the 40-60 age crowd that feels the need to purchase 16-weeks worth of bread and milk in the likely event that the entire state of North Carolina is swallowed whole by the sea, like that divine appointment between Jonah and the whale. Which provides just the perfect analogy for what Hurricane Alex has just revealed about my own life.
Jonah was called by God to go to Ninevah and preach repentence to a nation that had murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people and even left their heads aloft pikes as a display of their cruelty. Jonah disagreed; they deserved damnation, he mused. Perhaps he was right, but God had other plans. Sitting at my computer early this morning I found myself perplexed by the likelihood of having a hurricane named after myself on the exact same week of my birthday. Perhaps it's just chance; perhaps it's sychroncity. I don't know, but I couldn't help but find myself thinking like a hurricane.
Subtracting the human toll of destruction, what purpose does a hurricane serve that never comes in land? It could have the most amazing and powerful driving winds and rains, but if the hurricane just hovers out over sea and never comes in land, its impact on the ecosystem will be minimal at best. Sometimes I wonder if my own life isn't like Hurricane Alex: full of sound and fury, but signfying nothing, because I don't have the courage to step out in faith. I know so many people who are blessed with immense talents and abilities, but if those talents never dare to rise above their own surroundings, then, like Hurricane Alex, their lives are nothing more than a week-long news story about great potential.
So the question returns full circle yet again: Beauty or Obscurity?
Renewal or Complacency?
God is calling, cue that, challenging us to rise above our own lives and our own insecurities and to lay everything that we think we are down as a sacrifice to the supremacy of the Kingdom God. God is daring us to give up our dreams, our hopes, our clothes, our cars, even our very own families to advance the Kingdom of God in the deepest and darkest recesses of this universe.
And the challenge before each of us, is who will heed that call? May God pursue us as passionately as God did Jonah, until we find ourselves thinking like a hurricane. 
