I’ve been receiving Facebook posts and emails from Margaret Feinberg’s PR folks for months now in anticipation of, and after, the publication of her new book Wonderstruck (link below). Not only is there a book but there’s also a study pack with DVD etc, and the hype is quite big. I haven’t yet read any of her books, though I have one lying in a pile to have a go at. But the word on the street (or at least on the web) is that her material is good.

True, her PR people are wanting to sell books, but I think that she is also wanting people out there to look out for things that make them gape in awe and point them in the direction of God. Yesterday an FB post encouraged us to pray each day to be wonderstruck at something, and, as it happened, I saw this after having been wonderstruck (I would normally say ‘gobsmacked’ but perhaps that doesn’t go down well with the US reading public) at a BBC wildlife programme.

Gordon Buchanan (BBC link below) is following a polar bear family – a mother and two cubs – over the course of three seasons. The mother, having become pregnant and needing to hibernate, digs a snow den for herself. The cubs are born there and spend the first weeks of life in that tiny space kept warm enough by the body-heat of their mother insulated by the snow. Buchanan is following their trail, from first experience of daylight as the cubs pop their heads out of the den, through several months of the challenges to survive in the most inhospitable landscape.

Wonderstruck I most certainly was, at the capacity of such fragile scraps of life to survive in these surroundings, and so early in their experience to be able to walk with their mother for up to twenty miles a day, sustained only by her milk. And wonderstruck that she had not eaten for six months, losing half her body weight over the period. Now it was time to take the cubs out into the world looking for food to help her keep producing the life-sustaining milk, and to educate them in the ways of hunting. Only about half all polar bear cubs survive. We are waiting to see if one or both can get through their first year of life without falling prey to the many dangers that face them from fellow creatures and the cold wasteland around them. I need to record tonight’s episode.

I’ve put Margaret Feinberg’s book on my Amazon wish list. Whether I buy it or not is a decision for another day, but at least I am taking her advice and encouragement to pay attention to what is going on around me in order to be wonderstruck, and to look for God’s presence in the world around me.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20908471