There is a version of creative work that becomes purely transactional over time. You get good at it, you get efficient, and somewhere in the efficiency you stop noticing things. The designer who used to spend an hour looking at a single typeface just to understand how it moved on the page now makes font decisions in two minutes. The photographer who once crouched in the rain to get one shot now shoots in auto from a comfortable distance. Craft without wonder is fast. It is also hollow.
Wonder is what makes creative work feel alive. It is the thing that makes you stop and look longer, listen harder, sit with something until it reveals itself. And it has an enemy: speed. The faster your life moves, the easier it becomes to process the world without actually seeing it. You walk past things that used to arrest you. You hear things without listening. The details God designed into the world, the details that used to feed your imagination, become invisible.
Psalm 119:18 is a direct prayer for this: open my eyes that I may see wonderful things. It is a request for God to restore the capacity to be arrested by what is in front of you. Wonder is not manufactured. It is received. And it tends to arrive when you slow down enough to ask for it and actually look.
The writer who reads a sentence in someone else’s book and has to put it down because it is so good. The musician who hears a chord progression that stops them mid-commute. The filmmaker who notices the way afternoon light falls through a window and feels something shift. These are not distractions from the work. They are the food the work runs on.
Let wonder back in. Pay attention to the things that make you pause. Your imagination does not generate its own fuel. It needs to be filled, and God built a world full of material to fill it with.