From Wonderblind to Wonder-Full
Heath Hardesty
5 min read ⭑
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
—Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect
wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather
teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
—Attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
C’mon. I want to show you something!
He jumped out of the truck, eyes alight with excitement. He was almost to the side yard when I opened my door and crunched down onto the gravel driveway of the old farm, too slow for the excitement that pulled him toward the house.
C’mon! Come and see! He called back as he led me around the corner of the house with thin, dilapidated white siding. Look! He said. And there they were. Peacocks. A half dozen of them swaggering around with no care of us. “Watch this.” he said. He walked us toward the closest peacock and whistled and whooped until it stopped and bristled. It considered us for a moment, and then in a flash of light, threw open its tail and caught the afternoon sun in the transcendence of turquoise and sapphire feathers. Countless iridescent eyes hovering and blazing, like some otherworldly being had stepped out of the prophet Ezekiel’s strange visions.
Deep Trivedi;Unsplash
My father laughed like a little kid at the lavish display, clapped his hands together in delight, and said, “I’m going to ask Mr. Cobean if I can have some of those feathers! Imagine the beautiful flies I could tie!” He was giddy with the glory of spectral colors and visions of fly fishing the St. Vrain River. Milky-eyed, I was wonderblind to the iridescent mystery of it all.
Then we turned, and I followed him to the house where we would free up a clogged laundry sink, and he would talk of peacocks and rainbow trout with the widowed homeowner.
Come and see.
This is the call that Jesus extends to two of his soon-to-be apprentices. We read of this alluring encounter in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, a chapter that is very much about “seeing.” John is using his words here like flashing lights, calling for our full attention. John wants us to see that Jesus is not just to be seen as an object in our field of view, but that he is the very light by which we come to truly see the world. This Jesus is not a mere rabbi who dispenses some nuggets of wisdom and tinkers with the shape of our morality, but he is the very light by which reality is seen. The light by which we see light. (Psalm 36:9, ESV) Now, that might sound strange, but many strange things are delightfully true.
Somewhere by the muddy banks of the river Jordan, a wild-eyed, rough-hewn prophet with honey on his breath named John “looked” at Jesus and said, “Behold! The Lamb of God.” Upon baptizing this Jesus, John (nicknamed “The Baptizer”) says he “saw the Spirit” descend from heaven upon Jesus, and that he has “seen and borne witness that this [Jesus] is the Son of God.” (John 1:29-34, ESV) Now, that’s a good bit of seeing in just a few short sentences. We should pay attention.
Witnessing this, and now fascinated, two of John the Baptizer’s followers start tailing this intriguing carpenter-now-rabbi named Jesus, who “turned and saw them following” him. He sees them. He knows them. He peers into their yawning caverns of need. Jesus skips the shallows and aims for the Mariana Trench of their hearts. He provocatively asks them, “What are you seeking?” (John 1:38, ESV) What a question! Here is an invitation into the heart of things!
In a few words, Jesus has called them to reassess their existence. What is the churning desire underneath their doings? How do they see the world? Why do they do the things they do? What subterranean longings animate their actions? In turn, they say they want to know where Jesus is staying, where he “abides.” I wonder: is this simple curiosity about Jesus’ current Airbnb or couch-crashing accommodations, or is this response laden with inklings of the truth that it is only in abiding in Jesus’ presence that the soul flourishes?
“How we imagine the wide world to be, how we envision the story in which we live, shapes the most seemingly insignificant motions and particularities of our lives.”
Regardless of the simplicity or unintentional wisdom of their answer, Jesus calls them to “come and you will see”. (John 1:39, ESV) They get walking and start a journey of re-seeing everything. A journey of apprenticeship. Their body is called into motion, quickened by Jesus’ words. They begin to walk the way of Jesus and will learn to see along the way. In a wonderful inversion of the troublesome pattern in Genesis 3 of Eve seeing the fruit on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, desiring it, and then taking it, here Jesus calls them to see, to desire God and take up the good life of following him. This counter-formative seeing, desiring and taking up will lead to their healing at the true tree of life — the cross of Jesus.
The next bit of narrative draws the reader further into this theme of seeing. (John 1:43-51, ESV) Jesus finds a man named Phillip and calls him to “follow him.” Philip then does what any good friend does when encountering something beautiful — he calls his friend to “come and see”. That is what beauty does. It calls up from within us a deep and ancient reflex to reach out of ourselves to another and invite them to “come and see” that which has dazzled us. This is why two people who are gazing at the same shimmering starfield or molten sunset say something like, “Look at that!” or “Are you seeing this?” Of course they do! These instinctive words are evidence of how glory makes the soul go centrifugal — outwards towards others.
Splendors call us out of isolation and into communion. Beauty is inherently hospitable and generous, inviting us to invite others in. Philip does just that, beckoning Nathanael into something wonderful. John then tells us that Jesus “saw Nathanael coming toward him.” Jesus then enigmatically tells Nathanael, “I saw you…I saw you under the fig tree…you will see greater things…you will see heaven opened.” (John 1:48-51, ESV)
Saw, saw, see, see. Do we see?
Come and see. Become un-wonderblind! Jesus invites us to come and to re-see the world the way he sees it. Come and see heaven breaking open on earth, erupting into the middle of the ordinary and familiar. Jesus is after our imaginations. He is after the way we go about our days — how we inhabit the world. He is after every last cell, buzzing synapse and mysterious element that makes up the miracle of our existence.
It turns out that the imagination is not just for some fantasy realm excursion at the movie theater or in the pages of a sci-fi escape. Our imagination is crucial to how we go about the most commonplace things of our so-called ordinary days. How we grind coffee in the morning. How we answer the day’s waiting emails. How we respond to our lonely co-worker. How we hide our anxiety with another glittering distraction or endless to-do list. All these things are very much related to the way in which we imagine the world to be.
How we imagine the wide world to be, how we envision the story in which we live, shapes the most seemingly insignificant motions and particularities of our lives. Apprenticeship to Jesus has everything to do with our imaginations because it lays claim to the entirety of our being.
Heath Hardesty is lead pastor of Valley Community Church and a founder of Inklings Coffee & Tea in downtown Pleasanton, California. He grew up in a blue-collar home and apprenticed as a plumber in Colorado before becoming a pastor on the edge of Silicon Valley, where he lives with his wife and four kids. He holds degrees in literature, leadership, biblical studies and theology from the University of Colorado Boulder and Western Seminary in Portland.
Taken from All Things Together: How Apprenticeship to Jesus is the Way of Flourishing in a Fragmented World by Heath Hardesty. Copyright © 2025 by Heath Hardesty.
