If anyone other than the divine knows your ins and outs better, it is your spouse. My wife, she knows me well, sees the changes in me and has the loving will to remind me to be a better person. She bought me a book and wrote the words below on the inside cover of the book. The book? Amusing ourselves to Death - by Neil Postman. This letter also reminds me of how far I had drifted from the things of God and the desire to seek his will. Praise God! Its Him who is the author and finisher of our faith!

Dear Anil,

I earnestly and strongly (if I may add) want you to read this book, this month. Please understand that I am not giving you this book because you are seeing TV. I heard pastors message and he recommending reading and has also mentioned how good this book is. I know in my heart that God gave you a brilliant mind. According to me you are real capable of becoming a theologian/philosopher/author and it hurts me to see you not reading any books. Like pastor says I don't want you to be an intellectual/spiritual pygmy. In our first years I used to admire your habit of reading. I wish and pray that God renews your desire. This is just an attempt of mine to get you started again. Maybe its the small step towards you writing books someday :), but not my desire but His will be done.

"The Lord bless you and keep you;
The Lord make His face shine upon you,
    and be gracious to you;
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you,
    and give you peace."
- Numbers 6:24-26

with lots of love, your wife,
Sunila.

My God surely knows me! My dear wife knows me too!

Wonder is that possession of the mind that enchants the emotions while never surrendering reason.

- Gods commands are there to protect what life is truly about, not the other way around. Implementing that truth in our lives keeps us from losing the wonder.
- The first chronological destroyer of wonder is anything that takes away the legitimate mystery of life and of living.
- To seek wonder in sexual enjoyment apart from its sacredness is to plunder ones own body. To seek wonder through sexual fantasies is to destroy the wonder of sex itself. To do it God's way is wonder-full and lasting.
- There is no wonder locked up in wealth. The one possessing the wealth must know its real value if the possession is to bring wonder.
- When you entrust Him with your life, He generates the wonder.

• Profound Gratitude. Benjamin Franklin said, "To the generous mind the heaviest debt is that of gratitude, when it is not in our power to repay it."
  
• Truth that compels the mind. The world of a child may delight in the fantastic, but the world of an adult must move from what is merely fantastic to that which is fantastically true.
  
• Love - Understand and Experience. (Love is the condition of the heart that "pumps" emotional intelligence through the blood vessels of life's daily encounters)
• True Believing in the gift of God's love and of His Son to us, more than as just an intellectual assent.
• A convinced sense of security, both in being able to accept yourself as you are and in having confidence that God has conquered not only life but also death.
  

Looking - There is a world of difference between looking at something and looking through something. We make the same colossal mistake with God's Word and the gift of print. We have books all around us. We stack them on our shelves. Yet He has revealed Himself in His Word and we let it lie unstudied, unread, and sometimes untouched. We look at it. We hardly ever look through it.

Reading - Stop. Ponder. Reason. What do we read? Is your own reading shallow or deep? The wonder that you find in the shallow end can only be for a child. Swimming in the deep is for the mature. If wonder is to be retained in our mind, reading and reading well is indispensable to the imagination and the heart. Good reading is like looking for something you have lost and finding it, but in the search finding something else that had also been lost. That is how wonder is constantly replenished.

Thinking - How to remain fresh in ones thinking? - I know of no better answer than to be in regular times of solitude and quietness before our Lord. Thinking is a dying discipline in a society that throbs with activity. Wonder is retained by wise pondering. Unless we learn to think and reflect on things above we will reflect the hollowness of a world moving fast but slow to think. Over the last few years I have made it a practice to rise early and go down to a room alone. I pace the floor, I kneel, I read ... only to listen. Wonder enriches you when you take the time to reflect and to ponder the greatness of our faith in Jesus Christ.

Talking (discussion) - F.W. Boreham said, "It puts iron into the blood to spend time with one for whom the claim of conscience is supreme and who loves the truth of God with so deathless an affection." Only noble themes life the spirit to heights of grandeur and the heights of the mind can never be exhausted.

Prayer - I do not believe that wonder can be retained apart from learning the discipline and delight of prayer. In the secret place lie unmined treasures. It is here that we win or lose. The discipline of praying is the seedbed of retaining wonder.

God is like the light. Wonder is like the shadow. If you chase the shadow you will never catch up to it. If you walk toward the light, the shadow will always pursue you. Keep your sights on Him. Spread the wonder.

- Notes gleaned from Recapture the Wonder by Ravi Zacharias.

Retire from the world each day to some private spot, even if it be only the bedroom (for a while I retreated to the furnace room for want of a better place). Stay in the secret place till the surrounding noises begin to fade out of your heart and a sense of God's presence envelops you. Deliberately tune out the unpleasant sounds and come out of your closet determined not to hear them. Listen for the inward Voice till you learn to recognize it. Stop trying to compete with others. Give yourself to God and then be what and who you are without regard to what others think. Reduce your interests to a few. Don't try to know what will be of no service to you. Avoid the digest type of mind - short bits of unrelated facts, cute stories and bright sayings. Learn to pray inwardly every moment. After a while you can do this even while you work. Practice candor, childlike honesty, humility. Pray for a single eye. Read less, but read more of what is important to your inner life. Never let your mind remain scattered for very long. Call home your roving thoughts. Gaze on Christ with the eyes of your soul. Practice spiritual concentration.

All of the above is contingent upon a right relation to God through Christ and daily meditation on Scriptures. Lacking these, nothing will help us; granted these, the discipline recommended will go far to neutralize the evil effects of externalism and to make us acquainted with God and our own souls.

- An excerpt from Of God and Men by A.W. Tozer.