When the wineglass shattered, rejoicing ensued. Much
rejoicing. (See and hear for yourself here). My daughter and I danced, we slapped high fives, and we squealed and
shouted so loudly in the detached garage that my wife heard us from inside the
house with all the doors and windows closed tight. That shattering glass was
our last ditch effort to get some part of her science experiment to work, and
after hours and hours of effort and frustration, a short celebration was very
much in order.
The experiment was supposed to be relatively easy:
use sound to break wineglasses at their resonant frequency. We pummeled a
variety of glasses with sound for hours and hours one afternoon with no
success. We tried wineglasses; we tried glasses without stems; we even tried a
mug. We tried not to get frustrated as the failures mounted.
After nightfall, we set up one more glass, and with the
loudspeaker and amplifier cranked to 11, the glass exploded. After all that
time, we broke only one glass, but what joy that one brought.
Consider how often God’s message of love and mercy
and redemption and peace gets presented, and then rejected, by one person. I
sat in church for years like a stout mug, with that message bouncing off my
thick head. Just between 1st grade and the end of high school alone,
I probably sat through about 1,000 sermons and Sunday school-type classes. And
who knows how many hundreds of thousands of times God tried to get my attention
during the rest of my life when I wasn’t even near a church.
How many times did I stubbornly resist?
How many times have you?
When His message finally resonated with me, I broke
down and humbly admitted I needed Him. Apparently, when that happens, Jesus
says “there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner
who repents” (Luke 15:10).
So if my daughter and I get excited enough to dance
and holler when one glass breaks after many hours of trying, imagine what the
celebration in Heaven is like after years and years, and thousands upon thousands
of attempts to get a person to take that step of repentance? “Rejoicing” might
be an understatement. Dancing, high fives, and shouts of joy are probably just
the beginning. The celebration might be downright raucous.
Have you given those angels something to celebrate?
