There is life on Earth because of the Sun. Our planet’s distance from the Sun, and orbital path around it, is perfectly calibrated for life. We exist within a rare “habitable zone” in which liquid water can exist (among other things essential for life), and it all has to do with our planet’s relationship with the Sun. What a miracle!
I’m pondering this today as another year ends, and a new 365-day trip around the Sun begins. In a literal sense, our lives are marked by their revolutions around the Sun. This is also true of life generally. Every plant, flower, and blade of grass—and every animal that feeds on this flora—exists because the Sun shines down on it. Every aspect of life as we know it depends on the Sun, around which we annually orbit, and before which we daily rotate.
Some flowers, like the aptly named Sunflower, express their dependency on the Sun in a beautiful movement called heliotropism, turning their “face” toward the sun as it changes its position in the sky throughout the day. Young sunflowers, for example, start the day postured toward the East, eagerly waiting for sunrise. They follow the sun all day and end facing West at sunset. Over the course of the dark night, they slowly turn back to face East to repeat the cycle. This is such a beautiful image of simple dependency—akin to the infant child’s tendency to turn their head to face the parent whose voice they hear.
If physical life flourishes insofar as it properly orients around the Sun, the same is true of our spiritual lives and their orientation around God. In 2023, resolve to revolve your life around God, as the Earth revolves yet again around the Sun.
The Earth has no will—no choice to not orbit in its perfect path around the Sun. God set it up in just the right way, and ecosystems flourish accordingly. But we do have a choice in our spiritual orientation. God designed us for himself, and we flourish most when all aspects of our lives are postured toward him in worshipful deference and dependency, like the Sunflower’s posture toward the Sun.
So often, however, we move away from this godward orientation and proper calibration. We posture our lives around other things: money, work, sex, or whatever temporary pleasures motivate us. But when our point of orientation is anything other than the fixed point of God, we go wobbly and off kilter. We wander in the wilderness like the lost hiker without a compass who is unfamiliar with celestial navigation.
But when we live our lives with God as the center point, around which everything—our rhythms and habits, our heart’s affections and longings, our values and convictions, our vocational and relational purpose—revolves, we will flourish.
I wrote The Wisdom Pyramid a couple years ago to offer one rubric for what it looks like to orient your life around God. Like the food pyramid which inspired it, the wisdom pyramid is structured with the more “nutritious” and important sources at the bottom and the less vital sources near the top. In the wisdom pyramid, the order of the levels is all about proximity to God. His Word is the foundation at the bottom, followed by his institution (church), his creation (nature), and the creations of his image-bearers (books, beauty/art). In the “fats, oils, sweets” category is the distraction-prone spaces of the smartphone, the internet, and social media. Too often in the digital age, we flip the pyramid upside-down, and our lives become oriented around the pseudo-events of Twitter or the alluring clickbait of algorithms. No wonder we’re feeling disoriented and lost.
In 2023, take steps to re-orient your diet of intakes and habits of life around God and the things of God. Wake up and look to the sunrise in the East, and remember you are alive physically because of Earth’s perfect, unchanging orbit around its unchanging source of light and life. Likewise, you will be vibrant spiritually because of your orientation around our faithful, everlasting God—the source of true life and light (John 1:4).
