On July 20 1969, Apollo 11 completed a 3 day journey of 240,000 miles and landed safely on the moon. Its’ mission was to just get there, and when it did the entire world watched in breathless wonder.

Wonder … what a beautiful word full of emotion and enlightenment and humility and gratitude.

51 years, six months and 28 days later a far greater wonder occurred. The Mars Perseverance rover completed a journey 1200 times longer than a quick trip to the moon. A journey not of a mere three days but rather of six long months across 300 million miles of empty space. A journey that ended just this last Thursday afternoon when Perseverance landed safely on the red planet. And far beyond just getting there its mission is to search for signs of ancient life. What a wonder indeed. But here’s the irony, if you follow the news you probably heard something about it, but you likely didn’t skip lunch to watch.

Wondrous things, wonderful things, things capable of touching us, moving us, leaving us breathless, are happening all around us every day. That we don’t see them is not because they aren’t present but because we aren’t present.

G.K. Chesterton said it well, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” In life, just as in design, perspective is everything. As Shakespeare put it, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” It’s one thing to be physically blind. It’s something far worse to choose not to see. It’s one thing to be a prisoner of circumstance. It’s far worse to be a prisoner of your own thinking.

I don’t know much and I wouldn’t presume to know the answer to what you are going through. But I have learned this much: Life is a wonder. A hard life, an easy life, rich life, poor life, healthy life, sick life, rewarding life, struggling life, pleasurable life, painful life, long life, brief life … it’s all Life, and Life is a wonder.

Please understand I’m not being trite. I’m right here in the boat with you. I have my own stories of the blows and the heartaches that drop us all to our knees. I know the struggle is as real as the hot tears on your face. I only want you to remember, Life is a wonder and at the end of the day, as hard as it is to imagine sometimes, it’s not our circumstances but how we choose to see them that will determine our joy.

For the last four years I’ve had a mission of my own: to meet you every weekend and help shift your perspective to see your home, and your life, for what they truly are, and what they could be. When it comes to homes and lives, design matters most. And when it comes to design, perspective matters most.

Mars is a barren and inhospitable place. The Perseverance rover is in that place now and will never leave. Like us, Perseverance only had a one way ticket. And yet today, right at this very moment, Perseverance is in that barren, inhospitable place searching for Life. That is its mission, its purpose, by design. For you and I, today, right at this moment, that could be our mission too.

Life is filled with wonders if only we choose to open our eyes to see them we can be changed by them. Like Perseverance, it took us a long time to get here. Shouldn’t we make it our mission to choose wonder, to choose gratitude, and even in the most inhospitable places to choose to build ourselves a beautiful life.