Have you ever listened to Brandon Heath’s song, “Give Me Your Eyes?” For those who have not, the lyrics include these lines: “Give me Your eyes for just one second, give me Your eyes so I can see everything that I keep missing, give me Your love for humanity.” I have often wondered how it is that those of us who profess Christ as the object of our faith are also among the most likely to lose sight of the value of other people.
I caught myself not only demonstrating this tendency, but teaching it to my child this week. The story went like this: My 5-year-old heard another child make a negative comment about his hair that hurt his feelings and made him feel self-conscious. My reaction to my son’s hurt feelings was to find out who the perpetrator was and to quickly make my child feel better at the expense of the other child. Our conversations that night revolved around my child’s sense of confidence and worth and resolved with a lesson that basically said “pay no attention to kids like that.” Pay no attention.
That has obviously been my method for a very long time. The more that people have hurt me, the more I have chosen to pay no attention to them. Or people who remind me of them. And after a while, there are large groups of people to whom I might pay no attention. One of my lifers (a life-long friend) gave me a book to read recently titled “The Sacred Romance.” It speaks at length about how our story with God – our Romance with Him – is countered throughout life by the story of our Arrows. Our Arrows are those things that hurt us, that stay with us, that mold us as we live and grow. I was confronted with my own story of Arrows when I witnessed my child receiving one of his first social Arrows. Rather than teaching him the larger story of how God loves us all with a love we cannot fathom and that story of Romance, I chose to teach him how to deal with the smaller story of the Arrows. . . by learning to ignore/avoid/dismiss those who would hurt us.
We are all a work in progress and I am certainly in that category. I have asked God in my prayers to give me a heart for all people and to remove some of the fear and detachment I have learned to use as a way to deal with my story of Arrows. This realization is part of that process. Every single person has the same two stories: the story of God’s Romance with him or her AND their own story of Arrows that tries to call into question God’s love or our personal worth. Knowing that, we should always strive to feed the Romance story and not give any more fuel to the story of Arrows.
I have seen a preview on television the past few days that speaks to our Romance with God. It shows a guy walking past and a girl dreamily watching him while saying, “I want to date him!” Another guy jumps up and says, “I want to BE him!” For me, it speaks to the fact that so many times, Christians just want to “date” Jesus. We want to hang out, have fun, without any real commitments. What he wants from us, though, is to be ONE WITH HIM. Now, that is INTIMATE – to have His mind, His heart, His eyes. . . “Give me Your eyes for just one second . . . “
Finding a new "normal" 