Category: Spiritual growth

Give Me Your Eyes

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 . . . “

Perfect Joy

For those of us who are married or have been married, the memory of our engagement day is usually one of sheer joy. Often, it is more joyous than the wedding day, simply because of all the stress surrounding wedding plans and arrangements. But the engagement day…that one takes us by surprise and takes our breath away!

It’s bowl season now and teams and fans are geared up for some high stakes joy as well. I’ve never been a huge fan of any sport, but I can remember getting caught up in college tournaments and how exhilarating it is to experience “the big win” with your favorite team. Ah, the big win. But then there’s always the other team – and if you’re a compassionate person on any level, you have to feel sorry for those guys, right? My mother used to say, “There’s no perfect joy on earth.” I understand what she meant.

My daughter got engaged just before Christmas this year and it was surely a joyous time for our family! Great kids who have made good decisions and are making good progress toward their educational goals getting engaged is something to celebrate! Several days later, the couple made an unsettling discovery: a diamond had fallen out of the ring after being resized . . . then a second one fell out. Heartbroken they were – both of them! It didn’t really matter that everything would end up fine because the ring would be repaired, etc. Perfect joy was tarnished. Imperfection had raised its ugly head and ruined a perfectly beautiful ring and perfectly joyous moment in life.

Jesus spoke about joy this way:

John 15:10-12 (NIV, ©2010)
10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.

I think we get “joy” and “happiness” confused too often. Perhaps it would have been more correct to say that there is no perfect happiness on earth. It is possible to experience joy, even in an unhappy situation… when we experience love the way Jesus commanded us. In that sense, our joy can be perfect.

Marking Time

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Hurry up and wait!” It seems as though a lot of our time in this culture is consumed by the “wait” portion of our big hurry. The problem is that we don’t seem to know how to handle the waiting. Common examples that come to mind include traffic issues in our fine little metro or the weekly work ritual of wishing the week away by looking forward to Friday. One of my favorite movie scenes is from “Meet the Parents” when Greg and Jack are trying to beat each other back to the house as they burn and screech their way block by block, traffic light by traffic light back to Jack’s house. Clip from Meet the Parents

We experience a variety of responses to this waiting time: anger, anxiety, confusion, frustration. . . perhaps even discouragement and sadness. It is an exception when we welcome times of waiting as a chance to catch our breath or reflect on what we are experiencing.

Sometimes the waiting times are found in more serious contexts: hurry up and get all these tests done, then wait for a diagnosis; hurry up and get engaged, then wait for the right wedding date; hurry up and get to the airport, then wait to reunite with your loved one. Perhaps if we can learn to engage these times of waiting, we can also learn to live more fully. Reflecting and journaling are great ways to process our thoughts and feelings during times of worry, confusion or frustration. When we fail to process thoughts and feelings, we fail to learn anything or grow from our experiences.

Back in high school, I was in the marching band. I remember marching in parades and how, even when we couldn’t move forward, we had to march in place or “mark time”. My memory of that experience is that it was exhausting. We were working very hard to cover very little ground.

I suspect that happens in our lives often. We use up vital energy during our times of waiting by marching in place rather than being still and reflecting on our experience and listening to God’s voice. Here’s a challenge for the coming week: When faced with a hurry-up-and-wait scenario, take an “at-ease” posture instead of marking time and engage the waiting time. Let me know what you experience!