I see God everywhere or not at all. He’s either in everything or nowhere to be seen.

This morning I rejoice with Him in the pink and blue sunrise. The diving duck startles me. It breaks the silence sending ripples like an earthquake across the placid lake. A cacophony of birds calls and answers one another, endless bird banter. Their singing erupts from every tree, waking up the city. I glory in God. I stroll through His city.

 

Other mornings, a nihilist, I walk quickly, not pausing to see God’s creation, not opening my faith eyes. Not hearing anything beyond the roar of ambition, pushing me to go and never stop. On these days I’m not truly hearing, not truly seeing. My eyes function to move leg to sidewalk; that’s all.

As a writer I must unearth the solution. We know the problem well. I have to be able to see the beauty. The ugly presses in, pushes in and asserts like paparazzi. My own faults and sin-racked yesterdays crowd my view of Jesus.

With no Jesus in my sight, I focus on problems and pain instead of grace and truth. My mind cloud to beauty. My faith eyes shut.

Everything I do starts with sigt. Without vision nothing gets accomplished. When I see little, I accomplish little. People perish where vision wanes, (Prov. 28:19).

The eyes act like a lamp to our body; Jesus taught us this.

“So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Matt. 6:22-23).

Are my eyes healthy?

Sunday I stood in church and sang the songs while my eyes began to heal. Sometimes I envision myself as a child kneeling before God’s throne. I take this attitude in worship, humble and low, but a new vision sprang to my mind’s eye.

No longer was I kneeling, instead the child in my mind was rushing her God. Her arms flung in embrace, her head buried in His belly! A new picture now replaces a worn-out, ill-fitting vision. God is father and I am daughter. I have always been.

Oh how vital seeing is to believing. Without the light, only shadows teach.

This shift in perspective changes so much for me. It makes all things new. With fresh eyes I view myself, able to reinvent myself with confidence.

The new eyes allow me to envision a better future. Each day my eyes widen, bringing in more and more light to my body.

In some ways the art of truly seeing ourselves and the world becomes the work of our lives. Not the day job that pays the bills, but the internal work of beholding God. It’s time-consuming work and won’t hold up under multitasking.

Sure, we can pray while doing anything, but receiving new eyes for a new day requires total focus on the One who remakes our focus. In doing so, He remakes us.

I am selfish in this. I long to capture every second I can with my children.

I’ve always been conscientious, so the sagely voices that told me to treasure every moment, I believed and still believe. “Blink and they graduate,” the gray-haired women whisper.

I plant kiss after kiss on my boys’ soft curls. I squeeze them till they wriggle from my grasp. I snuggle them long past the moment I feel their bodies go limp, dead weight in my arms. I often think this time with them is too short.

Why do I dread them growing up?

I think it reminds me of my own mortality. I too am aging just as quickly as they sprout ankles beneath jean hems. I grow deeper brow wrinkles and new laugh lines as quickly as the number climbs on their shoe size.

I hug them as if to stunt their growth and pinch their cheeks just to enjoy how the pudginess bounces back to perfect roundness.

I heard the Chinese once wrapped girls’ feet in an effort to keep them smaller, more feminine. Like those little feet, I would bind my boys up from nose to knees if I thought it would keep them from springing up into adolescence.

But it won’t work, nor keep me physically fit and young. I really want to stop change, to send it a cease-and-desist order.

God’s purposes change. He incites growth in each of us be it physical, mental or spiritual. Why is it that we long to stand motionless, unaffected by the shifting?

Change shatters our comfortable habits like a wrecking ball waylays a decrepit skyscraper.

The sooner we can unclench our fists and come to God with open hands, the less pain we will endure. The Unchanging One demands total surrender. When we acquiesce, we grow more into Him and begin to see more as He does.