The sky amazes me. It
always has. I am constantly in awe of
the hugeness of it. It makes me feel so
small. Sunsets, sunrises, clear blue
skies, white fluffy clouds, starry nights, all of these amaze me. People probably get tired of hearing
my sky commentary. I’ve always said that
if God gives out jobs in heaven, I want to be the sky decorator.
So last night, there I was again, staring up into the night
sky. If you didn’t get a chance to see
it, you seriously missed out. It was so
clear that I could even see the tiny stars along with the big ones. There didn’t seem to be an inch of sky not
filled with stars. I was lying on a
chair on my pool deck; weird, I know, since normal people use their
pool decks during the daylight hours; when I decided I wanted a picture. I whipped out my phone and pointed the camera
at the sky. And this is what I got.
Disappointing, right?
I thought maybe my camera was broken.
But it wasn’t. I peeked around my
phone and it was still there, the sky filled with stars. Then, it was like God tapped me on the
shoulder and said, This is how you so
often view your life.
This is how I view my life?
The question rolled around in my mind for a while before the truth of it
hit me. God is all around me. He is in smiles and laughter, in friends and
family, in a friendly word or gesture, in the breeze rustling through the
trees, in the starry nights and beautiful sunrises, but so often, I don’t even
see Him. So often, I’m way too busy looking through the camera lens of my
issues, my problems, my feelings, my wants, my needs, my fears.
Basically, I’m too
busy looking through a tiny camera lens called “ME”.
So often, I refuse to lower the camera and see the world
around me. It’s amazing how that one
little camera could not only block my vision of the sky, but make it look
completely different. Isn’t is also odd
how one thing can go wrong in my life and then completely block out all the
good things around it. I think, that wasn’t fair to me, I didn’t deserve
that, God why did You let that happen to me? See the trend? When everything is going great, it is easy
for me to see God working around me. Yet
it seems that when the slightest bit of trouble arises, I raise my camera to my
face and effectively block out everything else but myself. Through the lens of "me" all I see is darkness. Because we are not told to look to ourselves to finish this race, but to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2).
The most amazing part is that though Jesus has every reason to be put out by me, He meets me right where I am. He does not tell me my pain isn't real or that my problems are insignificant to Him. Christ never wants us to bury our problems and pretend everything is okay. It is important to acknowledge our pain and let Christ walk us through it. Instead of telling us to get over it or treating our hurt as insignificant, Christ hurts with us, just like He wept with Mary and Martha when Lazarus died. Then, slowly, tenderly, He reaches up and moves the camera out of the way. He opens our eyes to see the whole picture. Because in light of His greatness, our problems shrink in comparison. Suddenly, what seemed so overwhelming looks miniscule compared with the God of the Universe. This is what Jesus does. He widens our gaze. He calls us to let the camera fall and stop looking at our lives through the lens of our own understanding and instead to look at our lives in light of WHO HE IS!
Take encouragement! Because no matter what you are going through, God is there with you, right where you are. He sees your pain and cries with you. But He also calls your gaze higher, to the place where He sits enthroned above the earth. To the place of certainty, where He reigns over all. Let our gaze always, always be on Him.
