through God's eyes

Do you tend to learn your lessons the easy way or the hard way? Unfortunately, too many of us learn our lessons the hard way. The easy way is to trust the wisdom and experience of another so that you can see your situation through their eyes and gain understanding sufficient to guide you in making a different choice. The hard way is going through the pain of making a mistake yourself and then dealing with all the consequences which ensue. There is some value to the hard way. But if the hard way is the only way we ever learn, we tend to spend a lot of time battered, bruised and exhausted. At its essence, Christian discipleship involves a healthy combination of the two. Since most of us have a learning process more heavily weighted toward the hard way, in my comments here, I will focus more on helping us find the easy way more often. Marcel Proust wrote that the “only true voyage of discovery” is “not to travel to new landscapes but to see with other eyes…”To see with other eyes for the Christian means we seek vision that comes from God. Thankfully God is generous in sharing His wisdom and perspectives with us. Indeed, in Habakkuk 2:2 God issues this directive, “Write the vision; make it plain…” This means seeing through God’s eyes is not only possible but the preferable and “easy” way to live and learn. Why is this not then more prevalent? Perhaps the price we pay for buying into such an individualistic approach to life which is so often based on how we feel, what we want and what we think, is a lack of trust and confidence in what someone else thinks, even when that someone is God. The possibility of moving past our own limitations and seeing the world more like God sees it as He enriches and challenges our perspectives “… heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.” (CS Lewis) Trust will always be an irreplaceable aspect of our lives. When we live trusting God even more than we trust ourselves we learn lessons the easy way and raise the bar on our discipleship.