The key to how well we live is found in great measure in how well we see. And what have we seen in the day we have just walked in? Did we see the one in need of our lingering? Did we see the color of the sky or the color of a loved one's eyes? What do we really see when we look at something?
Years ago on a trip to Boulder, Colorado I took a side-trip to Florrisant to look for fossils in an ancient lake bed. Picking up one layered rock after another, I found much "debris" - speckling the surface of many of them. One rock in particular caught my eye with a speck of debris that looked different from much of the other I had found. I turned the rock in several directions seeking to get the best read of that spot on the rock. Finally, as I turned it completely around, its shape and form emerged. It was a small bee, like a sweat bee....large, striped abdomen with antenae and wings! I was stunned to find such a fossil treasure. Heretofore, all my finds had beem of tribolites and seashells. But here in this rock I had almost tossed aside were the remains of an insect. Only as I really looked at it from many angles did I finally see what I had.
We must take the time to look at our lives from many angles if we are to see what we really have; to turn it till we discover the treasures lying there. Children have magical vision that allows them to see the treaures in their day. They see the antlion's home and go looking for its occupant. They watch the honeybee dancing in the flower and throw themselves into the world of the lightening bug. They notice when something is wrong with a parent. They see purely because the filters that come with age have not yet blinded them; they see the world without the specks of fossilized remains we carry in our soul. They do not miss what we miss.
In Revelation 1 Christ is described as having eyes like flames of fire. His is a piercing gaze that burns through all that is irrelevant and goes to the heart of the matter. When the rich young ruler asked Him what he must do to inherit eternal life, Christ knew the possessions that lay in this young man's heart and knew he would turn from the answer He gave. Yet in Mark 10 we see the words, "then Jesus beholding him, loved him." The word for "beholding him" means a gazing intently into. Seizing his soul with His eyes - and knowing the priorities that lay there - Christ loved him anyway. His is a piercing love that burns away the specks and sees things as they really are. We are asked to have the vision of a child.....where life becomes brim-full and running over.
When the purity of love collides in our soul with the magic of faith we are able to see past the debris from our past. We are freed to see our hurt and wounded places as scars that can be healed. We are free to see forgiveness for what it is...a healing, liberating thing not only for "them" but for us. We are freed to see those who have wounded us as ones for whom Christ died. We have eyes with which to see the beauty in each moment because it comes to us from a loving Creator's hand who ever works within us to create from our broken places something new and alive. Here, we embrace the magical vision of the child, and we are free to see more purely who He really is and the treasures we really have.