Good Monday Morning (10-25-10),

In the body of Christ we are constantly seeking ways to better our walk with God. We attend seminars, we do Bible studies…sometimes we seek spiritual counseling. All this is good.

But I think sometimes we humans tend to over-complicate the extremely simple. Often we are searching for deep and complex truths to set us on the straight and narrow, to bring comfort and peace, to broaden understanding and lessen confusion…when our only true problem is that our vision needs adjusting.

We tend to schedule eye surgery when all we need is a one dollar pair of Wal-Mart reading glasses.

There is a song we’ve been singing lately during worship. It may be my all time favorite song. It begins by comparing God to a hurricane, and me to a tree, “bending beneath the weight of Your wind and mercy.”

What a perfect picture of His greatness and my smallness. Don’t you know I get that upside down all the time? The narrower my focus, the more my self and my issues fill up the screen. After a short time of that, God seems very tiny and far away and insignificant, and my problems loom large enough to overwhelm me.

But when I recognize God is like a hurricane and I am like a tree, bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy, my vision begins to adjust to the true picture. Then everything shifts and it happens just like the second stanza of that same song.

“Suddenly, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory.”

Seeing God as He truly is, at least to the extent we can do that while still in this earthly body, sharpens my vision and brings things into proper focus. His brilliance, His glory, His hugeness will always eclipse any momentary discomfort I might be experiencing.

Paul wrote about this in Second Corinthians. He described this life…all human affairs, any human situation (he wrote as one had had been beaten, imprisoned, chased across the known world, shipwrecked, stoned and left for dead)…he described life as a “light and momentary affliction”.

He didn’t need glasses.

Paul described life on this earth as “the slight distress of the passing hour”. Here’s why: he held God in the proper perspective. He recognized that this entire life — every suspended heartbeat, every burdened sigh, the sum of everything we experience and endure — does not comprise even the length of an eye blink in the span of eternity.

Paul knew irrevocably and undeniably two stout vision-adjusting truths:

· eternity is very long and life, when compared to it, is very short

· this life is merely a preparation, a training, a purifying, for our permanent existence which is more glorious than we will ever imagine until we get there

When I stub my toe I console myself with the knowledge it will only hurt for a moment. I know this from experience and it gets me through the pain without despair or discouragement. Can you imagine allowing a stubbed toe to ruin my perspective for the rest of the week? That would be foolish because I understand that in the panorama of life a stubbed toe is a light and momentary affliction.

God wants us to comprehend, to know beyond any doubt, that when we have the proper perspective in respect to His bigness and our smallness, to the breadth of eternity measured against the moment in time we call ‘life’, then everything we experience can be recognized as something that is already passing.

I know He wants us to get this truth because He has written it so many ways in His Word.

“Run the race with endurance keeping your eyes set on the prize before you…it has not entered into the mind of man what God has in store for those who love Him…consider it all joy…My yoke is easy, My burden light…we look not to the things which are seen, but to things unseen, things that are deathless and everlasting…don’t you know that you will judge even the angels?”

Sometimes I get such tunnel vision I forget what the truth really is. This happens when I turn my focus onto myself to the exclusion of everything else. I tune out God and tune in self-interest. I know my vision needs adjusting when my situation begins to seem overwhelming, when my peace has fled, when hope has waned.

Fixing this particular vision problem is easy. All I need to do is get into the Word. The truth always eases my soul, sets me free, and restores my sight.

“For our light, momentary affliction (this slight distress of the passing hour) is ever more and more abundantly preparing and producing and achieving for us an everlasting weight of glory (beyond all measure, excessively surpassing all comparisons and all calculations, a vast and transcendent glory and blessedness never to cease!)” II Cor. 4:17, Amplified

Laurie Gross