EYES EVERYWHERE

A few days ago, right in December 2020, a friend’s 2-year-old child went missing for a brief period. Does that make her a bad mother? 

It was one of the coldest days this winter season, dark, gloomy, and windy. In between two parked cars was a 2-year-old with no jacket, sitting on the floor crying frantically. How did this little 2-year-old get out of home by himself at 11 pm? 

As a mother of 3,2- and 1-year old boys, I could totally relate to my friend’s dismay. I often feel I need more pairs of eyes than God gave me to enable me to watch all three simultaneously. I need two more sets of eyes behind my head, two more by my left ears, two more by my right ears, and two more beneath my jaw. Then I probably would have just the right number of eyes everywhere.

But wait, God said everything He created in Genesis 1 was perfect, right? 

I began to think about God. How is He able to watch not only planet Earth with over seven billion human beings?; But also, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. How does He watch over the entire Universe?

I will not attempt to understand how God Almighty does this. I will join David in Psalms 139:6 when he said, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”

Here on planet earth, though, God sees all things; he is, after all, the Omnipresent God. Yet, He requires us to be His eyes on the planet.

So, before we write our new year’s resolution for 2021, let us write it through the seeing eyes of Jesus, through the heartbeat of Jesus.

Can you imagine if you started looking at the world as Christ would see it? Can you imagine the many solutions you may develop if the troubles of this world broke your heart the way it breaks Jesus’ heart? Can you imagine?

Brandon Heath, in his song titled “Give me Your Eyes,” says it so perfectly. I love not only the words of the music but also the video. Below is the chorus:

Give me your eyes for just one second

Give me your eyes so I can see

Everything that I keep missing

Give me your love for humanity

Give me your arms for the brokenhearted

The ones that are far beyond my reach

Give me your heart for the ones forgotten

Give me your eyes so I can see

Yeah Yeah Yeah

In the first scene of the music video, Brandon Heath is at an airport’s baggage reclaim area. He picks up his guitar from the baggage carousel and leaves without paying any attention to the people around him. In the second scene of the music video, he steps out to the airports’ busy streets and again ignores everyone around. Albeit it may not be an intentional overlook, like most of us, he probably had his life issues to think about, rather than being concerned about strangers around him.

But as the song nears the end, he asks for a second chance to take a second look at the people around him. Life doesn’t give us a second chance; we only live once. This has become such a cliché. We can point to YOLO (You Only Live Once), or the Latin term “carpe diem,” meaning seize the day. Seeing the way God sees, though, goes beyond these clichés. It involves a tremendous amount of intentionality, determining to live a life of purpose not just because of YOLO or carpe diem but because we are representatives of God on earth.

Brandon Heath does get a second chance, the music video rewinds, and after picking his guitar from the baggage carousel this time around, he looks with intention at the people around:

• He saves a lady’s suitcase that almost fell off the baggage carousel
• He helps a lost toddler find his way back to his mom
• He saves a young lady preoccupied with her thoughts from being hit by an oncoming vehicle

He got the second chance to re-look. But we have just one opportunity- YOLO! 

We live in a technologically savvy era; we are heavily engrossed with our phones, iPad, etc. We no longer take the time to look at the people around us and see how we could meet their needs. We honestly, shamefully, and painfully have become a very selfish generation. 

Before you put down those new year’s resolutions, would you take a moment to look at those goals through the eyes of Jesus?

When we open our eyes and heart to see as Jesus does, we could develop business plans that may make us the next Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg or Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, or even the late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs.

All these tough giants may or may not attribute the solutions they brought to the world as an example of wanting to better man’s living conditions. But they have made life better for us all.  

Will you be God’s eyes everywhere?