Seeing With Our Hearts Instead Of Our Eyes.

Get together all of the 7th grade students in this county, let them take turns drawing, writing, etc, with no preset criteria guiding their endeavor and you are very likely going to come up with something like I worked with today for the photo side of the blog. The piece intrigued me, and the longer I looked at it and examined it under that little + thing they put in computers, the more I realized that the only way to really see it was to "not" look so hard. The 7th graders that I know right now are like one another in every respect, and each one thinks that someone else is examining them right down to the very pores on their skin, but they aren't. That is just a strange little, self implanted, seed that grows with the age category. If you can remember back to that time in your own life(most of us would rather not)you'll know what I mean. How much better life could be if we all learned a simple lesson from this picture and then applied it to the manner in which we deal with others in our world. This is a large piece! The first thing we need to understand about it is that we are looking at the negative! That makes me wonder if the talent that put it together isn't making a statement in this, also. Now it's me that's trying to look behind the impact of reality in black and white and search for reasons for it being as it is. I'm going to keep this around on my screen for awhile as I practice seeing the picture as a whole instead of studying its parts. Maybe by doing this I can learn a lesson about keeping an eye on me when I look at others and, therein, remind myself to look at the larger picture that is actually quite nice, and not pick it apart piece by piece. My lawn looks pretty cool when it's freshly mowed, but if I stop to examine it closely I can see the weeds that are in there, the ones that have not been completely eliminated by today's spraying. The trees in back are beautiful this time of year, if I don't focus on the limbs that need to be cut, and the areas that are dying. The people I come across each day are truly amazing creations of a loving God, but only if I see them as whole. Each one of us is filled with tiny cracks and broken places, and dying parts, we call them wrinkles, and arthritis, and the natural signs of aging(especially don't look too closely when I smile, please, my eyes seem to just radiate fine lines in every direction from enjoying life too much). Some things are just better when we step back and see the greater picture instead of just choosing a point in it to ponder. We don't change the message, the message changes us. Have a great Sunday! God bless, Preacher.