Good morning…
He has made everything beautiful in its appropriate time. He has also put obscurity in their hearts so that no one comes to know the work that God has done from the beginning to the end (Ecclesiastes 3:11, MEV).
“Imagine that you’re unwell and in a foul mood, and you’re driving through some lovely countryside,” writes Anthony de Mello in his article entitled Substituting One Cruelty For Another. “The landscape is beautiful but you’re not in the mood to see anything. A few days later you pass the same place and you say, ‘Good heavens, where was I that I didn’t notice all of this?’ Everything becomes beautiful when you change.”
Anthony continues: “Or you look at the trees and the mountains through windows that are wet with rain from a storm, and everything looks blurred and shapeless. You want to go right out there and change those trees, change those mountains. Wait a minute, let’s examine your window. When the storm ceases and the rain stops, and you look out the window, you say, ‘Well, how different everything looks.'”
“We see people and things not as they are, but as we are,” de Mello concludes. “That is why when two people look at something or someone, you get two different reactions. We see things and people not as they are, but as we are.”
Anthony suggests: “Put this program into action, a thousand times: (a) identify the negative feelings in you; (b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external reality; (c) do not see them as an essential part of “I”; these things come and go; (d) understand that when you change, everything changes.”
We see things not as they are, but as we are. As God transforms us, everything changes. God’s Spirit inspires such magnificent “in” sight.
“It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this I-know-better-than-you mentality again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your own part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor” (Luke 6:41-42, MSG).
…Sue…
