I spent two summers in Long Beach, California, working with the church there. One thing that comes to mind when you think about that area is the traffic. Trying to navigate my way along the crowded streets was quite intimidating to this Texas boy. Since I was spending much of my time looking for places that I had never been to, I had to concentrate on street signs and house numbers as well as deal with the traffic.

Toward the end of that first summer I realized that, if I would just raise my eyes a bit, there was a beautiful view of the mountains near Los Angeles. The view had been there the whole time; I just hadn’t raised my eyes to see it.

There is an old joke about a courtroom scene. Sam, an old man, was a witness in a burglary case. The defense lawyer asked Sam, “Did you see my client commit this burglary?” 

“Yes,” said Sam, “I saw him plainly take the goods.” 

The lawyer asked Sam again, “Sam, this happened at night. Are you sure you saw my client commit this crime?” 

“Yes” said Sam, “I saw him do it.” 

Then the lawyer asked Sam, “Sam listen, you are 80 years old and your eyesight probably is bad. Just how far can you see at night?” 

Sam said, “I can see the moon, how far is that?”

Alan Smith, in his Thought for the Day, retells that joke, then asks the question: “How far can you see?” He talks about people walking along with their heads down, seeing the trash on the sidewalk rather than the beauty of the world around them. He then says that we often do that spiritually, focusing on the physical things around us, rather than the spiritual.

I was talking with someone the other day, commenting that our senses can be so overwhelmed by the physical world around us that it’s hard to see the real world. You see, the sights and sounds and smells around us blind us to the unseen things. It sounds strange, doesn’t it? Yet it’s true: the real world is the unseen world and what we see is merely a facade.

Paul wrote: “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:18) We know that this world and everything in it will one day disappear, yet it’s so hard for us to look beyond this world. In another letter, Paul wrote: “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” (Colossians 3:1-2)

So lift your eyes a bit. Look beyond the here and now and catch a glimpse of eternity. There’s a beauty there that is easily missed.

{photo by Rick Sampson}