Can I Recognize It When It Is Right In Front Of Me?
John 1:9-11 (New International Version, ©2010)
9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.
My girlfriend from Canada called me this morning. We have such a beautiful relationship, whether we speak weekly or every three months, we have a bond and a covenant that is cherished and valued on both ends. She said something today while on the telephone that made my heart leap, she said “when I visited Hawaii; it changed my life, because I met you.” Little did she understand that our meeting changed my life as well, for it began to cultivate and pull on the giftings and callings in my life that I had packed away because of church hurts. But one of the oddest dynamics for me is when we meet people and we recognize the significance of who they are and even the significance of who we are to them, but they miss it. My sister and I have had this conversation more than once and it is hard for us both to understand how we can pray for some things, or say we want certain things and they come and they are right in our face or in our hands and we miss it. How can this be? Easy, when we cannot see passed ourselves, or our image of what it should be and even our own fears, it is hard to see anything or anyone else and what they may add or mean in our lives.
We do the same thing with God, He is right in our midst, when we are crying out to Him, but because we are so focused on the fact that it does not looking as we think it should or it is not just how we packaged it or asked for it, we miss God when He is answering our prayers and moving on our behalf. Even when God sends people into our lives to help us, challenge us, grow us, befriend us and move us, when often miss it because we are so busy looking at who we are, what we assume we need and how we want it to be that we find it hard to move beyond ourselves to accept the blessings that God is bestowing upon us. If only we can learn to get beyond ourselves we would be able to value what God places in our hands, His display of power in our lives and the people He entrust us with. For some of us we are walking and talking with Jesus, just as those two men walking the road were doing and are lacking the ability to recognize Him and value the time and the direction in which He is taking us. We miss out on so many things that God is trying to do in our lives, just because we feel the need to control our environment and the people that come into it. But trying to control what God is doing is like trying to control the wind, no man can hold it. If we lack the ability to get beyond ourselves look around and be in constant pursuit of God, we will miss His movement, His visitations and His blessings, all that is right before us and we will continue on doing our thing and God will have been there and then moved on because of our arrogance and our inability to appreciate what He has blessed us to experience.
It may very well be time to clear out the things in our lives, and in our thinking that keep us from seeing God right in our midst. It may be time to deflate our big egos and magnify God. You see when God becomes what we are looking for we have the ability to find Him in most everything. We understand that God is even in the small things in our lives, in the people we meet, in the experiences that we have. It is time to take the blinders off and see, I mean really see, not just seeing the nose on our face and no more, but recognizing the God ordained seasons, people, and opportunities that are being given to us. Ask yourself today, was I walking with Jesus and missed Him; I WOULD NOT BE SURPRISED IF WE DID, ALL TOO OFTEN WE DO!
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