See Things Differently.

This week the Daily Devos are going to be focused on one very simple idea:  Changed people can change the world.  In other words, if you want to change the world, the change you seek needs to begin in you. 

Each day this week, we're going to be exploring practical ways that we can open ourselves up to the transforming power of God in your life.  I hope that these devos will become action items in your life, as I will be striving to make them in mine. 

Today we're going to offer up a challenging action item that can have a deep and lasting impact on your life if you choose to embrace it:  See differently.  

Jesus once told his followers: 

22 The eye is the lamp of the body. You draw light into your body through your eyes, and light shines out to the world through your eyes. So if your eye is well and shows you what is true, then your whole body will be filled with light.

What Jesus was inviting his followers to do was to learn to see the world differently.  Essentially he was telling them that if they chose to look out into the world with a "light-filled" gaze, they would be filled with the beauty, light, grace, and peace that they saw. 

But what goes unsaid is that Jesus was also indicating that if his followers chose to look out into the world with a jaundiced gaze, expecting to see the worst, looking only for darkness... they would most likely find it, and be filled with it.  

If we are going to fully follow Jesus we need to be able to see the world differently.  We can't be afraid to question our old lenses, our old ways of viewing the world and the people within it.  

Holocaust survivor, author and teacher Elie Wiesel once wrote: 

Questions can save us from the certainties that lead to fanaticism. To be human is to ask questions, to ask why, to inquire, to interrogate each situation in a search for the truth, the truth of how we must act. 

As you open your eyes to the world today, how will choose to see it?  Will you have the courage to see differently?  Will you allow yourself to seek truth and beauty wherever it may be found?  Will you let your old categories and ways of seeing the world withstand some much-needed scrutiny?  

May it be so for you.  And may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you now and always.  Amen.