Father, it is a beautiful day of new beginnings. I give it all over to You. May you use my life as You see fit for Your glory! Amen!
********
Keeping my eyes on the move is essential to keeping my invaluable cargo safe while driving my school bus. But more often than not, I see all kinds of things that are not threats but just cool things to see!
This morning a fox ran across the road in front of me. Last week a pheasant did the same thing. Rabbits and squirrels are everywhere this time of year. I often see deer. I see a great variety of birds all the time and even saw a Pileated Woodpecker on an old stump a while back.
I see them but do my students see any of them? …very rarely. If I see a deer in a field on a backroad, I quite often will point it out to my elementary kids. But all in all, they are absorbed in their phones or napping or playing/conversing with their friends. Who has time to look out the windows? What would you normally see? Rocks and trees! …as someone near and dear to my heart would say!
A phrase I have used in the past is that, as followers of Christ, it is of the utmost importance that we need learn to see between the lines. Far too often we are self-absorbed. We only see what pertains to us, and pretty much nothing else.
Recently I was watching a show and an FBI agent was talking with a boy about his older sister’s disappearance. They had normally walked to school together, but he had told his mother he was sick and didn’t go with her that day. Just by looking at him, the agent could tell – she saw between the lines – that there was something he wanted to say. When she probed a little bit, he shared that he hadn’t been sick and in turn blamed himself for his sister’s abduction.
That’s a simple example but throughout our daily routines, there is a good chance that our paths will cross with someone who is hurting, someone who needs something that we can provide. And we can do so if we are paying attention…if we are seeing between the lines of their lives.
Many times, those “things” are not easily discerned. We may need to ask a few questions to “prime the pump” if you will. But…if we are not looking, we cannot see. If our eyes are constantly on what interests us, we will fall short of seeing the needs of others. We may think we don’t have time to look out the windows of our lives but oh the things we miss because we don’t! Oh, the lives we could touch if we did!
Do you not say, ‘It is still four months until the harvest comes?’ Look, I say to you, raise your eyes and look at the fields and see, they are white for harvest. John 4:35 AMP
You just never know how the Lord could use you…see between the lines!
Apr 26th, 2021, Mon, 12:20 pm
