Are you looking or seeing?

I went to a funeral yesterday for a member of our church who was blind for most of her life. She was a wonderful woman who lived till 91 years of age. Members of our church would go and pick her up on Sunday and Wednesdays and do all kinds of different errands for her. Miss Allen knew what my name was, Tim, but she always called me Kim, and I didn’t argue with her because I would still be called Kim no matter what and I did not want to get in trouble with her for arguing. Our former pastor preached at the funereal and he made a great statement. “We look with our eyes and we see with our mind.” That is a very true statement! I have been blessed with excellent vision all of my life and the wonderful ability to “look.” But I have to confess I don’t see all that well at times. My ability to see often gets blurred by what I am looking at in my life. I have also noticed that a lot of other people suffer from this problem.

We often get so focused on what we are looking at and everything else gets blurred that is beyond the object or situation. It’s the old “I can’t see the forest because the trees are in the way!” There is nothing more frustrating than looking right at something and not seeing it in front of us. We look at our current situations in life and all we see is this is just the way it is, or I will work harder at this and it will maybe get better. Miss Allen never could look at her house to see if it needed cleaning, but anytime I dropped her off it was clean, really clean. She could always see her clean house. Maybe we need to start seeing where we want to go in our lives instead of looking at all the problems in our life. What ever we are looking at is the direction we will be traveling. I believe I will work on my seeing. I know Miss Allen is seeing everything she knew was out there now, and as a bonus, she can now look at what she has been seeing!

Kim West (Tim West) 11-9-10