The Eyes of Christ

I wish I could say that I see people with the eyes of Christ, through the mind of Christ. For example, staying at a hostel in Vilnius this week, there was a guy in the next bunk over who made a bit of conversation with us. He is traveling around Europe for two and a half months. Later, I heard him making plans to go out and meet up with other backpackers at a bar, as is the life of backpackers everywhere.

My reaction to this guy was one of smugness, and self-satisfaction. “I could never just travel around for that long without a purpose,” I said to a friend, “I’m over that backpacking phase. It’s just so empty and meaningless.” What I didn’t stop to perceive in this individual is the spiritual emptiness in him, which the eyes of Christ would enable me to see. Instead, he was an opportunity against which to measure my own sense of pride and self-satisfaction.

Why don’t I see people with the eyes of Christ? Why is it not my first impulse to be concerned about the spiritual condition of the hearts of my students? I need to pray and ask God for this vision. I was doing this at the outset of my time here – the Sunday of orientation in August, I sat weeping in my kitchen as I prayed over the names of my seminar students, asking God to help me to love them through His love. I have not prayed like this often enough. This is probably because I tell myself I “don’t have time” to walk around LCC crying over the state of souls. But what else are we on the planet to do? Really?

So my prayer is that of Ephesians 1:17 – 19: “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know Him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and His incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of His mighty strength”

I want the eyes of my heart to be enlightened by the Spirit of wisdom, and to be strengthened by the remembrance of the hope to which we are all called. I have been so challenged lately by a couple others also walking this path of service to God. Yesterday, my little brother sent me the link to his online journal. Reading it, nearly in tears because of the level of his passion, I could see his intense desire to live his life in service of things of eternal value. He is wrestling with what it really means to be a disciple and how that commitment requires a sacrifice of our dreams and desires (so much of what I too have been encountering here in LT). In his writing, he is just on fire with love for God. It isn’t even a question of prioritizing and planning how to serve. That kind of love doesn’t allow any response but gratitude and a life lived in praise.

Recently, in my desire to regain and remember the vision that has brought me to Lithuania, I posted a section of my journal next to my mirror in the bathroom. By the Holy Spirit’s power, I am trying to live it out.

“It is a hard principle to hold onto – to want, more than anything anything anything, the Kingdom of God. To want, more than my heart wants what it does, for every person to come to a knowledge of God’s glory. Paramount.
I want to want You first and foremost. Your story, Your Kingdom, Your Glory. (my life a tiny and infinitesimal jot in the great Play, the whirling dance)”

Holy Spirit, have your way in me.