Have you ever met someone who needs two sets of glasses - one for reading and one for long distance things?
Today, even if you don’t wear glasses, consider: through what sort of lens do you look at life?
Are you only aware of the things under your nose, as if you were going around wearing only reading glasses? Or do you see things further away?
Of course, we see good things - friends and family, houses, possessions, pets, money, and all of God’s good gifts. We do have a great deal for which to be thankful, but at the same time, we’re surrounded by moral and spiritual decay, rampant consumerism, global warming, poverty, inequality, sickness, old age, grief, sadness and death. Need I go on?
Isn’t it easy for these things, the things right under our noses, to become the be-all and end-all?
So often it seems like we’re walking around wearing only our reading glasses, incapable of seeing clearly anything more than two metres away.
In times like this, when life "gets us down," we would do well to remember St Paul’s words, "we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal" (II Cor. 4:18).
But how can that be any help? We can easily see all the things under our noses. How can we possibly fix our sight on what we can’t see? But in reality, it’s only by looking at what is unseen that we can possibly escape being bogged down in despair over what we can see!
The key to understanding Paul’s words is to view our lives and the world through a different lens.
St Paul wrote, "Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself" (II Cor. 4:14, 15).
This is what makes all the difference. God doesn’t leave us to stew only in what we can see under our noses. He gives us a new lens through which to view the world - the lens of faith, which enables us to see beyond the mess that surrounds us.
St Paul wrote, "For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands" (II Cor. 5:1).
No matter what troubles we may face, individually, or as a family, or a congregation or a wider community, we still see our eternal house in heaven, built by God the father for all who believe in Christ as Saviour - an inheritance that nothing can snatch away, no matter what we see going on under our noses.
We just need to remember we can only see it through the lens of faith.
-LUCAS MATUSCHKA