Give Me Your Eyes...

For a few days now, I have been replaying this song and video, over and over. It is embedded in my heart. I have this huge burden that is just brewing inside of me, but is really hard to express. I feel the words of this song so deeply, "Give me your eyes for just one second, give me your eyes so I can see, everything that I keep missing, give me Your love for humanity..." and it just resonates inside my spirit.

I often find myself lost in my thoughts whenever I am in public. Places like Walmart, the mall, church, the movie theater, restaurants, they always evoke my antenna's, as I like to call them. I look around and quietly think about who I am seeing and what I am seeing. I take rapid mental notes about how they are postured, their facial expressions, their clothes, the color of their clothes. Who they are with, how close they are physically to any other person. Whether they are touching someone. How they are touching someone. The way they are moving, slow... fast, carefree...purposeful. How they are fitting into the overall dynamics of the place we are in. What kinds of emotions they are emitting. But above all, I watch their eyes, the windows to their soul. My intuition soaks in the details around me. My emotional antennas go up. I sense how they are feeling and it begins... I ache for them, rejoice with them, feel with them. All this is going on no matter what is is also happening around me. It is my secondary nature. Many times I have wanted to just leap outside of myself because of how noisy it gets inside my head. I am emotionally overstimulated.

So the words, "give me your eyes for just one second" I think, whoa!... I am already overwhelmed by the little bit of intuition and empathy that God has blessed me with. What if He did give me His eyes, for just one second...!?! What if I could for just a moment have the same love for humanity that God has? What if I didn't miss anything, saw everything, knew everything. What if I could see through people's souls, see the colors of their heart, for one sceond. If I could see what happened to them last night, yesterday, or when they were five. See their love, their sorrow, their sin. Know them so well, that I could perfectly anticipate their needs, even if they could not. Know what makes them happy, what their dreams are, what they would wish for if they could... How would I handle that?

Even, if I could do that for just one person for one second, I don't think I would be able to survive it. I believe every emotion I have would collide in overwhelming confusion. But if I could survive, how would it change me? What would it do to me, if I could have His eyes. Would I feel hopeless, because I could not handle the depths of another's real burdens. Would I feel such great sadness over the sin in the world, that I would just give up? Would I ever leave my house again? Would I become a missionary?

The next verse, "Give me your arms for the brokenhearted, for the ones that are far beyond my reach, give me a heart for the ones forgotten, give me your eyes so I can see." This is where I live. This is my heart. In many ways my life has been hard, good but hard. I have had a lot of struggles and pain in my own life. Not as much as some others, of course, but enough. It is the pain that I have experienced that gives me empathy or my "eyes". Rejection, grief, sorrow, trauma, subtle depression, I can see it all around me. I know I have just a tiny bit of empathy compared to God. I certainly don't have God's eyes. But what would happen if I just prayed that prayer everyday, "Give me your eyes, Lord, Give me your arms". What would it do if everyone in my church did the same thing. What if every Christian? What would it do for our homes? For our community, for our world???? Oh it would be amazing!

I love the quote from a book called "Love Walked Among Us". The author, Paul Miller states it this way, "We instinctively know that love leads to committment, so we look away when we see the beggar. We might have to pay if we look too closely and care too deeply."I fear that most of us do not want to pray this prayer. It requires too much from us. If we could see, what would it cost us? Could we see and not do? The burden is so great. But I am going to keep praying it. I want you to pray it too. I want you to have eyes, because I don't want to go alone. I will go alone, but this is a burden I want to share.

Please watch both of the videos and then tell me what you see...