The Beholding Life: How We See Matters
Your eyes are windows into your body.
If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light.
If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a musty cellar.
If you pull the blinds on your windows, what a dark life you will have!
—Jesus
(Matthew 6:22-23, MSG)
One morning over waffles, I asked Drew the following question:
“What compels us to believe the people who have had visions—who claim to have seen God in a true mystical experience? Like how did Joan of Arc, a teenage girl who believed she encountered angels, convince an entire army to follow her in defying the conquest of England?”
Drew wisely responded, “I believe it takes communal discernment. And certain people’s visions have stood the test of time.”
I thought of those visionaries whose revelations have endured the test of time, like Julian of Norwich, who saw apparitions of the crucified Christ and was enraptured by the deep and passionate love of God—even though she never left her tiny stone cell for twenty years. Then there’s St. Francis, who was praying alone on a mountaintop in Italy when he received his vision of a fiery seraphim with wings covering the body of Christ. The Bible is also filled with men and women whose dreams and visions stood the test of time and shaped the rise and fall of nations. Pilate’s wife saw Jesus’ innocence through a dream and warned her husband not to sentence Jesus to crucifixion. Peter saw animals descending from the sky in a vision which furthered the reach of the Gospel to the Gentiles. John’s visions—given to him while stranded on the island of Patmos—formed the book of Revelation.
Each of these saints were alone, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when God revealed his glory and truth to them—a unique manifestation of his presence that was not visible to others. Maybe God longs to reveal God’s self to us in the middle of our mundane nowhere places, too. This is the hope upon which I’ve built my life and ordered my days. For over a year, I have written regularly for the Behold blog. When Drew and I were building my website and it came time for me to choose a name, Behold came to mind immediately because of how precious this verse from John’s Revelation is to us and our story—we even have it inscribed in our wedding bands:
Behold, I am making all things new.
(Revelation 21:5)
In this verse, God invites John and future readers to look closely at the redemptive work that is happening in our midst, even now. When naming this blog, it struck me that beholding is a deeper way of seeing, and that is what I wanted to explore. Is there a deeper, truer, more beautiful way of seeing this world, our lives, and God? If so, how do we behold the presence of God in our everyday lives? Every so often when writing I pause to ask, “What am I doing with my writing? More importantly what is God doing?” No matter the subject matter of these blog posts, I believe they all point to one thing:
How we see matters.
Why?
Because how we see is ultimately how we live.
In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught his followers about the importance of seeing shaping our living:
The eye is the lamp of the body.
If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.
But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.
If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!(Matthew 6:22-23)
The eye is the lamp of the body. Think about that for a moment: the degree to which we shine with the light of God is directly proportional to the health of our vision. Is Jesus talking about the health of our physical eyes? I don’t believe so. Jesus seems to be indicating that there is a clear line between light and darkness in this world, and which reality we inhabit is directly tied to our spiritual vision. If we fixate on darkness, we become darkness. When we behold what is true and of God, we become full of light. We pattern our lives after Jesus when we, too, shine with the light that the darkness could not overcome.
As followers of Christ, it is crucial that we learn to see with the eyes of God—that we embrace his vision for the world and our lives, not our own. When we learn to see like Jesus, we will begin to live like Jesus. Below are some crucial questions of seeing I’ve wrestled with over the past year, both through writing and in my conversations with fellow believers. In pondering these, I have discovered that how we answer these questions inevitably shapes how we orient ourselves towards creation, others, ourselves, and God:
Do we see the earth as mere kindling for the fires of future judgment, or do we see the earth as a precious place that God is actively renewing—a home that will endure for eternity?
Similarly, do we view our lives as something to either endure or escape, or do we see our lives as a crucial first chapter of our eternal, glory-laden story?
Do we see our daily work simply as a means to an end, or do we view our labor as sowing seeds in the already-not-yet Kingdom of God?
Are other people nuisances and a waste of our time and resources, or do we see them as image-bearers who reveal to us the face of God?
Do we see ourselves as created evil with the potential for good, or do we see ourselves as created good with an inevitable propensity towards evil?
Is God someone we see as cruel, harsh, stern, judgmental, and perpetually disappointed—or do we see God as kind, patient, playful, just, and abounding in steadfast love?
Do we look for God only in the miraculous, or do we see God at work in the mundane elements of our day to day lives?
Do you see how your answers to these questions radically determine how you spend your money, time, heart, and energy?
It all comes down to whether or not we choose to see or to behold. When we merely see what is in front of us, we will only ever glimpse the surface of things—which by all appearances are bleak, indeed. When we behold our lives and this world with the eyes of God, we open ourselves up to wonder and worship as what is hidden becomes revealed and what is invisible becomes visible to our spirits.
When we move from seeing to beholding, we journey from looking at the appearance of things to truly beholding the heart of things.
This is the kind of life into which God invites the prophet Samuel as he chooses the next King of Israel after Saul. When Jesse’s sons are lined up before him, Samuel fixates on the robust and kingly physical appearance of David’s brothers, but God shows Samuel a different way of seeing:
When they arrived, Samuel saw Eliab and thought, “Surely the LORD’s anointed stands here before the LORD.”
But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”(1 Samuel 16:6-7)
The LORD does not look at the things people look at. So how do we learn to see with the eyes of God? How do we learn to behold the eternal in the temporal, the divine in the mundane?
I believe the life of Moses offers us a clear example of someone who truly learned to behold the face and presence of God in his midst. His journey of beholding begins with the burning bush at a time when he was alone in the desert, escaping punishment for a murder he had committed in Egypt. Moses is going about his (presumably) mundane and ordinary job as a shepherd in the wilderness of Mt. Horeb when something catches his eye:
There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”
When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”
And Moses said, “Here I am.”
“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”(Exodus 3:2-5)
I will go over and see this strange sight. The burning bush would have crackled with the presence of God whether Moses chose to stop or not. What God honored was Moses’ willingness to turn aside and “go see this strange sight.” Years later, God invites Moses to behold his presence in the darkness of Mt. Sinai. How did Moses learn to see God in the majestic whirlwind of the dark? I believe it is because he first practiced beholding and experiencing the presence of God in the everyday drudgery of the Israelite’s wilderness journey. Moses turned aside to look more deeply into the mystery of the burning bush, and his life would never be the same. When Moses dies, these are the final words written about him in the book of Deuteronomy:
Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, who did all those signs and wonders the Lord sent him to do in Egypt—to Pharaoh and to all his officials and to his whole land. For no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all Israel.
(Deuteronomy 34:10-12)
Indeed, Moses is one of very few people in the Old Testament described as a man who beheld God:
The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.
(Exodus 33:11)
Can you imagine being described as a friend “Whom the LORD knew face to face?” When Jesus came to earth in the flesh, God befriended us, too. The intimate, revelatory way of seeing with which Moses and many of the prophets were privileged is offered to us as well in the person of Jesus, who called us friends.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,
(and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,)
full of grace and truth.(John 1:14, KJV)
And we beheld his glory. The truth is, the beholding life is something that is accessible to everyone—though few turn aside from their busyness to look for the manifestations of God in unexpected places. Beholding begins with learning give our whole-hearted attention to the presence of God in our midst—a radical concept that can best be described in the words of T.S. Eliot as “A condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything” (The Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”). Though it may sound simple, I’ve found that paying attention and learning to behold the heart of things instead of merely seeing the appearance of them is ridiculously hard. It requires all of my devotion to turn my gaze from what is seen to what is unseen. Why is this so difficult, and what keeps us from seeing clearly with the eyes of the heart? These are questions I hope to explore in the weeks ahead, but until then, may you receive these words as a personal, divinely intended invitation to the beholding life:
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.-Mary Oliver
Beloved, the God who sees you wants to be seen by you. So pay attention. Be astonished. And tell the world about what you have seen.
Amen.
To Go Deeper: Listen to Has It Been You by John Mark McMillan.
I concede eternity
Is pressing into time
Even the material
It hums with the Divine
And I believe
The miraculous mundane
Is still begging to be seen.