Are you seeing the unseen?

posted on : January 1, 2018 posted by : Skip Burke

“So 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.” — 2 Corinthians 4:18

I don’t know about you, but…It’s a bit scary to think that all through my life…and all through my day, even today, there are things going on around me that have eternal significance which I miss. Do I fix my eyes, my brain, my heart on those unseen things in a way to notice invisible things that last forever? Unfortunately, most of the time, not. In fact, Diane says that I miss at least sixty percent of the easily seen things going on around me.

Are there really unseen things around me that have potentially eternal consequences as I go to breakfast, work in my office, throw a football with my grandson, go for a haircut, or yell at the refs at a college basketball game? Maybe I will never see them if I do not “set my eyes” on them…rather if I do not let God have his will to focus my mind on seeing them.

A friend recently told a story of what happened as his wife was preparing for a procedure in the hospital. As he started to say a prayer with her, he was reminded of a challenge from a book he had recently read about sharing the faith. So he engaged the nurse in the room by saying: ” We are about to pray for my wife’s procedure. Is there anything going on in your life that we could pray for at the same time?” The somewhat startled nurse said “sure”; then began to open up about children that were in extremely bad circumstances and the difficulties she was enduring as a result.

Easily Seen: a wife’s procedure that called for prayer. Unseen: a nurse who was experiencing unknown suffering. Unseen: an individual that perhaps needed to hear that God is the answer for life’s problems, and that His people cared. I think my friend came to recognize these unseen circumstances by allowing his mind to be fixed on more than the obvious.

Even so, I’m not sure he thought about other unseen levels going on in his situation…including the potential effect on the lives of the nurse’s children; the strengthening of his relationship with his wife through that experience; and even the impact on other individual lives as he later told the story in a weekly bible study.

Why is it so easy for us to miss the potential for God to use us in ways of furthering His eternal plan…while we go about our lives as though we are on a path plotted out by a GPS? (More on this later.) Can our eyes not be set to see the unseen dimensions of life?

My New Year’s Prayer:

Father, you told us in your word, that we can use our eyes, which are the doors to our minds, to see the invisible. Help me somehow to not be so fixated on the things that I see on my path, that I miss the unseen…where there may be opportunities to potentially impact what lasts forever.