Blurry Vision

A nice Saturday Morning my family and I were all packed in the car headed out on a trip. We had been gone from the house a total of 5 minutes and I already felt as if this trip was going to be a success. The kids were all buckled in and the bags were all packed and Lori and I felt confident that we had not forgotten a thing we needed for this 4 day mini-vacation (Thank is a success within itself). We had planned the trip, prepared ourselves and the kids, and our vision was clear we were going to have a blast. Three seconds latter things changed. We were driving directly in the sun and I made the mistake of pushing the windshield wiper fluid button. You wouldn’t think something as harmless windshield cleaner would be a problem. The window was nasty and I wanted to be able to see better and I thought this was my best option. Little did I know that window cleaning fluid and direct sunlight just don’t mix and my vision for the road suddenly became so distorted that I had to bring the car to a complete halt. As I was drying the window off on the side of the road and I realized that even though we had a vision of what the trip was to be and had spent time planning and preparing, right then and there we could have had a wreck and everything would have changed. I know my vision is important but at that moment having the right vision meant everything.

Look at Nehemiah 1 and we can find some answer about what we can do when we lose God’s vision for our lives. There's a great prayer there that God was so impressed with that He put it in the Bible. And it's a real-life model of what the ultimate purpose of prayer is. Obviously, our purpose is to get whatever we're praying about, but God's purpose is to give us His vision.

Nehemiah has a heavy burden on his heart. It's the news that God's people and God's city are a mess. And it drives him to his knees for weeks of praying about it. I don't know what's weighing heavy on your heart right now, but I hope it's driven you to your knees. Maybe like Nehemiah, you feel powerless to solve this one. Then you'll be interested in how he ends up praying after initially focusing on the situation. Praying about the situation changes how he looks at almost everything. After heavy duty praying, he's seeing things much more clearly - through God's vision. And that's what the ultimate purpose of praying is, not getting an answer, but getting God's perspective - which often leads to the answer.

It's that burden on your heart that gets you to praying. But if you will persist before God, you will notice your vision starting to clear up. The Divine Ophthalmologist will be giving you glasses to see Him, and yourself, and the people around you, and the real issues, and your next step as you've never seen them before. When you go to your knees, you get God's glasses. And suddenly, things look so much clearer!

In Him,
Joe