learning to see

I’ve walked this path for ten years. I’ve looked at this tree a hundred times. I give it a mental nod as I go by, as I would a passing acquaintance. Yet I never really saw it, not till today.

Usually all I notice is the lower trunk, as fat as it is tall, knobbed with burls and fissures. In that strange alchemy of gum trees, the brown trunk gives way to white branches. They drag their weight over the path, crooked arms with broken fingers. A potbellied man warming old bones in the sun.

This morning I see it differently. As I walk towards it, the sun sparkles off foliage and catches my eye, a cockatoo screams from above, and I look up, up, up into branches I didn’t know were there, long pale limbs raised to the sky, leaves flickering in a high breeze. The grace of a dancer, the strength of bone and sinew and toned muscle.

It strikes me that we are like this. Look at us, how we grow worn and weathered. That may be all you see of me, all I see of you. But if we belong to Christ, the high glory of what God is making us into is breathtaking. He is making us to be like his Son!

We see the skin: the teenager’s awkwardness, the middle-aged woman’s closed-off face, the old man’s irrelevance. He sees stumbling attempts at love, endurance of pain, a life’s faithfulness. We see the gouges and scars on the work in progress; he sees the emerging likeness and the finished glory.

Perhaps it’s time we learned to see with new eyes.

 image is by  mathias shoots analogue