Sometimes the obvious comes and hits me upside the head, accompanied with exclamations that run along the lines of, “I can not believe I hadn’t thought of that before!”

Generally, the way my mind works, the Motown-sounding backup singers in my head sing staccato tones of “Duh-duh.  Doo-duh-duh. Ba-by! Duh-duh…”  You get the point.

I had a moment like this a couple of weeks ago talking to a friend I adore.  We were discussing the numbers of pastors who report that they have seen little of God’s “transforming power.”

She then began reminiscing on the transformation she’d witnessed in my life.

See, I have a history.  I have a solid, ‘churched’, family-full-of-preachers history, followed by doing all I was supposed to do going to the Christian college, studying lots of Bible, and so on.

That was before what I affectionately refer to as my ‘unchurched-of-the-world-years’.  There were a lot of those years.  I was still searching though, and had returned to my good church-going ways for some time and then it suddenly clicked.

As a photographer, I like when things click.  The click is the sound of the shutter in my brain capturing beauty, art, truth, and usually love.  It clicked.  I saw it.  Things have never been the same, and I haven’t looked back.

My friend described the change she saw in me this way:

“You’re more ‘you’ than you ever were before.  But you definitely see things through a different lens now.”

Click!  “I can not believe I hadn’t thought of that analogy before!”  “Duh-duh.  Doo-duh-duh.  Ba-by!  Duh-duh….”

The part about ‘you’ being more ‘you’ made complete sense to me.  That is what happens when we die to self and give everything to God.  In a twist we don’t expect, He gives us the personality, talents, and even the desires He created us with, and now we get to fully experience them directed and used for higher purposes.

This, by the way, blows my mind.  Just in case you were wondering.

I have talked with people about seeing others as God sees them, viewing their circumstances the way God views them. Never once had I considered the lens.

And then there’s this. If we’re to try to see things more and more through God’s lens, that includes the way we see ourselves.

I don’t know about you, but I need God so desperately.  I am intimately acquainted with what I’m like without Him.  He definitely brings my sin to my attention.

But one big change, for me, is not only to try to see the world and others through God’s eyes…..but to see myself that way to.

To view myself through God’s lens, I feel His love, His comfort, and His peace.

And there, I find rest.

“Teach me your way, O LORD,

and I will walk in your truth;

give me an undivided heart,

that I may fear your name.

I will praise you, O Lord my God, with all my heart;

I will glorify your name forever.

For great is your love toward me;

you have delivered me from the depths of the grave. – Psalms 86:11-13

Do you need to change lenses?  In the way you’re looking at a circumstance in your life?  At other people?  How about in the way you view yourself?

by Deb Owen, Future-Smiling

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