Last Sunday, a friend and I were walking along a trail when BAM! God had a teachable moment with me. Because of my natural clumsiness and the uncertainty of the rocky path, I was so focused on my footing that I hardly looked up. In the middle of our hike, my friend pointed out a small, easy-to-overlook branch filled with clusters of beautifully peculiar leaves. For a moment, I stopped to simply admire the intricacy and uniqueness of this plant. The sight of it triggered praise within my spirit to the Creator who has made this earth incredibly diverse, magnificent even in the smallest details, and full of endless treasures like this to discover. I marveled at how God, with all His power and strength, loves His children so much that He has gone to great lengths to extract awe and wonder from us, to “wow” us, with even the smallest of things like a leaf.
In the midst of my internal amazement at this, I turned and looked around me. And to my astonishment, I was SURROUNDED by these leaves. Surrounded! Above and below, to my right and to my left, the sunlight was bursting through these dazzling leaves. I think I let out a tiny gasp as I stood there taking it in. When I shifted my gaze from the singular branch and looked at the bigger picture, I wondered, How could I have not seen that this was all around me all along? Little did I know that while I was taking in the glory of one small portion of a plant, there was so much more for me to see.
God taught me something in that moment. Sometimes my limited perspective is keeping me from experiencing all that God has to offer. When I am walking around with my head towards the ground, beaten down by life, or when I let my perspective of God be confined to what I as a mere human can understand, I am blocking myself from living in the fullness that God has. God reminded me in that moment that He is big, He is vast, He is beyond comprehension, and He is capable of more than we can ever imagine. Isaiah 55:9 says His thoughts are higher than our thoughts and His ways our higher than our ways. After we choose to put our trust in Him, we need to change the way we think. We must remember that God is limitless and expansive. He wants to awe us and captivate us with His glory. He isn’t restricted by anything, for He is capable of things that, humanly-speaking, would be impossible.
In Genesis 15 God made a promise to Abraham (who at the time was called Abram) that he would become a father at the age of 99. When Abraham started to question how this would happen, God “took Abram outside and said to him, ‘Look into the sky and count the stars if you can. That’s how many descendants you will have.’” (verse 5). Just as God escorted Abraham outside in order to get a different perspective, I believe God calls us to do the same—to shake off the limited perimeters of our own understanding and instead put our trust in the God who “is able to do infinitely more than we might ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20).
I believe God is calling us to fix our focus. To stop telling God about the mountain that’s in front of us and begin telling the mountain about the God we worship. To stop trying to find the Right person and focus on becoming the right person ourself. To stop focusing on the then and instead see what God has for us in the now. To stop focusing on what is not and magnify what it is that we got. To stop limiting God to the extent of our understanding and look around at the glory that has been surrounding us all along.
Love you guys! I would love to hear what God is doing in your lives as well, so please comment below or contact me with your own stories or questions. God bless!
