One of my favorite things as a kid was to go to the dentist, because they had the best magazines. Every kid loved these magazines because they were full of word searches, jumbles, stories, and pages to color. One of the most important pages was the one with hidden figures. The instructions were simple: look at this kitchen scene and see how many of these objects you can find; or how many animals can you see hidden in the forest? It was really exciting if you could get to the magazine before other kids had marked them up.
Your eyes would wander up and down the page, looking at every line, jot, and squiggle to see what you couldn't see at first glance. Sometimes it was a cat in the wallpaper, or a squirrel in the leaves of a tree, or a pitchfork hidden in the grain of the barn wood. Whatever it was, you had to look twice to see it. Looking once was not enough, you had to look again.
Most of us grow out of picture searches. We begin to see the world for what it is. That's a tree, that's a car, that's a house, that's a church. But when we read the pages of scripture we find that Jesus often calls us to look again at something, so that we might be able to see what we cannot the first time around. Jesus tells us to "consider the lilies of the field," or to think about the birds of the air, or to look at the way a woman adds yeast to her dough
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Jesus is only continuing the images found in the rest of scripture, which describes the world as saying more than we think. Look at the way the trees of the field seem to wave their hands and clap, see the way a deer pants for the water, see a land that longs for a drink from the rain. All of this is a call to look again and see what we miss right in front of us.
All of the world testifies to the glory of God. The mountains do of course, everyone feels a sense of awe in front of them. But so does wildflower growing by the roadside that people speed by. All of these things are in front of us but we will only take the time to stop and look, and then having looked, to look again. Arthur Conan Doyle said through his great detective Sherlock Holmes that “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.“
Looking again never happens by chance, it’s a decision that is made at that moment. Just as there is a difference between listening and hearing, so there is a difference between seeing and looking. Everyone sees the sunset every day, but if you take the time to look again you can hear the speech that the rays are giving about the glory of God. The tyranny of the urgent has a way of drowning out the sound of a world that is singing God’s praise. The father pushing his child on the swing at the park, an ant carrying a crumb, the mixing of hydrogen and oxygen to create water that sustains all life: all of it will point us towards God if we take the time to look again.
The problem for most of us is that it does take time. Learning to look again means learning to live with a sort of leisure that we normally aren't afforded in this world. Most of us have too many things to do, too much to accomplish, too many goals to achieve, too many items to cross off our lists. We're so busy we walk by the roses without smelling them, feel the wind blow but don't listen to it, hear the birds sing without listening to their song, feel the wind without wondering who directs it, or taste something sweet without contemplating who made sweetness in the first place. If you want to see God around you then you must take the time to look again.
It doesn’t feel very profound to say “look again,” but if it were easy we would all be looking over and over at the world. Looking once comes naturally, but looking again takes a lifetime to learn. It's shamefully easy to live life and never have to notice anything deeper than what you see by looking once. To look again means taking time to go outside in the dark to see the stars, pulling over to look at the flowers, taking out our headphones to hear the birds, watch the bread rise, or sit while the embers fade in the fire. Looking again means going slow enough to listen to what the world is teaching us about God.
The fact that we seldom take time to do this proves how much work it is; if it was easy it would already be done. What is the reward for all of this work? It would be enough if all we gained were a few small moments of pleasure in our day, but there is more reward than that. Learning to look again expands our world, and fills it with wonder and excitement. Suddenly nothing is as it seems: the trees are clapping their hands, the mountain skips like lambs, the fields exult and are glad, the stones cry out, the gates lift their heads, the tiny acorn contains mountainous trees, the smallest apple seed contains an orchard. Looking again means that the world becomes bigger and greater, and that we see it the way God created it to be. Take the time to look again and see what is there in front of you, a large and wide world that points to God’s glory at every turn.