By Georgia McKee
Have you ever looked at something familiar and noticed something you’ve never seen before? Maybe it’s the weathered trunk of the tree outside your window you thought you knew by heart. Or maybe it’s that faint freckle on your child’s arm caught in an unexpected slant of sunlight. Sometimes these surprises arrive not because the thing itself has changed, but because you have. Your gaze shifts, if only for a second, and what was familiar becomes new.
Week after week, we make our way here carrying the well-worn stories of our lives. Yet stepping into worship is a gentle interruption, an invitation to set our bundles down and see our own stories, and the world around us, through a clearer, more tender lens.
It feels deeply fitting that today two of our songs — “Open Our Eyes, Lord” and “Be Thou My Vision” — are about our sight, and that “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” serving as our offertory, is a song about God’s sight.
In organizations or teams, a clear vision determines the difference between wandering and purposeful motion. Are the actions we are taking leading us to fulfill our mission? Or are they taking away from what we’re trying to accomplish? A trip back to your vision can often give you your answer. The same is true for us, not just as a congregation, but as individual pilgrims.
We will never be able to fully see through the eyes of God, but we can try. Every time we show up to worship, whether it’s at Wilshire or in our daily lives, we are taking steps to see the world — and ourselves — more honestly and with more divinity.
As Richard Rohr says, “Once I can recognize the divine image where I don’t want to see the divine image, then I have learned how to see. It’s really that simple. And here’s the rub: I’m not the one that is doing the seeing. It’s like there is another pair of eyes inside of me seeing through me, seeing with me, seeing in me. God can see God everywhere, and God in me can see God everywhere.”
May we enter this hour with open hearts and expectant eyes. May we notice new beauty in the ordinary and soften our gaze to what has grown hard or routine. Let us be willing, even if just for one hour, to have our sight renewed — not only by what we choose to see, but by what God so graciously reveals.