A New Lens

A lightbulb went off...an A-Ha moment for me. Our culture is trained to focus on the drab, to highlight what is wrong, to use a critical eye. It comes in small ways such as our food preferences and clothing choices or big ways like where we choose to live and which neighbors we reach out to love. Sometimes it manifests in the spoken word where other times the criticisms grow inside of u like a vine climbing up the side of a house.

Eventually those vines will spread from a straggly growth to a wall covering, changing a tan colored house to green. Vines starve and creep and entwine and spread until they can no longer be pulled away by hand but require clippers, gloves, ladders, and brute strength.

A quote I read by Erasmus says,

"A nail is driven out by another nail; habit is overcome by habit."

What if we consciously choose to focus on beauty, to highlight the positive, to train our eye and our thoughts to dwell on loveliness?

The Bible tells us,

"Let all that is within me bless His name."

So if I choose to dwell on loveliness, I am essentially blessing God for His creation in people and in my world. This does require practice though...practice until it becomes second nature. Hammer out those nails and hammer in beautiful thoughts of thankfulness and honor.

And as I practice thinking on that which is good, pure, lovely, kind, true, and admirable in everything around me (Phil 4:8), I'm essentially putting weed killer on the roots of those creeping vines. That makes it much easier to live free, unentangled, able to run!

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us..." Hebrews 12:1