What Am I Missing?

The past two months we have been working on landscaping our backyard. This has been no small task anywhere from removing old grass, an overgrown wall vine from Hell (roots intertwined both above and underground), sprinkler removal and laying a new sprinkler system, in addition to lots of planting and bark spreading. I believed prematurely that I had completed the trench digging, PVC laying and sprinkler installation until I took a stroll in the backyard just to admire my handwork and to plan out my next backbreaking tasks. I noticed on my stroll that the original sprinklers on the back flowerbed, the ones I didn’t think I needed to change out were pointing directly towards the proposed sitting area and fire pit. In other words, if we were sitting around the fire pit and the sprinklers went on we would be soaked and very irritated.  I realized that though the obvious was right in front of me for the past three months it didn’t dawn on me that my sprinklers needed to be rerouted. Rerouting not only meant removing the old sprinklers and their pipes, but it also meant I had to dig a new fifty plus foot trench to accommodate the new sprinkler system. Ugh! Just when I thought my tired body was about to take a break from the action, I had to re-engage with my shovel, mattock and heavily rooted flowerbed.

This is preciously what took place when the Pharisees encountered Jesus. Jesus healed many in their presence, but they couldn’t recognize who He really was. The person they had long to see as a fulfillment of God, spoken by the prophets stood right in front of them, healed right in their midst, spoke the word of God to the masses in their hearing and yet the obvious wasn’t registering. It is so easy to miss the obvious.  We experience God working in and through us and we label it as a result of hard work or happenstance. Jesus answers our prayer and we forget we had even made that particular petition. In other words, God is placing before us what should be obvious to us, but for many distracting reasons we can’t equate those things as been from God or we miss Jesus when He stands in front of us.

Like my sprinkler system, there is a need to stroll and examine where we are in our life journey. What is my life purpose or mission, how am I doing in pursuing it and what is clear or obvious that I need to tweak or engage in? We can get so caught up in the details, those issues that life throws our way or those areas we enter ourselves that prevent us from staying the course as prescribed.  I miss Jesus when I hear of a person’s life change and I write it off as “I’ll wait and see if it is legit”. I miss Jesus when I avoid eye contact with a person asking for money. I miss Jesus when I tell someone I will pray for him or her and not do it right then and there. I miss Jesus when I am too busy to really pray and engage in His word. I miss Jesus when…you can fill in your own blank. The overarching question is: what is Jesus doing right in front of you that you are currently missing?  Ask for the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of your heart to see Jesus in ways that you may not have been accustom to.  When He reveals that particular area be willing to do the hard work it will take to accomplish what it is He has you doing.