We All Need More Jesus-Vision

by Rhonda Rhea @RhondaRhea

What would Jesus do? How would Jesus notice?

Five kids in seven years. That’s what I had. People ask what it was like having that many teens/pre-teens all at once. I tell them it was basically a 10-year search for someone’s missing shoe, plus about eight thousand school fundraisers. Plus, plus—a lot of sweeping of various breakfast cereals. Some of them from under the beds.

“Total.” It’s a relatively healthy breakfast cereal. Except when it’s been left under the bed with dirty sweat socks. For two-and-a-half weeks. Because then it transforms into something that is more sweat sock than cereal. Something gross. And frightening. Even if I could describe it, I promise, you wouldn’t want me to.

In the years of teen-raising, I do wonder how many times I had to say things like, “Son. You have to clean your room. We’re out of spoons.” I also remember sweeping the kitchen floor. Then sweeping it again five minutes later. I recall wondering how I could possible sweet up more breakfast cereal than we had. Ever.

Fascinating that my teens never noticed any of that cereal. Seriously, they could crunch their way from one side of the kitchen to the other and never see it.

I would make fun of them a little more if I didn’t all too often have blind spots myself. Let’s get real, I’d so much rather find a fault in someone else than recognize any crunch of my own. Sometimes I can hear your crunch from a mile away and completely miss the kitchen-full of Fruit-Loop-dust I’m standing in myself.

But Jesus helps me see differently. Not so quickly dismissing my own snaps, crackles and pops. In Matthew 7:3, He asked, “Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the log in your own eye?” (HCSB). It would be comical if it weren’t so convicting. And so true. Here I stand pointing out someone else’s tiny corn pop while I’m neck-deep in a vat of it?

Jesus went on, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a log in your eye? Hypocrite! First take the log out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye,” (Matthew 7:4-5, HCSB).

Every time we allow Jesus to help us see as He does, all those hypocrisies are swept clean out. He looks with eyes of love. We’re told in the love list in 1 Corinthians 13 that “Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” (vv. 6-7, HCSB).

Eyes of love look for truth. They’re not hypocritical. There’s no self-seeking. They are eyes that help us stop perceiving ourselves as better than the next guy. Paul made it clear as well in Romans 12:9 when he said that “love must be without hypocrisy,” and a few verses earlier, “I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he should think,” (Romans 12:3, HCSB).

Jesus-vision. Lord, give me more of that. I want to notice people just as He does. His kind of vision brings a total transformation in how and what we think of ourselves, and how we think of and respond to others. Total transformation. Which this time, by the way, is not at all a cereal reference.

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Rhonda Rhea is a humor columnist for lots of great magazines, including HomeLife, Leading Hearts, The Pathway and more. She is the author of 10 nonfiction books, including How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take to Change a Person? and coauthors fiction with her daughter, Kaley Faith Rhea. She and her daughters host the TV show, That’s My Mom, for Christian Television Network’s KNLJ. Rhonda enjoys traveling the country speaking at all kinds of conferences and events. She and her pastor/hubs have five grown children and live in the St. Louis area.