Open Our Eyes

Sitting on my parent's deck, I find myself surrounded by the beauty of nature and the blinding brilliance of the sun breaking through the trees. Reflectively, I am taken back to a Biblical scripture in the book of II Kings, chapter six, I believe. It is the story of the prophet Elisha who has been at work faithfully letting the King of Israel know how to move his troops and how to avoid the attacks that the King of Aram sought to launch against Israel. Elisha had been quite successful in listening to God and working with the King of Israel to protect the troops.

The King of Aram, however, was tremendously frustrated. He was convinced that he had a leak amongst his own troops and when he questioned them, they informed him that it was Elisha in Israel who was the true leak. So, the King of Aram, did what any king would. He hunted Elisha down, essentially surrounded Elisha's abode and Elisha's servant was freaking out. What are we going to do? How will we survive this? The servant could see no way for survival!

Aren't we like this most of the time? Something "bad" happens to us and we immediately fail to see the possibilities. We see a place of no hope. We fail to get the job we want, the relationship that we desire falls apart, we lose the big donor for a major project, etc. Our immediate response is, "Woe is me! How can God do this to me? Haven't I been a faithful servant? Don't I deserve the best?"

Elisha was cool, calm and collected in the face of his impending death and his servant couldn't understand it. But Elisha knew that his failure to understand came only from what he could not see. Elisha prayed that his servant's eyes would be open and immediately they were. When they were opened, the servant saw that for all of the Aramean troops that surrounded them, there were even more troops sent by God that outnumbered the Arameans. Then he prayed that the Arameans would be made blind and God made it so. This enabled Elisha to lead them off to Samaria where the Israelites were able to capture them and return them to their land.

Isn't that the kind of thing that God does for us? Provides for us far more than we can imagine in our feeble human ways of being. God always provides the best for us and usually never in the ways we imagine but always in more wondrous ways. Our blindness to what could be is usually the block that keeps us from trusting God's amazing way!

Maybe all we have to do to claim faith is simply to pray that God will open our eyes to the marvels that we have yet to see!