Father’s Eyes
I was asked two questions last week: How do we come to know God, see life as the Father sees it? And how is Jesus the only way to the Father? Great questions, and related—two parts of the same question. Knowing God is central in scripture, but knowing to the Hebrew minds that wrote scripture was not intellectual; it was intimate experience. To them, knowing God couldn’t be separated from the process of experiencing intimacy.
Jesus’ Way is the process of experiencing God, seeing our lives through God’s eyes. Jesus can’t be separated from this Way because he lived it, became the shape of the Way—the only Way to experience unseen God in a physical life. And this muscular spirituality that Jesus lived and taught can’t be separated from the physicality of life. If we can’t find God, find the spiritual in the midst of the physical, we aren’t seeing with the Father’s eyes.
Life on earth is all about we as individuals interfacing with all the other individuals we encounter, looking at life through the separation our individuality creates in our minds. Life in heaven is the experience of everything as just one thing, all connected. Seeing with the Father’s eyes is seeing past the illusion of separation here on earth to the unseen oneness beyond, literally merging heaven and earth.
But as long as we’re breathing here, heaven and earth don’t mix any more than oil and water. They remain distinct…only and until they mix in us. Only in our hearts, in a moment of intimate experience, do heaven and earth mix like paint colors on an artist’s palette.
Scripture seems to be showing us five ways to mix our colors, see unseen unity in a world of diversity, and they all have to do with the simplest of daily experience. It couldn’t be any other way. There is no other way. We won’t know or see God out there somewhere. The colors don’t mix in the air. Only in us, in the physical, intimate experience of unseen connection in each moment and each other do we see through Father’s eyes.
