Simply Perfect- Look, See, Pray

Sometimes my eyes just marvel at the beauties to be found around us. Simply perfect.

This tropical butterfly is stunning: kept safely in a hot butterfly house, it has few cares and little risk. Left to itself, it reaches a peak of unspoilt beauty, and with help from its mates, provides another generation to delight our gaze. I could (and did) watch for a long time!

What a gift to us.

If we approach God in the same way as we appreciate and enjoy beauty, we may learn a good principle.

A.W. Tozer wrote about believers who cultivated the practice of “gazing upon God”. He described them as those who, “without giving much thought to what is going on within them, constantly practice this habit of inwardly gazing upon God. They know that something inside their hearts sees God. Even when they are compelled to withdraw their conscious attention in order to engage in earthly affairs there is within them a secret communion always going on. Let their attention but be released for a moment from necessary business and it flies at once to God again.”

Taking time to fix my attention of God. Using Bible, prayer, silence, art, photography… these can “prime the pump” but our goal is discover ourselves to be in the PRESENCE of God. Tozer is one of many Christians who has discovered the JOY of gazing on the beauty and Love of God.

Perhaps during Advent we may choose to do some gazing? Start where you are, look around, and allow the Holy Spirit’s touch to draw you closer.

I hope you encounter the Lord this Advent. That will be simply PERFECT.

Romans 12:1-2 in the Message Translation:
“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”