Seeing others through God’s eyes…

When talking about the challenging past year with a friend of mine, she asked me how I kept bitterness out of my heart when dealing with my husband’s depression and desert season as well as my son’s mental health challenges more recently.

I responded to her that I can’t say bitterness was completely out of my heart…there were definitely times where my heart drifted in that direction.  However, I do believe there was one key thing that helped me maintain a healthy perspective:

I asked God to help me see the person through His eyes.

When we face a difficult situation or are dealing with difficult people in our lives, it becomes very easy to see them through our eyes.  We see the hurt they cause us.  We see the wrong they’ve done to us. We see their actions through the lens of our own personal experience.

When we face a difficult situation or are dealing with difficult people in our lives and we seek to them through God’s eyes, we are able to see them as a hurting or lost person.  We see their woundedness or their confusion. We can sometimes see where they are being deceived. If we seek wholeheartedly, we can even see their possibilities instead of their liabilities.

Seeing the world and others through God’s perspective takes the focus off of us.  This keeps us from taking things personally. And when we don’t take things personally, we can be more objective, we can better stand in the gap in prayer for the other person, and we can see things as they are instead of seeing them as we are.

Are you facing a difficult situation?  Do you have a difficult person in your life?  Ask God to help you see them through His eyes.  Ask Him to help you see where their pain is coming from.  Take yourself out of the picture and see the situation or the person as they are instead of how they are hurting you.

There’s incredible freedom to be found in God’s perspective.  

What about you? Are you facing a difficult situation or a difficult person? Have you ever been able to see a situation or a person through God’s eyes?  Have you ever experienced the freedom to be found?