i need an eye op. urgently.

i probly have a good 30 or 40 more blogs i could write about the goose fest but i don’t know if i’m going to get to them – i don’t want the blog to become a sort of dairy [as i spell it] of events and lose the heart of what is happening here – i also don’t want to be caught up too much in blogging that like a person filming or photographing an event i spend so much time filming the event i wasn’t really part of… i still don’t know if the simple way folks may some day see this blog as part of my ‘online ministry’ and ask me to take a sabbattical from it too for 6 months… so i feel i should write this one at least before it happens…

after listening to shane again at the goose [by far my favourite talk or session and largely because it was the first time in three days i remembered hearing the name Jesus more than once and heard passages read from the bible] i was reminded or challenged by the fact that i need an eye operation. i need to start seeing people the way Jesus sees them – he retold this one story about this argument he had with a buddy of his who told him ‘Jesus never spoke to a prostitute’ – shane whips out his bible and is ready to argue and quote scripture and claim battle victory but his friend continued, “the reason Jesus never spoke to a prostitute is that He never saw a prostitute, He only saw a child’ and that hit me once again and i know it needs to do so much more than give me a moment of “oh yes, that” – it needs to become my dna.

i know with some of the kids on the street and some of the parents whose names i am already learning it already has, because they are not statistics or a demographic – they are now a name and a person and a personality and a story – i have not come close to connecting with people on our street like i want to but i have started connecting and at least that is something, but with them i already have a growing sense of how God sees them.

but i know with a lot of the people i don’t have those eyes and i certainly don’t have the heart of Jesus that is desperately needed in the community – those dealing with or doing drugs and those who look worn down with the ugliness of life and some of the barely dressed women we pass in the streets and so on – i judge and i think i am so better and my sin and uncleaness is forgotten in a horrible instant of somehow thinking i may have earned everything God has so freely given to me.

i need God to give me new eyes. and i need a new heart. to see as He sees. to love as He loves.

i have realised since being here how little i actually care about the poor in for-real terms – and that’s another blog – but if i really cared for the poor as much as i needed to then my life back home would have looked dramatically different from what it does now – i can’t change the past but i know i need to be changed so that i walk a different future. that excites me. i know it starts with personal connection with God as well and that needs my attention too.