I’m sure I’m taking this verse out of context, but the point I saw was keeping your eyes open and noticing what’s right in front of you instead of being lost in the thoughts in your head. Three times God has tried to show me this in the last day:
2. Yesterday I had a mom bring in her two fat, beautiful 4-month-old baby girl twins for diarrhea and cough. I examined them and found no signs of anything other than “worm belly,” so I gave them the medicine for worms and briefly talked about watching for signs of dehydration. As I talked to the mom, my eyes kept going to one of the twins who was a little smaller than her sister. She was smiling the whole time and drooling a lot. My eyes then settled on her almond shaped eyes and the shape of her head — down syndrome. That’s why she looked different (see photo of babies with my translator). It was subtle, but the more I thought about it and got a few others’ opinions, it was quite obvious that one twin had Down’s. Mom had no idea. My translator talked and talked with mom. As she pointed out each feature, mom would shake her head. She honestly didn’t see any difference in the two girls. Sometimes we are blind to what’s right in front of us.
3. Look at the strangers in front of you, don’t get that glazed look when you’re “dealing” with them. One of our translators is a little on the haughty side. This white haired lady grew up with missionary parents in Honduras, and she’s translated for hundreds of mission groups and aide organizations like Mercy Ships. So maybe she’s a little fed up with helping people. Yesterday I heard her loudly yelling in angry Spanish to some ladies to back up and move away from the farmacia (pharmacy). She later said at supper that she could’ve punched one ungrateful old lady (this is making her sound terrible, but we all vent about our jobs at supper to some degree) because the lady had fussed about us running out of some of the medicines by the end of the day. Our translator barked back at her in Spanish that she should be grateful that we were even there to give her any medicines at all. This was a fair point, but if she’d stopped to look at the woman or talk to her, she would know that this was a 70-year-old grandmother who had walked many miles with three kids under the age of 6 to get medicine for them. She may have seen that the grandmother didn’t look like two of the lighter-skinned children. The grandmother had been my patient earlier and I’d heard that she was raising three children who weren’t her own and struggling financially to keep doing so. Only one was a blood relative.
Let your eyes notice those around you. Make eye contact, smile, notice. See them, really see them.