The Eyes That Keep Opening

"...Many, LORD my God, are the wonders you have done… they would be too many to declare." - Psalm 40:5 (NIV)

There is a house you have walked past for years, and one ordinary afternoon you look up and see it for the first time. The carved stone above the door, the worn step, the small window high under the roof, all of it was there before, and you never saw it. The house has not changed at all, and you are the one who has finally seen it. And once you have, you keep noticing it every time you pass. You wonder how you missed it for so long.

Maybe much of life is like that, full of things already there, waiting to be seen. David, who had walked with God since he was a boy, came near the end of his life and looked back over all of it. What he saw was more than he could count. "...Many, LORD my God, are the wonders you have done, the things you planned for us... they would be too many to declare" (Psalm 40:5). Nothing new had appeared that day. He was seeing at last what had been there all along, and the wonders were so many that he stopped trying to count them. The wonders had not changed. His eyes had.

Our eyes are not so different from his. The good God gives is already ours, and always has been. What we risk is walking past it the way you pass the same house and never look up. And so we are reminded, "...forget not all his benefits" (Psalm 103:2). It was never that God gave too little. So much of His giving is quiet, and quiet things are easy to overlook. This is why the seeing has to come from Him. We cannot reason our way into it or earn it by trying harder. The seeing is given to us, and then given again, a little further each time we ask.

This kind of seeing keeps deepening, the way a room fills with detail as your eyes adjust to the light. Think of a kindness in your own life that you knew as God's only long afterward. When it first came, you may not have seen His hand in it at all. Then one day you understood He had been holding you even then, and the kindness had been there all along, "...stored up for those who fear you... in the sight of all" (Psalm 31:19). You were not imagining it. Your sight was simply catching up to what had been true the whole time.

You don't have to strain for that kind of wonder, or scold yourself for feeling too little of it. It is not something you make, but something He gives, "...how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him" (Luke 11:13). The wonder was never missing. It was only waiting for eyes able to see it, and those He gives gladly to anyone who asks. There is more of Him to see this morning than you saw yesterday, and more again tomorrow, and you won't come to the end of it. The country is always larger than the map, and each morning brings a little more of it into view. Follow the longing. He opens the way.

Prayer

Father, open our eyes to all You have done and are doing that we have not yet seen. Teach us to ask for that sight, and to receive what we notice as Your gift. Amen.