Awesome

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made…” (Psalm 139:14a, NIV 1984).

How often have you met with and prayed for doctors who:
Felt long-term guilt over a poor patient outcome,
Loved a niece who was caught up in prostitution,
Praised God for His victory over pornography,
Lost a wife and daughter in a motor vehicle accident,
Has a grandson born with cystic fibrosis,
Has a son whose girlfriend left him broken hearted after six years together,
Has a sister whose children are being kept from her by Satanic forces,
Has a son who has decided to quit following Jesus,
Has a daughter destroyed by bipolar depression?
I have within the past month.

The point of laying out these lives is not to remind us that life can be hard. Most of us get that.

These lives are laid before us that we may pray for each. God hears the fervent prayers of righteous men and women. Please pray for each of these.

But more than that, these lives are laid out so that we can be reminded: everyone we see lives a much deeper life than we can imagine. Each of these listed is a normal doctor whom we might greet in the hall, assuming that everything is fine. In truth, everyone we see has a huge life within them---a life of nobility, a life of service, a life of deep relationships, a life of pain, a life of dreams, a life of joy.

Each person we see has such nobility about them, even the weakest of humans, that we should stand in awe as they pass.
Each person we meet has potential evil within them, so great that we would shrink in horror if it blossomed.

Each is like us.

Each one is so loved by the Creator that Christ died for them.

God protects us from a constant awareness of the extraordinary depths of being in people. We could not handle the overload. We cannot handle the depths of our own being, much less our neighbors’. Only God can. Only God can work out His redemptive love in my life and do so in billions of people just as complicated as I.

But every now and then God awakens us to the extreme beauty or tragedy in a person’s life so that we might be instruments of His love.

We need to be ready.

We need to stand in awe of God’s creation and His work in every life we see. We need to ask Him to make us ready to speak and touch with His love whenever He opens our eyes to the infinite depth of being in our colleague on the elevator, the executive in our exam room, our neighbor cutting grass, our fellow student, the clerk checking out our groceries, the assistant who moves our patients.

Dear Father,
Make me aware of the awesome person in each one I pass. Guide me to speak and touch when you choose.
Amen