Focus on Jesus

This is a photo of my 13 year old dog, Roxy. Earlier this year she was diagnosed with cancer in her eye and we were told that she was too old to go through an operation, so we would have to put her to sleep... But we prayed for her and delayed taking her to the vet and BOOM! A month later she was 100% healed.

 

A few weeks ago, our miracle dog had a stroke and I am not too certain of all the veterinary terminology but basically the stroke has caused her vision on her left-side to be non-existent. She now walks with her head completely tilted to the left, to balance out her vision by making her eye the centre of her body. Shame... She bumps into things and falls over all the time and there isn't anything we can medically do for her.

 

Roxy is such an integral part of our family and we love her so much, so it is really awful to see her this way. We aren't sure how much time she has left before all the falling around causes her to really injure herself.

 

I know this is a long story to demonstrate the metaphor I'm going for but here we go: I want to consider the way we as followers of Jesus view the path we are walking and also the way in which God must view us sometimes.

 

When we place God at the centre of our lives, there is balance. It may not be an easy walk/run but He governs our vision and we are able to keep up with His plans for us. There's the occasional trip over a stone or long and hard mountain to climb but a lot of these things are merely obstacles to overcome, and because of Jesus' resurrection love, He gives us the power to overcome. Ah flip, too many metaphors! Apologies!

 

As soon as we let our eyes be distracted and our focus is shifted off of Jesus, it is a blindness in a way. As if we have forgotten about that resurrection love that allows us to balance. And this blindness, whether it is forgetting that God has won our battles, or if it is blindness to something that poisons our lives, causes us to twist our heads, trying to regain vision. We fumble and bump into walls and get knocked over by things that we would have been able to avoid with balanced vision.

 

I think that God sees us in our confused, clumsy and destructive states and He just wants to pick us up, hold us and heal our blindness so that we can stop hurting ourselves. I know that this is exactly what I want to do for Roxy, and I think God has a whole ocean's worth of more love for his children than the love I have for my dog.

 

So if you can sift through all my messy analogies, hopefully you will be able to see what I am seeing? Basically Jesus loves you, peeps! And He wants to take the reigns on your life - let Him. I don't think the madness of God's love ever gets old.

 

 

Love Sammy and Roxy