Dump or Destination? (Friday Devotional)

For the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.

- 1 Samuel 16:7

Last Saturday, Lindsey and I took Andrew on a special field trip somewhere we knew he’d love. As we predicted, he ate it up. He got to see things he’d only seen in books, he got to take in a whole new world of sounds and smells, and by the time we left he was already asking when we could come back. It was, by any standard, a great field trip.

Where did we go? The city dump.

Now I suspect the local landfill is not normally your idea of a good time. You go there when you have to, and otherwise you just don’t think about it. But for a 2-year old, it was a magical place, a place where all the garbage trucks, bulldozers, and giant dumpsters were gathered together, a place unlike anything he’d ever seen before. For Andrew, the dump was a destination.

With his innocent sense of curiosity and wonder, Andrew showed me a new way to look at a mundane place. As adults, we have a hard time seeing familiar things with new eyes. The longer you live in your home, the more you start to dwell on what needs remodeling, taking for granted its amenities. The longer you’re in a job, the less you appreciate the highs and the more you get bogged down in the lows. The better you know something, the less you’re able to see it in a new way.

Unfortunately, the same is true of how we see people. As life goes on, we start to think we have nothing left to learn about people; our impressions of them become set in stone. We trust our eyes and our past experiences to judge people we don’t even know, assuming we can distinguish who is and isn’t worthy of our time, attention, and kindness.

But if you think you get it right every time, you’re fooling yourself—sometimes the most put-together people are actually empty inside, and sometimes God accomplishes incredible things with the last people you’d expect. God doesn’t see people through the lenses of generalizations, prejudices, and initial impressions, He looks at the heart of every person and draws His judgment from there. If we are to be obedient to Him, then we ought to do the same.

After all, even a dump can be a destination if you’ll look with eyes of grace. In the kingdom of God, a shepherd can be a king, a fisherman can be an apostle, and a carpenter can be the Christ. God sees beyond the outward appearance of a person to their heart—may the children of God do the same.