Tiny Dental Mirrors

When I went to the dentist a few weeks ago, I watched the hygienist (as best as I could) as she maneuvered the tiny round mirror around my mouth. She would move and manipulate it every which way, trying to get a good look at different places and angles of my mouth. Obviously, the mirror was too small to allow a full view of all she needed to see; my mouth, though, will certainly not permit an amply-sized mirror. As a result, at any given moment, she could only see a tiny portion of the total picture.

Can you imagine how it would be if we looked at the whole world that way? We would wander around, looking at everything through a tiny dental mirror. We would probably crash into things because our vision was so impaired, and because we never looked at anything directly, what we were able to see would be skewed.

It wouldn’t make any sense to do that in our everyday lives, but many of us are doing that very thing in our spiritual lives. We look at one or two things, expecting to somehow catch a full view of who God is and what He is doing. We watch our pastors and expect them to teach us everything we need to know. We listen to Christian music and expect that to count as listening to God. We sing worship songs and say that we have spoken to God. We read a spiritual book and count that as having read God’s word. We talk with friends and expect that their revelations will enrich us, too. Worse still, we do only one or two of these things and consider our work to be done.

We are so misguided.

There is so much more to the picture than we are allowing ourselves to discover. It is as though we are standing with our noses to a grandiose mural, wondering why the brush strokes don’t make any sense at that distance. Our vision is limited and our understanding is impaired. We somehow believe that we have seen all that there is to see, so we lose interest and stop looking.

Taken individually, the things in life that are meant to point to God can, I think, be more of a detriment to our growth in the Lord than a help. If we depend on one “spiritual” element to cover all the bases for our spiritual development, we’re missing out on a big chunk of the whole picture. In addition, because many of those things come from man (though they may be inspired by God), they are fallible and can distort our vision of God.

May I issue a challenge to you and to myself? As we seek to see God more fully, let us take a good long look at the whole picture. Let us focus especially on our conversations with Him and His letter to us: prayer and the reading of His Word. Let every other expression of praise stream from there, for when we really see Him, we will praise Him. We will. We will not be able to help it.