“Lift your eyes”

Jesus challenged his disciples to change how they viewed the world. He said: “Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.” (35) This conventional wisdom about the necessity of waiting patiently the prescribed time for harvest was likely familiar to the disicples. But then, Jesus asks them to reject it, to look away from the natural processes of the world. He challenges them to look through their mind’s eye, where the fruits of their labor and the spiritual harvest were always visible.

This ability to visualize, to “see” things with the mind, is unique to human consciousness, to the consciousness that God breathed into us with “his breath of life.” And so, lifting up our eyes means consciously turning away from what the world is showing us. When we do that, as Jesus assures us, we’ll see that the thing we most need is already here.