People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.
1 Samuel 16:7 NIV
A few days ago it was again time to mow the lawn. Thanks to lawn fertilizer, enough water, and nice weather, my lawn is thriving splendidly. On the last meters it happened: my old electric lawn mower, which had been jerking and stuttering for a long time, gave up the ghost completely. Well, it was old, and for the last two square meters, I was able to borrow my neighbor's lawn mower which was also getting very old and stuttered suspiciously.
So the next day I drove to the hardware store and bought a new, inexpensive little lawn mower. My dear husband assembled it and confirmed that it worked smoothly. However, he had only started it once briefly. Now yesterday, as I was taking the beautiful mower into use for the first time, it too began to sputter and cough. A suspicion came to my mind: was the problem something quite different than a broken lawn mower?
I now checked everything and lo and behold, the extra-long electrical cord that my husband had already once repaired was responsible for the plight. My husband could hardly believe it at first, but the cable was broken. You could not see the damage because it had been thickly wrapped with insulation tape, but it was there. My false conclusion led me to get a brand-new lawn mower – how nice!
Why am I telling you this? You know, life often writes good lessons if we could just recognize them. Something is not working, in a family, in a marriage, among friends, in the church, or at work. People are quick to draw conclusions that can often be quite wrong, or they try to "fix" something that isn't broken. But maybe it will break if you just jerk it long enough...! Things are not always as they seem. Sometimes the errors lie much deeper, invisible to the eye, hidden, carefully covered up.
Finding the real problem is often not at all easy. We let ourselves be blinded by appearances or seemingly obvious grievances. We don't take the time to listen or listen well enough and think things through before drawing our conclusions. And of course, there are very natural preferences that influence our opinions. This is nothing new, it has been the case at all times and is also a very human reaction. But how can we then find out the real "defect"? After all, it's not always just a broken lawn mower that's at issue.
I think that it is always very important to place ourselves under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. He gives wisdom and insight. Only he can open our eyes to reality and give us the love we need to make something whole! We often lose so much time, so many precious years, chasing the wrong path and not getting anywhere.
God wants us to thrive. He wants us to find the real cause of our distress. Thus we save ourselves many a sorrow, many a pain! Because God looks at the heart, at our thoughts, at reality - HE knows where to start!