My word with you this month is inspired by Moses.  Not the Old Testament Prophet and leader of the Hebrews, but Moses our house cat.  Moses was on the short list of the APL when he was rescued from the pound and he has the face only a mother could love.  Now that I think about it, the young lady at the pound said his mother didn’t like him very much—really.  And actually, he is kind of annoying.  He’s got the tics, not like fleas but little twitches and spasms.  He paws endlessly at inanimate objects, knocks things over all day and likes to watch television.  We think he’s a feline savant and have called him ‘rain man’ from time to time.  He’s got a massive crop of whiskers protruding from his face but his true endearing feature is that he is mildly cross-eyed.

While I was meditating as what to share with you, Mo jumped up on our computer table purring away, staring fixedly at me (he’s kind of an in your face cat).  He was so close to my face, I began to go cross-eyed!  Have you ever held something so close to your face that as you examined the object your eyes began to cross? 

You ask is there a point in all of this? Well, there actually is a point; one that may explain some of the stress, anxiety and the conflict that we all deal with from time to time.  When you look at something too closely for too long, your perspective gets distorted, and in a sense, you get cross-eyed!

An example from the Word of God shows us how this distorted perspective can affect our choices and cause us to make some costly mistakes. In Numbers 13, beginning with verse 30, the twelve Jewish scouts have just returned from checking out the land that God has promised to His people, and are reporting back to Moses—not the house cat, but the prophet and leader of the Hebrews.  Two of them, Caleb and Joshua, are saying "Go for it!" The other ten are saying, "Run for it!"

Here's what it says, "But Caleb tried to quiet the people as they stood before Moses. “Let’s go at once to take the land,” he said. “We can certainly conquer it!”
But the other men who had explored the land with him disagreed. “We can’t go up against them! They are stronger than we are!” So they spread this bad report about the land among the Israelites: “The land we traveled through and explored will devour anyone who goes to live there. All the people we saw were huge. We even saw giants there, the descendants of Anak. Next to them we felt like grasshoppers, and that’s what they thought, too!”

Well, as a result of this perspective, God's people turned away from the beautiful land God had promised. He said He'd give it into their hands, and they spent 40 years in the wilderness instead. Why? Those ten scouts had stared at those big walls around Jericho and those big Canaanites, and pretty soon that's all they could see. Caleb was looking beyond those walls and those giants and seeing the great and mighty God they had. But those who never saw the Promised Land were the ones who got spiritually cross-eyed from staring at the size of their problem instead of focusing on the size of their God, which could be a mistake you've been making recently.

When you focus on your obstacles, what you're afraid of, what you're worried about, your vision starts to get blurry. When you focus on yourself and what your resources can accomplish, you start to feel small "like grasshoppers." You start seeing your whole life through the lens of this problem or that obstacle, and pretty soon everything looks distorted. And you start making decisions that are now based on a totally cross-eyed view of reality.

When you've been looking too long and too closely at a situation, you need to do things that will help you back off and get a view of the big picture again. Some of the things that have helped me at times is getting more sleep, (right, like that’s possible) spending more time praising God for all He is and all He's done, which in turn reminds me that he is faithful.  Try spending some time with a child in your life who can help restore your perspective, and get the views and input of some people who are totally outside your situation.

Remember, when you look at one thing too long and you look at it too closely, your vision gets distorted. You begin to stumble and knock things over.  You paw incessantly and the object becomes overwhelming—take it from a cross-eyed cat.  So don't hold it so close, give it up to God and spend some time looking at something else.   

Meow.

Art