Raise Your Sights

Last night I was skimming through a little booklet on Christ, half-watching the TV, half-listening to the constant back-and-forth patter between my wife, my four-year-old, and my baby. I was in that zone – not The Zone – but that zone where you’re doing so many things at once all half-assed that you’re not really doing anything. In fact, it’d probably have been better for me to stop everything that I was doing and just pick something.

Part of being a hopper, I ’spose.

Then, something caught my eye on a page in that booklet:

Raise your sights!
Let My body and blood transform you!
There is so much I want to do through you!

Wow. Never before have three words stopped me cold. Or three sentences, for that matter.

Raise your sights. Let’s just focus on that sentence right now. According to this author, this is what Jesus is telling you or me, this very day. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, though I kinda think it is. After all, this verse from the Sermon on the Mount immediately came to mind:

Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:48)

So I think Christ wants us to strive to be the best we can be. Do our part, and He’ll do the rest. Naturally, that means raising your sights. And this resonated within me.

Why?

I think for the past six months I’ve kept my sights low. Instinctive and reactionary. Survival mode. Six months ago I was relatively healthy if a bit overstressed and overtaxed. Then, one morning at 4:15 AM my whole life changed. Six surgeries and three hospitals later, to add insult to injury, I lose my job. So for the past couple of months I’ve really just tried to stay out of trouble. No, let me amend that. I’ve tried to get as close to getting in trouble as I can, without actually getting into trouble. Understand?

Hardly raised sights. Just keeping my head low and hoping for a miracle.

If I did raise my sights, where would I be looking? What would I be looking at? That’s a personal question, but one I’m not afraid to answer.

First, Jesus Christ. Just as there are no athiests in foxholes, there are no lukewarm Christians in hospital beds. I let that new-found newly-strengthened spiritual part of me slide, and that should be my primary focus.

Second, my writing career. I have two complete novels and fifteen complete short stories, and I know the process I need to navigate to get them published. Why am I doing absolutely nothing to get my work out there? Why? Fear of rejection and embarrassment and all self-belittling will have to be set aside, if I am to keep my sights high.

Third, I need to get back into the grind. Yeah, it sucks to work, especially the only work that I can get since it’s the only work I’ve done over the past twenty years: cubicle work, paper pushing, number crunching. Trading my time for an hourly wage to make someone else richer while I have to beg to take off early to take my daughter to the doctor or plead my worth to a stranger to get a dollar-an-hour raise. But I need income, if only to keep the bills paid, a roof over my girls’ blonde heads, and the ten-year-old clunker running.

Raise your sights.

That’s the first step. That’s my part. I need a little bit of help with the rest, Lord.