Give me Your eyes for just one second...

People. They are everywhere, in all different shapes, sizes, and colors. Each one of them is so precious, so unique, so amazing. And yet so often I pass by without even seeing them.

Funny how it’s the little things that make you realize this. Thursday was a typical day of classes. We had just finished our first exam in Statistics, and I was walking back to my car when I saw a young woman out walking her 3.5 lb Chihuahua. She sits behind me in Abnormal Psychology, and she is beautiful in a wild, unkempt sort of way. Her hair is dyed an unnatural mixture of deep browns and black, although the darkness of it matches her clothes, her makeup, her nail polish, and the tattoos that cover her body. There are dark circles under her brown eyes—those deep, living eyes which hold a sadness that cannot be put into words. She greets me with a smile that is somehow sadder than tears, for it comes from the depths of a heart that has been hurt more deeply than I can begin to fathom. As we laugh and chat together for a brief moment, it hits me for the first time how very, very tired she looks, and how much sadness is pooled in the limpid wells of her eyes.

I have not spent much time getting to know this woman, but I know that she has small children, a live-in boyfriend with whom her relationship is on the rocks, a dead-end job which she keeps only to make ends meet, and frustrated, broken dreams that mock the harsh reality of who she is today. All of this pent up in the heart of a girl who cannot be much older than me.

The image of her face, with those haunting eyes, burns into my mind as we part ways.
“O God! How desperately she needs Your hope! Give me words to speak…”

Then there was the roly-poly little fellow that I babysat that evening. Joe is a gorgeous little guy, with huge, curiosity-filled brown eyes that scrunch up into little sparkling half-moons when his ready smile puckers up his round little face. He is just beginning to discover his temper, with the help of his three older brothers, and angry howling filled the house on more than one occasion throughout the night before he was safely tucked away in his crib. (His three older brothers, incidentally, have long since discovered their own tempers, which contributes immensely to the whole howling effect. There were moments when I felt a bit like howling myself).

As I held three-year-old Nic on my lap and watched Joey experimenting with his legs, trying to master the art of toddling, I thought suddenly of all that is ahead of both of them…all the beauty, all the harsh realities, all the maturing experiences that will shape their little lives and mold them into men. And what sort of men?
“God, their parents do not know You now…what is Your future for this family? May I be found faithful in whatever my role is to be...”

There are others…Joe’s happy parents, with all their dreams for the future, their baggage from the past, their uncertainty about what lies ahead for each of their four boys.

There is the painfully-young, single Hispanic mom who walks into the law office with the desperate look of a hunted tigress and says she must find a lawyer.

There is my office assistant, a young woman just out of school, who avows herself to be an atheist in the same bubbly, matter-of-fact voice that she uses to tell me about why she chose to become vegetarian.

Everywhere you look, there are people, and each one has a story to tell. Day by day, each story is growing a little longer. Minute by minute, they are drawing closer to the end, and what kind of eternity will they face when they pass through the portal that leads from this life into the next?

I am ashamed that I am so often willing to be silent, that I am so frequently frightened by what others might think. Do I really understand what is at stake here?

Too often, my actions are saying, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak, for I am a youth.”

And God in His great faithfulness, replies, as He replied to Jeremiah: “Do not say, ‘I am a youth,’ for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of their faces, for I am with you to deliver you.”

Perfect love casts out fear. It’s a promise.

May God give me the grace to love more perfectly, more completely, more unreservedly. Would that He would place a burden on my heart for the people who walk into and out of my life each and every day and give me the boldness to speak when I ought to, the wisdom to know when to be silent...

~Thea