A blog from the pen of Kim Lee
From the side, it looked like a gigantic bird with its head turned up toward the heavens; it was not. Further down the way on the right, I saw a triceratops nestled in the brush; it was not. Just a few steps away from the triceratops sighting, I saw a totem pole; it was not. Right at the bend on the left, there stood a mammoth ant hill, the kind you’d see in Zambia, Australia and Brazil; it was not.
On the green-way, at a distance, fallen, broken and rotting trees take on strange and yet familiar shapes. Up close and personal, they look like what they are: rotting parts of trees.
Seeing.
In the 2nd chapter of Exodus, after Pharaoh’s infamous edict to drown all baby boys in the Nile, and after Moses has been pulled from the river and named by Pharaoh’s daughter, and after he was sent home to be nursed by his mother and then returned to palace to be educated as an Egyptian, the Bible says, “One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their forced labor.”
Seeing.
Do you remember the first time you saw something for what it really was? I do.
I was in the seventh grade. And for the first time in my schooling, I had an African American teacher. One afternoon she asked us what time we woke up to get ready for school. After hearing our answers, she told us that while we were just waking up there was another group of children on the other side of town already on a school bus and in route.
And then there was the time I was volunteering on Friday afternoons at an after-school center called Partners in Hope. Every child in that program lived in poverty. Each afternoon, when the children got off the bus, I greeted them and asked them to tell me their favorite part of that day. Each day, to a child, I heard the same recounting: a detailed description of what they had for lunch. I had been teaching on the other side of town for fourteen years. And in all those years of asking children to tell me their favorite part of their school day, I had never once heard what they had had for lunch. It didn’t matter. They had food and plenty of it.
Seeing.
For the first time, Moses saw, up close and personal. And what he saw forever changed his life.
Distance takes on strange and yet familiar shapes in relationships. It is only when we get up close and personal that we can see things for what they really are. And in that closeness, lives are changed.
What do you see?