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“Learning to See”- Saturday, March 21, 2025

Scripture Reading: 1 Samuel 16:6–7

Samuel is a wise and experienced person of faith. He has heard God’s voice for years. And when he walks into Jesse’s house looking for the next king of Israel, he looks at the oldest son and immediately thinks: that’s the one. Tall, impressive, exactly what a leader should look like. And God says, essentially: you’re not seeing what I’m seeing.

This is the same pattern we’ve been tracing all week. The disciples saw a blind man and asked whose fault it was. The religious leaders saw a rule violation and missed a miracle. Samuel saw a strong, impressive firstborn and missed the youngest son out in the field — a shepherd boy named David, the one nobody thought to call in. God’s way of seeing consistently lands on the people that our way of seeing passes right over.

The phrase that stops us here is this: “The Lord looks at the heart.” Not the résumé. Not the appearance. Not the track record or the label or the category. The heart — what’s actually there, underneath what’s visible. That kind of seeing is slower. It requires more attention. It doesn’t sort people quickly into useful and useless, worth my time and not. It lingers. It asks questions. It waits.

As we close out this week, the invitation is simply this: ask to see differently. We’ve been thinking all week about the “who sinned?” reflex — the habit of explaining people, assigning fault, reducing a person to a problem. The alternative isn’t just to stop doing that. It’s to actively practice something better: looking at the heart. Asking what’s really there. Letting what we see surprise us. That is a learnable skill. And it begins with asking God to teach it to us.

Reflection:  When do you find it hardest to see past your first impression of someone? What would it look like to ask God to help you see what God sees in that person?

Action Step:  Before one conversation or interaction today — a family gathering, a meeting, a relationship that’s been strained — take thirty seconds and pray: “Help me see this person the way you see them.” Then pay attention to what shifts.

Prayer:  God, teach us to see the way you see — past appearances and categories and our own assumptions, all the way to the heart. Make us people whose first instinct is curiosity and compassion. Amen.