The Outlook Changed.

Looking at Jesus changes the world for us. It is as though the light of His eyes fills our eyes and we see things all around as He sees them.  Have you ever gone out, as a child, and looked intently at the sun, repressing the flinching its strength caused and insisting on looking?  You could do it for a short time only.  It made your eyes ache.  But as you turned your eyes away from its brilliance you found everything changed.  You remember a beautiful yellow glory-light was over everything, and every ugly jagged thing was softened and beautified by that glow in your eyes.  Looking at the sun had changed the world for you for a little.

It is something like that on this higher plane, in this finer sense.  That must have been something of Paul’s thought in explaining the glory of Jesus that he saw on the Damascus road.  “When I could not see for the glory of that light.”  The old ideals were blurred.  The old ambitions faded away.  The jagged, sharp lines of sacrifice and suffering involved in his new life were not clearly seen.  A halo had come over them.

I recall a bit of a poem I ran across in an old magazine somewhere.  It was one of those vagrant, orphan poems with fine family lineaments that find their way unfathered into odd corners of papers.  It told about a man riding on horseback through a bit of timber land in one of the cotton states of the South.

It was a bright October day, and he was riding along enjoying the air and view, when all at once he came across a bit of a clearing in the trees, and in the clearing an old cabin almost fallen to pieces, and in the doorway of the cabin an old negress standing.  Her back was bent nearly double with the years of hard work, her face dried up and deeply bitten with wrinkles, and her hair white.  But her eyes were as bright as two stars out of the dark blue, it said.

And the man called out cheerily, “Good-morning, auntie, living here all alone?” And she looked up, with her eyes brighter yet with the thought in her heart, and in a shrill keyed-up voice said, “Jes me ‘n’ Jesus, massa.”  But he said a hush came over the whole place, there seemed a halo about the old broken-down cabin, and he thought he could see Somebody standing by her side looking over her shoulder at him, and His form was like that of the Son of God.

How poor and limited and mean her world looked to him as he rode up.  But how quickly everything changed as he saw it through her seeing of it.  With the keen insight into spirit things so often found in such simplicity among her race, she had gotten the whole simple philosophy of life.  Her world was changed and beautiful in the loneliness of the woods by reason of her Master’s presence.

This removes the commonplace at once clear out of one’s life.  There is no drudgery nor humdrum nor hardship, because everything is for Jesus, and seen through His eyes.  Whatever comes in the pathway of his work is gladdest joy, whether an obscure narrow round of home work or shop or store, or leaving home for a strange land far across the sea with a peculiarly uncongenial spirit atmosphere.  Contact with Jesus, seeing Him, changes all for us.