Sunday, February 3, 2013

Women's Eyes

I am looking for something. It happens often enough. It might be the car keys or a piece of paper with an important phone number on it. I go from room to room, around the house, looking under things and opening every cupboard and drawer. Nothing. It isn’t anywhere. Naturally, I ask my wife for help. And as she hands it to me, in next to no time at all, she might say something like, “You have to look with a woman’s eyes”. I am left mumbling things under my breath and asking myself how that happened.

I thought of this when my wife was talking to me about her friend and her talk on the parable of the lost coin. She was using the parable to suggest that we need to be open minded in the way we look at God. After all, in that parable he is pictured as a woman. I think she may be making a little too much of that, I don’t know exactly. What I do know, is that the whole parable would not have worked if Jesus has used a guy in place of a girl. I can imagine the people listening to him. “Hey, teacher. Men don’t clean the house. We play dominoes, down in the square.” Jesus answers, “The day is coming, when those who marry a woman will clean, and with spirit. It is truth.” The crowd look incredulous.

The thing is, apart from the whole culture thing back then, men look for stuff with their commitment held in reserve. As I search I am formulating a plan B. If I don’t find the #?&% keys, then I will  take the bus or my bicycle. That would make me only . . . about ten minutes late. If I take the bike, I will need a backpack. Where was that backpack? If a woman doesn’t step in, the man will be so distracted by plan B, that it all becomes self-fulfilling and he will end up on the bicycle. Of course, the man may also feel compelled to take a trip to the local hardware store to purchase the correct tool for the job, to aid his search. He might return with a high pressure water blaster or vacuum, or a metal detector. That would happen only after he has carefully weighed up all the options.

So when Jesus was looking for a picture of the Holy Spirit he needed to use a woman searching and not a man. Otherwise, I’m sorry, but he could have left out the rejoicing part at the end. She looks with single-minded determination . . . with woman’s eyes, and with a funny sort of intuition that I don’t understand. Amidst the grime that you and I have been tainted with the Holy Spirit is looking for . . . well, he is looking for us. Who we really are has been lost, hidden beneath our brokenness. He has no plan B! He is undistracted. He knows what he is looking for and will stop at nothing. To him, you are so precious . The Holy Spirit will succeed, just as women tend to succeed when they are searching for things that have gone missing. He searches with women’s eyes, and that means there is hope for us all.

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