Twenty-Two

                 But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (I Samuel 16:7)

                Maybe it was because Saul was tall. When Samuel went to anoint the new king of Israel, his first inclination was toward a tall, good-looking member of the family. God chose the youngest member, the “runt” of the litter, who probably didn’t have anything against him (to the external eye) except that he was the little brother, and everyone picked on the youngest as the “nobody, nothing” of the family.

                We all do it. Put aside the rabid accusations of the various -isms. You might see someone with hair of a color that God didn’t make it, or piercings, tattoos, or scars. Or, he/she may simply be ugly, fat, too skinny, poorly dressed, or too well dressed. It could be the pieces of paper on the wall (I have a few), the titles or alphabet soup before and after their names, or their reputations. We all judge based on appearance, even when we don’t realize it. We even to it to ourselves.

                One of the big outward appearances is the color of someone’s politics.  I’ve had people say “I thought you were nice” and then condemn me as a person because I disagree with their proclamations. Clearly, if I don’t agree with them, I must be a monster down to the core of my heart.

                The thing is, just as the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes and electron microscopes allow us to see things that are far away or very tiny a little bit, we can only observe a little bit of someone’s heart. We can get hints if we watch them for long enough. They may only have hints themselves. But God knows their hearts, and the first thing that He knows is that they aren’t as “in the right place” as we want to believe they are. This doesn’t disqualify us. He’s willing to work with it, and He knows what to do. When Samuel anointed David as king, David wasn’t ready. He became ready because of what happened to him over the next twenty-two years.

Twenty-five years ago, I got a job at a retail establishment, and basically hated that job for the next 15 years. I have long had a sort-of-kind-of dream for a “monastery garden” – whatever that means, but twenty-two years ago, I would not have thought what I have was possible. What is in your life that you couldn’t have imagined 22 years ago? Where has God brought you? Would it have helped you if people had dismissed you as something less than valuable?