Lift Your Eyes

Lift Your Eyes

A young pastor planted a church in a neighborhood his denomination considered unreachable. 'The people in that zip code don't go to church,' he was told. He went anyway. He spent the first six months doing almost nothing except walking the neighborhood, having conversations, listening. People who hadn't been to church in decades started showing up. He told the denomination: 'The field was ripe. You just couldn't see it because you were looking at demographics instead of people.' Within three years the congregation had two hundred members, most of them people who had never previously attended church. The harvest was there. Someone had to look.

Jesus' instruction to look at the fields comes immediately after His conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. She has gone to tell her village and the villagers are coming down the road toward Jesus. The disciples are thinking about lunch. Jesus is thinking about harvest. 'Open your eyes' — the implication is that they are closed, focused on what is immediately in front of them rather than what God is doing in the larger field. The harvest imagery is urgent: 'ripe right now' — not in four months, not after more preparation, but now. Wherever you live and work, there are fields ripened by God for encounter. Are your eyes open or are you thinking about lunch?