Seeing Everything Now With New Eyes!

“Therefore, if any person is (ingrafted)s in Christ (the Messiah) he is a new creation (a new creature altogether); the old (previous moral and spiritual condition) has passed away. Behold, the fresh and new has come! -2 Corinthians 5:17 AMP (emphasis added)

Last Christmas Colleen and I watched for the umpteenth time the classic Christmas movie,
“It’s A Wonderful Life’ starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. What is it about that movie that draws me back to it year after year? Why do I still tear up when George Bailey prays, “I want to live… Please God, I want to live?” Why do I still not able to stop my tears when old Burt shows up at that snowy bridge when George has a fresh and new realization of the wonder of him now being alive?

Maybe, because that story says to each of us that our life can never be defined by the dreams we fulfilled or not, the goals we reached or not. These things don’t define us. We were created for a relationship with God and with other people He has placed into our lives.  God has made ordinary people like us to make an extraordinary impact upon others. As we live our lives, we don’t even know the difference we may have had upon certain lives and upon the lives that those lives have touched.

Just like George Bailey, we may have never been given the chance to fulfill our life’s ambitions. Instead, we may find ourselves doing what we never had planned to be doing while we watch family and friends become in our minds “success stories.” For George, that underlying frustration became suicidal when his Uncle Billy, through his carelessness, put the future of the family business in mortal danger. George’s life insurance policy made him wrongly believe the lie that he was of more value to others dead rather than alive.

But George, through being led by his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody, was able to see what his world would have been like if he had never been born. He was given the priceless gift of being able to now see everything in his life with new eyes.

This classic Christmas story strikes right to our hearts because most of us can relate to George Bailey. How many of us feel that our lives aren’t quite working out just as we had planned? How many of us look at the lives of others and believe they have fulfilled their dreams but not us? How many of us, as George had, have become blind to the small yet so important chain reaction impacting things we may have done for others throughout our lives? The lasting good of these things we will likely never see in this life.

For the Christian, God has given us a new life (2 Corinthians 5:17), and part of that new life means that we can see all of our circumstances now with new eyes,  Just as George Bailey did in the story.  It is significant that his joyful gratitude came before his dire circumstances dramatically changed at the very end of the movie. The external hadn’t changed but the internal had.  This “changed perspective before changed circumstance” will best reveal the undeniable reality of a God-given new life to a cynical world.

Dear heavenly Father, thank you for the new life you have given us in Christ Jesus. Thank you that it gives us the ability to see everything fresh and new through new eyes. Thank you, God, that through Christ we have been given a Wonderful Life!