One of the things I did while refining my mind and visualization some years back was to see things from their original, pure state.
For instance, I woke up one day and thought, “Why do we call sex dirty?”
When you hear how society stereotypes things like sex, you wonder why everyone is having it if it’s so “dirty.”
I remember playing out a scenario back then in my mind.
I said, “If I think about a naked woman, for instance, and have sexual arousal, and because of that I say my mind has become dirty, then why is it different if I am married and I think of my wife that way?”
Of course, the random answer someone might give without thinking is, “That’s because she’s your wife and the other person is not your wife.”
So, I reasoned, “Then that means it isn’t a woman’s naked body that I see that’s dirty; it is my relationship with her.”
In other words, “the naked body is not the problem here; my mind is.”
Because if NUDITY made a mind dirty, then everyone who’s married should all have dirty minds. So, nudity is holy and pure, but what’s dirty and shameful is my relationship with the person whose nudity I’m staring at. In other words, the bone of contention is morality—what is right and what is wrong.
So, sex of any form isn’t dirty. The morality behind that action, however, can make it look dirty or not.
This is, of course, a discussion with loose ends, and the subject of focus here isn’t sex; nor am I writing this to fuel your passions, whatever they may be. The focus here is seeing things without lenses or stereotypes.
Another example,
There was a period I also told myself that my default mindset about anyone I meet for the first time must be negative. Well, it was a defense mechanism back then, but it worked while it lasted, lol.
So, I developed this theory and practiced it because I figured that humans are uncertain and highly unreliable. We have thousands of different behaviors and characteristics in people, and meeting people for the first time is like you running blind into a forest; you don’t know what to expect.
But when you expect the worst from anyone, you put yourself in a place where disappointment is impossible.
During those years, this mechanism worked like magic. I would meet people and have absolutely NO good expectations from them. By default, I expected them to be brutal, dishonest, wicked, etc. So, when anyone showed contrary behavior, I would go, “Oh wow, that’s...that’s something...”
But it was a wrong mindset I had to erase. I then thought that a healthy balance to this mindset is to expect NOTHING from people. But you see, in the kingdom, it doesn’t work that way. If you expect NOTHING from your brother and sister, it means you’re indifferent to their way of life.
It means you care only for yourself and your life. It means you have not discerned the body of Christ, and you do not walk in love.
So, NO, in the kingdom, once I meet you, I hella expect A LOT from you, and I’ll definitely be disappointed when I don’t see it. I care so much about you to expect the WORST, no!
So, when I see you do things contrary to the Spirit you carry, I am heartbroken, and if I am able, I will do anything within my power to “fix you.”
In the kingdom, we don’t mind our business. Everyone’s business is my business. When I meet you for the first time, oh, I’m going to see you ONLY from a pure sight.
And even if you act otherwise, I will still see you from that pure sight, but I’ll acknowledge that you’re as much a human growing unto perfection as I am.
Paul used the body to illustrate Christ and the church. There is always something worth paying attention to with WHAT was used to illustrate another thing. It means if you study the allegory or metaphor very well, you can understand the real thing better.
The way the whole of your biological body is interconnected and wired to function together simultaneously; that’s how the body of Christ is wired to function.
That means if I’m unperturbed about a sore on my left foot, that sore can grow and kill the entire body.
Remember what Mordecai said to Esther when she thought she could become indifferent to the suffering and impending doom of her people.
Mordecai said to Esther, “Who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
He was basically telling her, “Esther, this isn’t just about you.”
And that is one of the things I think we miss when we don’t learn to see things from their original pure state. We begin to see people through their mistakes, their weaknesses, their past, their behavior, their reputation, and everything else that has happened to them, and eventually, we stop seeing the person and only see the problem.
But if you can learn to see things as they truly are, you can discern what is wrong without allowing what is wrong to redefine what you see.
That is how I want to see people.
I want to see them from the purity of what God intended them to be, while also being honest enough to recognize where they have departed from that reality. Because seeing someone purely does not mean being blind to their faults. It means your perception of the person is not controlled by their faults. And perhaps that is what it means to truly discern the body.
I don’t look at the sore on your foot and conclude that the foot is the whole body. I understand that something is wrong with one part of something much bigger, and because I understand that, I cannot be indifferent to it. Your pain affects me.
Because we are not independent bodies walking around pretending that what happens to one person has nothing to do with another. We are one body.
So perhaps the maturity we need is not simply learning how to identify what is wrong but learning how to see what is right even when something is wrong.
And most importantly, you can keep seeing people as people who are still becoming. Because that is how God sees us. We are not finished.
And neither are they.