I Lift My Eyes

In the year 2000, I began a six year stint as a teacher in a treatment facility.   I had just moved back my home state of Montana, after spending 6 years in Oklahoma and Texas, when my Grandmother died tragically. I missed my family, and I was really questioning how I had spent so many years in the flat lands, so I moved home.  That year I began a six year stint as a teacher in a treatment facility.  My experience in this setting is and was invaluable.  As I taught, worked in the residential lodges, and helped lead worship with the students I taught, I was educated in what it is like to be abandoned, abused, addicted, or tormented by PTSD or mental illness.  This experience in understanding the struggles of so many different people has made teaching an art instead of a job for me.  The other benefit of working in this setting was the people I worked with.  Yes, treatment facilities have a high turnover rate, but there were so many wise, experienced, and Christian people I worked with who taught me so much about working with kids as well as life. 

Among these people was the man I consider to be the wisest person I know-no offense to the many wise people God has used in my life.  He was a reserved, Christian psychologist who had devoted his life to counseling the most difficult, children and teens in our community.  Simply working around him was a constant reminder of God’s character.  One day the school was having a myriad of discipline problems-usually around the holidays, full moons, etc. . . . –and as soon as one fire was put out another started.  I remember I briefly stopped in to his office to vent.  I said something like, “Have you seen what is going on out there?  What are we going to do?”  He calmly smiled at me and said, “That’s why the Psalm says, ‘I lift my eyes to the hills’ (Psalm 121).  We aren’t supposed to look at our surroundings, we are supposed to look up” and calmly went back to work. 

There are many times I have recalled this timely reminder, and when COVID hit, this was one of the first verses to pop into my head, not because I had memorized it as a child, but because this man had applied it to real life.  Once the cloud of depression I was in wore off from sitting at home and missing my students and co-workers, I really thought we (the country) would have moved on by now, but according to the news I watched this morning, the disruption of life has not only continued but gotten worse.  Now we fear the virus, a suffering economy, police brutality, racial unrest, riots and a permanent disruption to life as we know it. And our nation is looking for someone-the right leader (or politician) to make it better, the “right” outcome to the election.  How quickly we forget that we already have a savior.  It is a waste, a sin, to put our hopes in a new one.  Should we vote? Should we get involved in our local communities instead of burying our heads, yes!  But we should do these things knowing that because of Christ, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31.  The victory is already his and will continue to be even if the nation stays in an uproar over one issue or another.  Lord, remind us to keep looking up!