Visions of Toy Boats
Deep Thought: I remember how my great-uncle Jerry would sit on the porch and whittle all day long. Once he whittled me a toy boat out of a larger toy boat that I had. It was almost as good as the first one, except now it had bumpy whittle marks all over it. And no paint, because he had whittled off the paint.
It has always amazed me at how he and other whittlers can see the finished work of art from whittling out a chunk of wood… or in this case the toy boat. That is the way it is with vision. That is what we have been talking about: vision.
Last week, we started with a series of posts talking about meeting the needs of some children in central Florida and the vision that ensued after seeing the needs of these kids. If you have not read them, I would recommend you go back and read them starting with the post from August 24 entitled Unruly Salmon in Kids Church.
So, Nehemiah was in agony over the condition of his hometown, Jerusalem. He got permission from the king he worked for, Artexerxes, to take a trip to Jerusalem and rebuild the walls, which was the first step in restoring the glory of Jerusalem. After spending some time inspecting the walls to calculate the amount of work it was going to take, he called the remaining people of Jerusalem together and said this:
Nehemiah 2:17 “Then I said to them, ‘You see the situation we are in, that Jerusalem is desolate and its gates burned by fire.”
The first thing Nehemiah did was identify the problem. He described to them how it was; “Here is the current situation, the walls are crumbled and are useless and the gates are also burned to the ground rendering them useless.”
Why would Nehemiah have felt it was necessary to make such a statement? They knew the condition of the walls. Some of the people listening to Nehemiah had lived in Jerusalem all their lives. They passed in and out of the burned gates every day. They didn’t need him telling them their gates were burned.
Nehemiah’s words were a wake-up call. In essence he was saying, “Open your eyes! Things are bad! We’re in trouble.” His fresh set of eyes brought a new perspective. And without much prodding, the people of Jerusalem took a fresh new look at their situation. In that moment they were able to see their city through Nehemiah’s eyes. And once that happened, they caught his vision.
That is the way vision works. It is seeing how things are and seeing them how they could be. Clearly identifying the problem helps others to get on board with the vision. It is like my great-uncle Jerry. He could clearly identify the problem: that there was a toy boat trapped within the other toy boat and it needed to be released. And he could only do that by whittling that toy boat out of the other toy boat.
