Where is our focus?

We got here and our immediate focus became “getting set-up/getting settled in”, when our focus should have been Jesus. It should always be Jesus. Of course we know this, but as humans we get distracted, don’t we? Our focus gets blurry. I found myself wondering and having doubt as to whether we would ever have any time to “do ministry” as we are running round, jumping through hoops. Of course, ministry is everywhere and effective not in our power but in that of Christ alone. We have children, spouses, the guest house employees, taxi drivers, adoptive parents and children, children on the street, neighbors… Our focus should be on Jesus and we must be available, willing and prepared for those divine appointments.

I was teaching the kids out of Acts Chapter 3 (1-10) the other day…where Peter and John are heading to the temple via a gate called “Beautiful” . They see a crippled man who has been begging for money there daily for quite some time. The scripture says that Peter looked “straight at him”… it is translated that [he] had [his] eyes fixed on him.^[1] . They did not give him their money, (“Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you^[2] ), yet they also did not walk by this man and ignore him. Instead, they fastened their gaze upon him, commanded him to look at them and then by the power of the Holy Spirit, this man was healed.

Later that afternoon we were walking by a grocery store and a man was begging; not an uncommon sight in Ethiopia. I thought he was sitting on the ground and kept on following my family. Then I stopped dead in my tracks. He was not sitting, because you can’t sit if the entire lower half of your body is missing. But there he was, as I turned around, holding his hand out to me, looking at me. And I had the honor of fastening my gaze into the eyes of this man, going to him grabbing his hand and holding it, and telling him “Xavier ebarke” (God bless you), and I gave him the small change I had.

It wasn’t exactly like the Acts story, because the Holy Spirit did not work through me to heal this man. In fact quite the opposite: the Holy Spirit worked through this man, in that moment to heal me: to heal my blurred and unfocused vision and allow me to refocus and see Jesus in a beggars’ eyes on the street in Addis Ababa.