Let me come straight to the point.  Life is meant to be lived with a vertical gaze. Think about it. It’s true from the time we are born and beyond. Babies first learn to make eye contact looking up. Toddlers learn to walk by looking up toward their destination, almost always with hands raised high. Looking up is how we first learn, and how learning is always done.  It is an obvious, inescapable fact.

Child to parent.  Pupil to teacher.  Apprentice to master.  Creature to his Creator.

The real problem arrives when we think we’re big enough to shift our learning posture and begin looking down.  It first happens when we convince ourselves that there is no one in the room “bigger than me.”  My father called it being “too big for your britches,” and whenever I heard him use that phrase it never turned out so well for me.

The truth is that there will always be someone bigger than me— even if I don’t see that person in the room. Ah ha!  That’s the problem. We only compare ourselves to the ones in the room with us.   Who says that’s the only room in the house?  Who says it’s even the only house on the street?

We cease to grow when we stop looking up.  A downward gaze is condescending, judgmental, and shallow. It pretends to know all things and leaves no room for improvement. When we think we have “arrived,” our journey ends.  Alas, what a dreadful destination is journey’s end!

Still…  just one gaze upward on a starry night can free us from our tiny little rooms.

“When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars….”     Psalm 8:3

 If I’ve learned anything in life it’s this: I am not the center of the universe—not even the center of my own universe. My marvelous Creator knows me, loves me, and has a purpose for me all the days of my life—all of them. I get the privilege of discovering His purpose every moment of every day. I get to grow. To change. To learn. To experience.

All I have to do is live my life with a vertical gaze.

Psalm 139, my favorite of the Psalms of David says it so clearly:

Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;  you formed me in my mother’s womb.  I thank you, High God––you’re breathtaking!  Body and soul, I am marvelously made!         

I worship in adoration––what a creation!  You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body;You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something.

Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you,  The days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day.  Your thoughts––how rare, how beautiful! God, I’ll never comprehend them!  I couldn’t even begin to count them––  any more than I could count the sand of the sea.

Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with you!                                                                                                                                                     Psalm 139:13-18 The Message Bible

Three thousand years later Steven Curtis Chapman joined in agreement with King David when he sang:

How could I stand here and watch the sun rise;                                                                                                                                                 Follow the mountains where they touch the sky.

Ponder the vastness and the depths of the sea;                                                                                                                                                         And think for a moment the point of it all was to make much of me.

‘Cause I’m just a whisper;                                                                                                                                                                                        And You are the Thunderer.

I want to make much of You, Jesus
I want to make much of Your love;
I want to live today to give You the praise
That You alone are so worthy of.
I want to make much of Your mercy;
I want to make much of Your cross.
I give You my life
Take it and let it be used
To make much of You.     (Much of You, 2004)

So, my friends, my readers– intentional or accidental–  I urge you to do this one thing every day of your life:

Live Life With A Vertical Gaze.    Looking Up.    Always Up.

“Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing.”   Isaiah 40:26    The Message Bible

“In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths.”  Proverbs 3:6