Weekly Words

Looking Up

Some time ago, I was coming from a road trip with one my friends and as we landed back home we found ourselves in the Atlanta airport looking for the baggage claim. In the Atlanta airport, everyone comes from the same train and up the same escalators, then you choose to go to either the north or south sets of baggage claim carousels. There are some six carousels in each terminal, and as we approached the south baggage claim we were about to begin the tedious journey of going from baggage claim to baggage claim looking for our flight number. At worst, this would mean starting in the middle of the carousels, walking to one end, then possibly walking all the way down to the other end in search of the right baggage dispenser. Having traveled slightly more than my buddy, I informed him there was a way to avoid the hassle of treading along carousel to carousel and making numerous wrong stops before finally ending up at our final destination. Above the windows, doors, and carousels there is a screen that has the sole purpose of directing people from their flight to their correct baggage claim. In other words, instead of trying to find our way on our own and using a process of elimination that may be filled with multiple wrong turns, we simply had to look up at the guide to be shown the way.

If you know me by now, then you know that as these words were coming out of my mouth my sermonic antennae went up and my theological telescope began to take focus. What a metaphor for life! How many of us are bumbling and stumbling through life making wrong turn after wrong turn attempting to find our right destination? Many of us continue to make mistake after mistake when we could simply look up and be guided to our desired location.

On one level, finding a model in someone who has gone where we want to go or has done what we want to do is looking up. Unless we are in the elite ranks of Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Beyonce, or Jay-Z (people who are the best at what they do), there is always someone who serves as a standard whose life can guide us and model for us the path we ought to take. Thus, it behooves us to find models and mentors whose life we can study, and who have the insights and experiences that can save us from trying to make it by ourselves.

On a higher level, we set ourselves up for unnecessary experiments and avoidable mistakes, if we attempt to live life simply searching on the ground level. When we choose to limit our gaze to our mundane world of human desires and possibilities, we set ourselves up for mix-ups and mistakes. My friend and I would have bounced around from carousel to carousel, had we kept our eyes forward and fixed on the level where we walked. Life mirrors my airport experience in that the best directions call for us to raise our heads and lift our eyes to a place higher than us. In life, the guidance of God always demands that we look up to a loftier place than human experimentation and self navigation. Such is the case with so many of us who are ending up in dead end places, wrong relationships, and undesirable destinations because we have decided to go place to place looking for our destiny on the ground level. However, looking up to a place loftier than us and a Power higher than us may afford us the direction that we so sorely need to rescue us from ourselves.

Humbly in Christ’s Love,
Pastor B.A. Jackson