“Lord, give us eyes to see!” How many times have we prayed for that? In last week’s blog, I said we would be talking about engaging in the steps of the Process of the Gospel. As we do this, I want to especially focus on the need to follow Christ’s example of humility, and even find ways of self-limitation in how we approach each step.

The first step is observation – “eyes to see!” In our modern, technological culture we have lost the ability to sincerely observe. Observation was very important in past relational cultures that lived close to nature. Through observing the living systems around them, they learned to do just about everything!

Seeing with new eyes is like looking at a hologram. In observation, your subconscious mind becomes engaged and suddenly you see the whole system! Doug and I were walking down the sidewalk on a street in Pune, India, when we came to a small bridge over a little stream. After having spent some time in villages in India, and then looking at this scene, it suddenly opened up to me in a new way that made perfect sense. It had everything a family needed – a house for shelter, a cow in the back shed for milk and fuel, cow dung cooking fuel patties on the sides of the wall, water in the stream for cooking and cleaning the clothes that hung from the line, chickens, sheep and a cooking fire. I felt like I could see this scene through the eyes of the people who lived there; I saw how the system worked!

Too often, our observations are very detail-oriented: We can describe this bus or that building. To truly observe, we must move past the way we would normally see something (I might notice a nice dress, and Doug would see a fancy car or be invigorated by all the people on the street) and engage in a more focused observation of the broader complex system in which these objects live (the reality of a city and its people with all its issues and needs).

Newcomers to our country and cities are in a good position to give us feedback as they look at how our social systems work, because they observe with new eyes and often see things that we who have been in the system a long time no longer see. At EGC, we always ask new staff members or interns to give us their impressions of our organization. It’s important to look with fresh eyes. Theologically, Charles Van Engen encourages us to even read the Bible with fresh eyes, especially when we have a theme that we want to explore more deeply.

The task of observation is what EGC staff members, Ramesh and Sheba Telore, did ten years ago when they lived in Kolhapur, India for two years, setting up a micro-enterprise project. To westerners, all Indian cities might look the same, but the Telores had observed all the differences, big and small, between their cosmopolitan home city of Pune and the provincial city of Kolhapur. Although during Ramesh’s career as an engineer with the Indian Railway they had lived in large houses with servants, a car and a driver, they immediately observed that the setting in which they were serving was far more humble. So, they rented a simple, second floor two-room apartment, where they lugged water up the steps every day and cooked, ate and slept on the floor – in keeping with the way other people lived – and spent long hours using the standard bus service going to churches in outlying villages. They observed how the social systems in Kolhapur worked, learned from the people and lived among them, and by doing so gained their trust. Their experience is a great example of observing and humbly self-limiting to do ministry within the context of a living social system. It all begins with observation!