Look Up

A few days ago my host dad gave me this advice: "When walking through Copenhagen, look up." He went on to tell me that it is so easy to miss out on so much of the city by just watching your feet or looking at the shops at eye level. I have been thinking about this phrase a lot.

Look up.

So often we go through life keeping our eyes right in front of us. We forget to look around and see the beauty that is within our reach. We become negative, cynical, egocentric. When our whole world consists of what is at our feet we miss out on all the blessings God has for us. While the cobblestones are beautiful, the shops intriguing, the people fascinating, the most beautiful architecture is up above the grunge of the street. It is easy to become content with what we see and forget to look up.

These past few days everyone at DIS split off around Denmark and Northern Germany to go on our short study tours. My group went to Western Denmark to explore different schools that work with children and adults with special needs. It was such a cool and unique experience! Each place we visited was so unique and inspiring. Our first night we stayed at a højskole, where the students and teachers all lived together at the school. We ate dinner with them and then were able to hang out with everyone in the evening. There was one beautiful girl, I think her name was Lark, she definitely understood this concept of looking up. Even though she was confined to a wheelchair for her whole life, she was so positive. She told us how blessed she was to have the opportunities that she had. She loved her life, and kept telling us how good off she was, and how much worse her life could be.

By our worlds standards, she had every right to be depressed, or at least to complain some, but I did not hear one negative word out of her mouth that whole evening. Wow, that sure puts my life in perspective. It is so easy to complain about the littlest things, but to what end does our complaining bring us? Throughout our whole trip I kept encountering this, positive people looking up, regardless of their situations.

So, my words to you. Look up! See the positive things in life, how blessed you are, the potential God has given you to do great things with your life! Step out of your comfort zone, trust God to lead you, stretch yourself to look beyond yourself. Be thankful for the path that is under your feet, but don't be afraid to look up once in awhile.