Be Still And Know

Matthew 5:8 God blesses those whose hearts are pure, for they will see God. One of the greatest privileges of my life in recent years has been to spend a good deal of time with people who are blind or partially sighted. I am constantly blessed by them and am conscious that they are often far more aware of what is going on than those of us with sight. We get distracted by the visual clues and don’t listen nearly as hard as they do. This Beatitude naturally causes me to think of my blind friends and forces me to ask what Jesus meant when he talked about seeing God. In his Gospel, John makes it clear that no one has seen God. So what did Jesus mean? I believe that Jesus is saying that the person whose heart is purely focused on him has uninterrupted closeness to God. There is nothing in the way. It is describing life at its best, when we have a complete awareness of God. Having a pure heart is an important theme in the psalms. In Psalm 24, David asks the question: “Who may climb the mountain of the Lord? Wh