Seeing with the Heart

I just finished watching the leaders of the LDS Church give their annual Christmas Devotional. I was impressed with the remarks by President Dieter F Uctdorf. He quoted a phrase from The Little Prince. A fox tells the Little Prince "here's my secret, it is very simple. One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes." He then spoke about how most of the people who lived in Jerusalem during the time of Christ could not see Him for who He was. Reflecting upon his words, it seemed unfathomable that so many people could walk among the Savior and His Disciples and not know who He was. The people in Jerusalem had been waiting for their Savior for centuries, and yet most of them missed him. My thoughts quickly turned to the story of Christ's birth in Luke. When Mary and Joseph went to the inn, Luke writes that "there was no room for them in the inn." The phrase "for them" stood out to me. I've always pictured the inns at Bethlehem as being filled to capacity, with no room for anyone. That may be true, but what if it wasn't? What if there was just no room for a poor couple and their donkey? Maybe the inn keepers were embarrassed to have such a couple at their inn, or maybe they could see that Mary was about to give birth and didn't want the trouble.

For the past hour since President Uctdorf's talk was given, I've been contemplating about the realities that I am unable to see. Do I ever neglect my family because a pressing task takes priority in the moment? Have I formed incorrect judgments about the character of my associates and missed their goodness? Are opportunities to serve the truly great presented to me, only for me to ignore them or consider them unworthy of my time?

This then led me to think of the book Blink (which I recently read). In the book, the author relates an experience where someone tried to sell a counterfeit of a type of statue called a kouros to the J Paul Getty museum in LA. The statue looked perfect and all of the tests that were performed on the statue led the experts to believe that the statue was real. There were a couple of experts, however, who felt that the statue was a fake. They couldn't explain how it was a fake, but they just knew, even though everything that their eyes saw told them that it was real. In the end, they were right. It was a fake.

So, I've set a new goal for the Christmas season. It is to see with the heart. Those words look corny on the page, but their intent is not shallow. On December 25 I want to be able to tell MaryAnne that I now realize a truth that I previously was oblivious to. I have no idea what it will be (hence the current state of oblivion), but I am anxious to find it.