When we turn our attention to imagine the human face of Jesus full of love, the song says ‘the things of earth will grow strangely dim’. But those ‘things of earth’ aren’t the ordinary, everyday, mundane people and places that make up our human lives. If they were, we would be turning our attention away from the very human life that Jesus himself lives and loves.

Instead, what grows ‘dim’ are the conceptual frameworks, the narrative stories, the priorities and projects by which we orient, interpret and understand our lives. When we are paying attention to Jesus, the ways in which we see things – our perspectives – are transformed. This transformation is primarily spiritual, meaning, inwardly real to us and outwardly relational toward others, but not objectively perceptible in the things themselves. The ‘things of earth’ are still the same, and at the same time not at all the same. We still have to do the same old boring tasks we’ve always had to do – washing the dishes, for example – but the way we understand and narrate and conceptualize and experience those tasks is transformed by spiritual possibilities we would otherwise be unaware of. Drudgery becomes an opportunity to exercise faithfulness. An interruption to my plans becomes an invitation to previously unexplored possibilities. An annoying person becomes a beloved child of God. A stranger becomes a neighbor. An enemy becomes a potential friend. Not because anything about them – the things of earth – has changed, but because I have.

When I turn my attention to Jesus, my perspective on everything else is changed. I walk by faith and not by sight. And seeing with the ‘eyes of faith’ I now see things of earth more clearly as they are. Still dimly, deficiently, deceptively, but less so.