“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” — 2 Corinthians 4:18 (NIV)
“Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” — Colossians 3:2 (NIV)
So much of my life has been filtered through the mind. It is both my greatest creator and, at times, my greatest deceiver. The imagination is capable of envisioning beauty, hope, and possibility, yet it can just as easily manufacture fear, anxiety, and stories that were never true.
It’s estimated that we have tens of thousands of thoughts each day, and many of them are simply repetitions of yesterday’s thinking. We relive conversations, replay failures, rehearse tomorrow, and often miss the only place where life is actually happening—the present moment.
What the mind cannot truly grasp is the soul. It cannot measure its depth or comprehend that our deepest self has no beginning or end because it originates in God. The mind lives in time, comparing the past with the future. The soul simply is. It rests in the eternal presence of the One who breathed life into us.
The mind is an extraordinary servant, but a poor master. It interprets what the eyes can see, yet it struggles with what can only be known through faith. It cannot comprehend eternity because eternity is not something to be figured out—it is something to awaken to. God’s Spirit reveals what the intellect alone cannot.
We become so absorbed in the character our mind has created that we forget who we really are. We play our role, defend our identity, and chase the approval of a world that is temporary, all while the truest part of us quietly waits beneath the noise.
Paul reminds us to fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. Our circumstances, our successes, our failures, even our thoughts are temporary. The soul, however, is eternal. When we set our minds on things above, we begin to see life not merely through the lens of thought, but through the eyes of faith.
Perhaps the greatest spiritual awakening is not discovering something new, but remembering who we have always been—a child of God, known before we ever had our first thought, loved before we ever had our first success or failure, and held by an eternal reality that the mind alone can never fully see.
