Latest / The Seed Project / Sometimes You Need to Walk the Other Way

Transcript

Sometimes You Need to Walk the Other Way · The Seed Project

• 0:01
  Hey, friend.
• 0:02
  Welcome to Send a Seed.
• 0:03
  I'm Charlotte Edwards, and I believe small seeds create big impact.
• 0:08
  Each week, we'll plant one.
• 0:10
  Let's dig in.
• 0:12
  This morning, I was out walking my two golden retrievers, George and Petey, and we have a couple different routes we take almost every morning depending on the weather.
• 0:22
  If it's sunny, we have a shady walk.
• 0:25
  If we wanna go longer, there's a different option, but usually there's probably about three different routes that we take.
• 0:31
  And when we were walking down one of our usual streets, I noticed an ambulance ahead, and my dog Petey, love him dearly, but he is a hundred-pound skittish, anxious dog, especially around sirens and emergency vehicles, anything that he's unfamiliar with.
• 0:52
  So I knew it would be a struggle to get him past the ambulance.
• 0:56
  So I stood there thinking that we could just turn around and cut our walk short, or we could do the same route, just go in reverse, and that's what we did.
• 1:09
  We turned around and did it backwards.
• 1:12
  And what's funny is it's the exact same neighborhood, same street, and same houses, same distance we ever go on.
• 1:20
  The only difference was the direction that we were walking.
• 1:24
  But as we kept walking, I started noticing things that I'd never seen before.
• 1:30
  There was this beautiful little garden tucked beside one of the houses, and then a few houses later, I noticed an addition on the back of another home that I'd never seen before.
• 1:42
  Even the light coming through the trees and the flowers looked different.
• 1:48
  And I actually caught myself thinking,"How have I walked this neighborhood so many times and never noticed any of this?" And then I laughed because of course those things haven't magically appeared overnight.
• 2:02
  The garden had always been there, the addition wasn't new, nothing around me had changed.
• 2:07
  The only thing that had changed was the direction I was walking.
• 2:12
  And as I kept walking, I found myself thinking,"Isn't that just like life?" Sometimes when we feel stuck, we usually assume something around us has to change.
• 2:23
  Maybe we need a new job, a new opportunity, a new routine Maybe we just need to blow everything up and start all over.
• 2:34
  And sometimes big changes really are needed.
• 2:38
  But how often what really needs to change isn't our circumstances.
• 2:43
  Maybe it's just our perspective.
• 2:45
  Maybe you've been looking at this season as proof you're falling behind, when it's actually a season where you're growing in ways you just can't see yet.
• 2:55
  Maybe you've been so focused on what's happening that you've missed the quiet ways God is already moving.
• 3:02
  Maybe you've been staring at one closed door for so long that you haven't noticed another one standing wide open.
• 3:09
  And what struck me the most this morning wasn't that I saw something new.
• 3:14
  It was realizing that those things had always been there.
• 3:18
  I couldn't see them from where I'd been standing, and that made me wonder.
• 3:24
  How many blessings have I walked right past because I wasn't looking from a different angle?
• 3:30
  How many opportunities have I missed because I'd already decided they weren't there?
• 3:37
  How many prayers has God answered in ways I didn't recognize because I wasn't expecting something different?
• 3:45
  Perspective doesn't change reality.
• 3:48
  It just helps us see more of it That's why one of the core messages of The Seed Project is simple.
• 3:54
  It's pay attention.
• 3:56
  Pay attention to your thoughts, your words, your actions But also pay attention to the lens that you're looking through.
• 4:05
  Because sometimes paying attention doesn't mean looking harder.
• 4:10
  It simply means looking differently is there an area in your life where you've been walking in the same direction for so long that you've stopped seeing what's actually there?
• 4:22
  So before you decide something is hopeless and Before you convince yourself there's no way forward or make a big change, pause and ask yourself one simple question,"What might I see if I looked at this from a different direction?" You may not find a different path, but you may discover something you've been walking past all along That's your seed.
• 4:49
  Now go plant something good