The difference between glance, look and seek

Tending the garden of the heart - Day 118

We have some very interesting conversations with our children and it is amazing the lessons we learn as we teach them.

Our eldest daughter was looking all over the house for one of her books. She kept asking if anyone had seen it. She had left the book in one of the rooms and when she went back to get it, it was gone. One of her sisters had put the book down in a box when she was doing something in the room. Her sister found the book and gave to her. I asked her if she had really looked for the book or if she just glanced around and did not bother to look further than what was on the surface. So I began to explain the difference between glancing, looking and seeking.

See, when you glance at something, you are just taking a quick look. With a glance you take in as much information as you can for that split second put you still miss a lot. When you look, you spend more time paying attention to what you are looking at and take in more details. However, when you seek, you are digging deeper than surface. You are investigating further into what you are looking at. I explained that if you just walked into the room and glanced around, you are not going to find what you are looking for. If you looked and did not find the book, you should have gone deeper, seek further. Instead of just looking around, lift things up; look down in the box, think of other possible places the book could have been placed.

There is a vital lesson to learn from this. Sometimes we treat our spirituality in the same way and fail to find what it is we desire to experience in our relationship with our Source. Instead of seeking, going deeper into the soil of the Spirit, asking questions and waiting for answers, we simply brush on by, take a quick glance. Or, we may decide to pay a little more attention than just giving to the Spirit a quick glance but soon after we stop looking and move on to something else.

But if we decide to search the depth of the Spirit to find the answers we are looking for, without fail, we will find - we will never be disappointed. When we put the time in to digging deeper into the soil of the Spirit, we receive the help we need and the wisdom we need to find what we desire. While we are seeking, digging deeper, it is amazing the other things we may find in the process. Have you ever been looking for something and ended up finding things that you were looking for a long time ago but could not be found?

That is what happens when you seek, when you go further into the realm of your own spirituality. We find things we overlooked many times and learn truths which were hidden from us before.