“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39). In Luke 24, we read an account of two close friends of Jesus who walked for the better part of five miles with Jesus by their side, and they did not recognize Him. It says “their eyes were holden that they should not know him.” (Luke 24:16). It could be that Jesus was exerting some kind of supernatural influence to disguise Himself or to cloud their minds that they did not recognize Him, but I find it equally likely that they were so consumed with their own grief and dismay that they didn’t have the mental capacity to recognize the Savior even when He was standing right in front of them. How often do we let the small details of our lives clutter up our hearts and our minds so that we can’t focus on the Savior even when He is right in front of us? And make no mistake, there is not a single moment of our lives that Christ is not standing right in front of us. So if we can’t see Him, it’s because we have allowed our eyes to become “holden that we should not know him.” I know that we all have a lot of necessary and important things that we need to accomplish every day, but if we are allowing the things that are present before us to get in between us and the Savior, we’re doing it wrong. We covenant to always remember Him. Christ does not want us to just become hermits and think only of Him with our every single thought to the exclusion of everything else. But we can share all of our thoughts with Him and allow Him to have a share in all of the daily minutiae of our lives. We can block out the light of the sun with a single pebble if we hold it up close enough to our eye, but just because we have blocked it out does not mean that the sun has ceased to exist, or that it has stopped giving us light and warmth. There is not a single thing present that can separate us from the love of God as long as we continue to choose to look unto Christ with every thought.
