It is amazing how incredibly easy it is to find a person’s flaws, to sniff out and point to another’s weakness. Anyone can do that, and most people do. With busy schedules it is effortless to simply not see people, to speed through the day checking off the to do list, jungle piling responsibilities, and ignore everyone and everything else along the way. More often than not we are more apt to pay attention to and focus on how people annoy or slight us in someway like the driver that cut you off in traffic, the bautista that messed up your order, or the comment someone made in the office that rubbed you the wrong way.

With photo and video editing at our fingertips and scripted reality tv it has become increasingly more difficult to find the beauty of the dozens of real people that cross our path on a daily basis. Even concerning the ones we love and spend time with, we tend to place more emphasis and emotional energy on where they fall short rather than what they do well. It requires intentionality and focus to look for the admirable qualities of the people around us.

While people are more inclined to pardon and make excuses for their own mistakes and not do so for everyone else, sometimes it is just as hard to identify and celebrate the beauty within ourselves as it is to find it in others. We are usually well acquainted with our own dirt and often cannot see the priceless jewels hidden beneath the surface. A person’s true beauty is sometimes hidden beneath their struggles or were purposefully buried there. In some cases, like some precious gems, a person’s strengths and admirable qualities may have been formed by the pressures of life and difficult situations.

The challenge is to learn to fully embrace each person, their mess and weaknesses, while simultaneously reaching past it all to pull out the gold and gems within.

It is my hope and goal to always look for the gold in a person, to see how even their weakness may stem from or lead to a strength, then reveal it to them, and celebrate who they are. I desire to discover and become skilled in using different mining tools to dig through the dirt or chisel through stone walls in order to discover and put on display the priceless qualities within each person. This is the mandate as a believer. This is releasing the kingdom: showing people who they really are, who God created them to be.

You can do it too! Start to tell the people around you what you love most about them. When your waiter is a bit disgruntled ask Jesus to reveal something He admires about them and then give them a compliment along the same vein. If you are having difficulty with a co-worker or boss, ask the Lord to give you eyes to see their amazing qualities, then start to treat and regard them according what He (and now you) sees. It is amazing how people begin to transform when you start to recognize and acknowledge, through action, word and deed, the gold they have within.