“And Jesus asked the lawyers and Pharisees, ‘Is it lawful to cure people on the sabbath, or not?’”
Luke 14:3
Recently I was listening to an episode of the radio show, “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!,” and the celebrity caller for the program was Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the head of the Hayden Planetarium, astrophysicist, and all-around interesting guy. During the program, Dr. Tyson had to answer three multiple choice questions. Getting two of the three correct would win a listener a prize. He was stumped two out of the three times. The host made a bit of a big deal out of the fact that they had stumped someone so smart.
Unruffled by the jabs Tyson said something that caught my ear. He said, “I choose to look at this differently. I didn’t get two questions wrong and one right, I learned two new things today that I didn’t know when I got up this morning.”
Jesus chose to look at things differently. He didn’t see the rules of the sabbath, he chose to look at the situation differently. Jesus saw the man with dropsy. Jesus encourages us to look at our fellow humans differently–seeing not the inadequacies or the short-comings, or the brokenness, but seeing the beloved child of God.
How will you look at the world, and those whom you encounter today differently? How will you choose to look with fresh eyes?
In Christ,
The Daily Cup 
As one who has manic depression, I am often discriminated against as much as a Black or Gay person because people can’t understand the situation. I have an illness that gives me a terribly painful often exhausting depression, and also a “high” or uninhibited state. I do my best to inform people but they don’t find it amenable to take the time to care. I am now being transitioned to another Church because of the supposed damage I did. I am sorry for that. But I ask that people try to understand me instead of discard or avoid me. I am not a monster. I am a bright, intelligent, and beautiful human being.
I am so glad that you picked up on this. I had also heard this exchange on Wait,Wait and I am also a fan of Neal de Grasse Tyson. I have thought of his answer about learning something new – nearly every day since, and it is quite fitting that you applied it to the teachings of Jesus. This is perhaps one reason why I enjoy reading the Daily Cup — to learn something new each day.