Be Thou My Vision

 

Where Your Eyes Rest

3 Nephi 5:19–24,  Covenant of Christ

Don’t accumulate treasures on earth, where moths damage, rust corrodes, and thieves break in and steal,
but instead accumulate treasures in Heaven, where there are no damaging moths, corrosive rust, and thieves don’t break in and steal,
because what you treasure reveals what’s in your heart.

The light enters the body through your eyes. If, therefore, your eyes look to God, your whole body is full of His light.

But if your eye looks for evil, your whole body is then full of darkness. Therefore if the light within you looks for the darkness, how overwhelming that darkness becomes.

No one can serve two masters, for they’ll either hate the one and love the other, or at least they’ll follow the one and ignore the other. You can’t serve God and covet.

Some scriptures feel like quiet instructions for the whole inner world. This one sits in that category. When you read the verses together, they form a single teaching. What you treasure shapes your heart. Your heart shapes what you look for. Your gaze shapes your inner life. And the way you see ultimately reveals whom you serve. It is simple and uncomfortable and fits human experience perfectly.

The Lens You Bring

Years ago I knew a woman who lived with her spiritual fists up. We watched Frozen and found courage and beauty in it. She warned us it was pushing an agenda. When we praised Harry Potter, she cautioned about witchcraft. If we saw the gospel in The Chronicles of Narnia, she warned about hybrid creatures. She braced herself for darkness in everything, and so she found it everywhere.

One day in a conversation about this pattern my husband said something that has stayed with me ever since: “Whatever you look for is what you will find.”

That sentence came rushing back when I read these verses again.

Not every human work is holy. Not every human work is corrupt. Most are simply works of men, blends of light and shadow. Joseph Smith taught that the works of God endure forever, the works of Satan collapse, and the works of men borrow from both. They can lift or drag down depending on what a person is ready to see.

Frozen is not scripture. Harry Potter and Narnia are not revelation. They are works of men, which means they contain pieces of good and pieces of cultural noise. You can find threads of courage and sacrificial love in them, and you can also find threads that are shallow or tangled. The presence of mixed elements neither condemns nor sanctifies them. It simply means we must sift.

There is another reason human works carry both light and shadow. The very “matter code” of creation came from God Himself. We were designed in His image, which means even the works of men carry echoes of godliness because divine patterns were imprinted into us from the beginning. Every story, every symbol, every creative act reveals something about the One who made us. Some works express those patterns clearly, others distort them or bury them under cultural noise, but the imprint remains. This is why courage, sacrifice, loyalty, forgiveness, and rebirth show up even in secular stories. We create from what we are, and we are His creation.

What matters most is the direction of your gaze.
A fearful eye finds shadows.
A faithful eye finds God.
A bitter eye finds reasons to accuse.
A soft eye finds reasons to hope.

If your eye looks for evil, your whole inner world becomes dark. Not because darkness is everywhere, but because your gaze has trained itself to hunt for it.

Some works of men are so imbalanced and saturated with darkness, cynicism, or distortion that there is not much worth wrestling over. Others are mixed but full enough of light that they are worth engaging with, if your eyes stay looking to God while you do it.

The less godliness something contains, the more difficult it is to keep your eyes looking to God while you are inside it, and the easier it is for the darkness to slip in. That is where discernment comes in. You can simply decide, “This one is not worth the struggle,” and walk away.

But the larger truth remains:

It is not only the content that matters.

It is what your eye is doing while you engage with it.

A Subtle Application to Hard Things

I have watched the same pattern play out in other places and among other people. Some grow so afraid of deception that they scan every word, every tone, every difference for evidence of danger. Others are so eager to see the best that they overlook real warning signs.

When a community treasures unity, its members look for light in one another.
When it treasures being right, its members look for error in one another.
When it treasures fear, its members look for threats.
When it treasures God, its members look for Him, even in the middle of misunderstandings.

A godly society will require eyes oriented toward heaven. Not naive, not blind, but willing to look for God as the starting point instead of darkness as the default. Because once the eye begins hunting darkness, it will always find enough to confirm itself.

“You cannot serve two masters.” This has always been true. But the Covenant of Christ makes the final line more clear than “Mammon” ever did. You cannot serve God and covet. You cannot cling to fear, suspicion, control, or the hunger to be proven right and still expect to walk in His light. Coveting is not limited to money. It is any craving that pulls the heart away from trust.

You cannot look for God and look for reasons to accuse at the same time.
You cannot treasure suspicion and expect to see clearly.

Choosing Where My Eyes Rest

I want this passage to become a small internal compass for me. To remind me that the way I look at people matters. The way I look at stories matters. The way I look at conflict matters. The way I look for God matters.

Human works are mixtures. Human hearts are mixtures. But God has given us a strange and beautiful freedom in the middle of it all. We get to choose where our eyes rest.

Light enters through the eyes.
The eyes follow the heart.
And the heart follows what it treasures.

I want to treasure the right thing.
I want to see clearly.
I want to let my eyes rest on God.
I want eyes steady enough to notice Him in the margins, even when the margins are messy.

Before I close, a small personal note...Selah has been one of my most loved groups for years, and their music has walked with me through a lot of my own trying to see God clearly. Because their music is so important to me, I usually keep their songs close, almost like part of my private worship. Sharing them feels a bit vulnerable, the way sharing a piece of your heart always does.

     But this song fits the spirit of these  verses so well. “Be Thou My Vision” has steadied me again and again, turning my eyes back toward God when I’ve been scattered or anxious or too focused on shadows.