Set Your Eyes Higher (Excerpt) by Whitney Lowe

We are excited to get to share with you an excerpt from Whitney Lowe’s new book, Set Your Eyes Higher: A 40-Day Reset to Slow Your Anxiety and Fix Your Focus on God (September 24, 2024). Life is complicated, and sometimes, we don’t know where to look. Here is a book that serves to remind us to look beyond ourselves and circumstance and to look higher.

“When I look at believers today, I see that so many of us have tons of sincerity and genuine love for God, but I also see cultural influences threatening to skew our focus,” writes Whitney. “We’ve been looking down, and we need to shift our gaze back up to the throne of God, and to retrain our mental and spiritual muscles back to healthy functioning.” (Provided by HarperCollins Christian Publishing).

We are grateful to HarperCollins Christian Publishing for making this possible.

Get your copy of Set Your Eyes Higher here!

Hope for Fools

[An excerpt from SET YOUR EYES HIGHER by Whitney Lowe]

“What? She really thought she could get away with charging eighty dollars for that?!” I exclaimed.

Friends, I was in deep. Here I was, using my precious last hour of the day scrolling through the latest drama on CakeTok, the baking community on TikTok. (Important context: I don’t even bake.) I had just watched forty-five minutes of a professional cake decorator shaming an unhappy client. I was on the cake decorator’s side, until she showed us the cake that started this controversy. And in the kindest of terms, yikes.

I jumped to the comment section to see how others reacted. Sure enough, commentor after commentor echoed the same sentiment—that baker’s work was astronomically overpriced.

Then, things got personal. “Her ego is way too big.” “Her cakes are so bad I thought her account was a joke.” “She is disgusting.”

I rose from the phone, bleary-eyed and disoriented. How did I get here? Why was this drama so interesting to me?

My scroll through the comments illuminated a problem: because of the dynamics around modern news media, social media, and the availability of information, we believe we are wise enough to judge anything and everything. Because we can search Google or YouTube for the answer to nearly any question, we struggle to believe that comprehensive understanding could be outside our grasp. Whether it looks like taking sides in random internet drama (à la CakeTok), or our outrage about complex political issues, we are a culture of quickly rendered, inflexible conclusions.

I’ve even found myself losing my patience with true, slow learning—especially the part that requires me to sit under the teaching of experts who have dedicated their lives to a particular field. Sitting is boring. I much prefer to get the gist of an issue from the fastest source—and to sound off my opinion just as quickly.

Yet I know myself to be limited in my perspective, right? I’m sure you can think of a time when you made a knee-jerk decision that had an unfortunate impact on your life. If we can’t always discern what’s right for our own lives—where we have the most context and detail—why would we assume we could have an accurate grasp of reality 100 percent of the time?

Reading Proverbs 26:12 should slow us all down: “Do you see a person wise in their own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for them” (niv). To me, this means whenever I find myself feeling like the smartest person in the room (or in the comments section), it’s time to take a long, hard pause.

Ultimately, we don’t know everything about anything. We need a regular reality check about the limitations of our own understanding.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways,

and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:8–9 NIV

Just like we have not been made to contain all the information in the world, we have not been created to understand the complexity of everything in the world. I think this is a big part of why we are commanded so many times not to judge (Matthew 7:1–5). It’s not that we don’t know what truth is; it’s that our ability to discern the motives of others and to understand all factors in a given situation is often limited. After all, as we read in Proverbs 17:28: “Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent” (ESV). Perhaps, like me, you need to read that again (don’t worry, I’ll ask you to at the end of this devotion). So many of us are trying to sound informed and knowledgeable.

“Just like we have not been made to contain all the information in the world, we have not been created to understand the complexity of everything in the world.”

So many of us think we have a better grasp on complex topics (and people) than we actually do. We feel pressure to be an expert on everything and experience anxiety when we aren’t. We need to remember that the more we try to look wise, the more we end up revealing our lack of true understanding.

It’s okay not to know it all.

TODAY’S READING: ISAIAH 55:8–10

FOR ADDITIONAL STUDY: PROVERBS 17:19-28

Lord,

I am tired of the constant pressure to pretend I know what is right in all situations, and I’m tired of the way that pressure makes me judge other people. Your ways are higher, and Your thoughts are better. Help me develop an accurate sense of my own wisdom. Help me take my gaze off the futile practice of arbitrating truth and judgment.

Amen.

[Excerpted with permission from Set Your Eyes Higher: A 40-Day Reset to Slow Your Anxiety and Fix Your Focus on God by Whitney Lowe. Copyright © 2024 Whitney Lowe. Used with permission of Zondervan, an imprint of HarperCollins Christian Publishing.]

Get your copy of Set Your Eyes Higher here!

Whitney Lowe is a Christian influencer who wants to see young women excited about God’s work: in the Bible, in history, in the world, and in them. She writes and creates on Instagram @ScribbleDevos, a project born from the realization that young women simply do not interact with the Bible enough to be changed by its truth. Whitney is passionate about disrupting the toxic scroll of social media with hope, peace, and light straight from Scripture. She lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband, who is a pastor, and their two young children.

Until next time, keep witnessing!

XX