When I was a gangly-legged fourth grader with a bad perm and unbraced teeth, an optometrist diagnosed me with myopia, or near-sightedness. I had been squinting at school, unable to read white chalk on green board, so mother took me to the eye doctor to get the problem fixed.
I will never forget walking outside with my brand new eyes, able to see individual leaves on fall trees and crisp words on billboards.
It was as if I were seeing for the first time. Everywhere I looked, wonders were visible. I could tell who was walking towards me before they were close enough to touch. I could make out images on the television from across the living room. This being able to see was a huge deal – I was impressed!
No longer limited to seeing just what was in front of me, I became aware of what was going on around me that I had been missing. I was able, quite literally, to see a bigger picture.
As he asked, ‘this one, or that one?’ while turning the dial on his prescription-finder, I honestly answered, “Are you even changing it? Because they both look terrible.”
His eye-scanning machines failed miserably, his last and final attempt to get an accurate reading.
He finally said, “You know what? We’re going to have to do this another day. Your eyes have small abrasions on them from those old contacts, and they are too fatigued to focus properly.” He ordered me to wear my glasses for the next few days so that my eyes could rest and heal.
Slowly, subtly, without me even realizing it, my once 20/20 spiritual sight begins to lose sharpness and its focus lessens. When I allow the daily struggles and overwhelming task list to take precedence over time spent with God, eyes of the spirit become damaged and I see only clouded distortions. What I see is not what is.
What I see is improperly refracted. It is only through the lens of God’s Word that I will see everything around me – every condition – in its true form. Without a daily – even moment by moment – adjustment, I become near-sighted again, seeing only what is closest to me, not the bigger picture.
It is not sinful to feel what you feel, but so often emotions are inaccurate. I might feel like I am worthless and unwanted, but that doesn’t mean it’s so. Our hearts deceive us, because our hearts are sinful. They are tainted by the evil one, not yet made perfect in glorious permanence. Emotions cloud our view of the accuracy of God’s words.
Sometimes what we believe about ourselves (and our God) is so deeply rooted in the opinions of others that we are not even aware of their influence. I want to live by these words and dwell on them alone – “How precious to me are your thoughts, O God” (Ps. 139:17). Only Yours.
Charles Darwin, the agnostic scientist that Christians love to hate, said, “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable [incomparable] contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”
If the human eye, which we can see and touch and study, contains “inimitable contrivances,” how much more complex must the spiritual eyes we were given be? How many more methods must there be for “admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of . . . aberration[s]?”
We are not condemned to a lifetime of blurry sight or spiritual eyes that are wounded and in need of rest. God has given us “everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness” (2 Pet. 1:3). We already have ‘everything we need.’ We have it! It’s time we live like it. We ought to be on our faces, begging the Lord daily, “Open my eyes that I may see . . .” (Ps. 119:18).
Where there is cloudy vision, there is a healing lens. Where there are weary eyes, there is curing rest. Jesus is longing to give us eyes to see, but He is waiting for us to want them badly enough to ask.
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