A New Pair of Glasses

Do you wear glasses? If you do, you will understand me when I remember these moments (and if you don't, well, you're getting older, so you might experience this one day...):

You sit at a table with a funny round mirror and a stranger puts glasses on your face. That is never good. Another person can never put your glasses on for you or take them off for you and it still feel right. If you've been wearing them your whole life, like me, you smile a "no offense" smile and you take them off your face and put them on yourself. There. That's better.

Then, a strange thing happens. You blink, you look at yourself in the mirror, you look around the room. You start looking for things to read. And for a few moments you feel like you are in a fish tank looking through 10 gallons of distorting water. And then - amazingly soon - your eyes say - oh YEAH... I can SEE that. And THAT. And that, TOO!

And by the time you've paid these nice people and walked out of there, you think, how could I have ever lived without seeing the world like this? I must have been blind before because everything looks so new and crisp and almost fake. Perhaps it is the shocking cleanliness of the lenses that contributes to that. No matter what, they will never be THAT clean again... you just know it...

You drive home and it is like you are experiencing everything for the first time. Leaves? the trees have leaves? I thought they were just green scribbles like my daughter used to draw. The details of the world begin to pop out at you and you realize how much you had been missing.

Sometimes, if we allow it, God can do the same thing for our hearts. When you finally reach that point when you just can't see anymore, when your head aches from trying on your own to understand your situation and your heart strains against what you think you see. Your dim view is causing you to trip, your aim is bad, and you feel unsure of where you are even going. It is in these moments, if we are wise, that we turn our eyes on the Great Physician and we ask Him to repair our vision.

We rise from our knees, we raise our heads from His Word and we blink, we look in the mirror. We begin to look around the room and suddenly, with the refraction of His love and mercy, we begin to SEE. We wonder how on earth we could have been so blind. Perhaps we feel shame and loss for waiting so long, but mostly, mostly we feel relief. And wonder. And a refreshing newness as we are able to look at ourselves with truth and others with love.

Leaves? The trees have leaves?