The Cure for Blurry Vision

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.

My physical sight has been treated for over twenty years, although it needs tweaking every now and then. A slightly stronger prescription is sometimes necessary as eyes age and eye shape changes. Not too long ago, I went to the eye doctor for some new contacts. I had been carrying the prescription from a previous exam in my purse, but as is often the case in my life now, other pressing matters took precedence over my own needs. I finally made my way to the office, thinking the visit would be short – in and out with a new box of lenses in just a few minutes.

The receptionist glanced at my prescription and said, “Honey, this thing expired last month. You’ll need a whole new exam.” (Sidebar – I know I live in the south, but it irks me to no end when people call me ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie’ and ‘sugar.’ You don’t know me. I could be as sour as pickles from a green-lidded jar. But I digress.)

Of course I needed a new exam. Such is my luck. Thankfully, there had been a cancellation for the next time slot, so I was able to go straight back to the torture chamber known as the exam room, where puffs of air are jettisoned straight into your eyeball in spite of your ridiculous blinking efforts to stop them.

As the doctor began to examine my eyes, he could not get an accurate reading. To begin with, I only got one answer correct on the ‘reading the chart’ test, and that’s because I cheated. I knew there had to be an E on the top. 

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.

As I walked out of his office, self-conscious in my glasses and feeling like that awkward fourth grader again, I immediately thought of how myopic my spiritual eyes are and how damaged and weary they become, too. 

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.

So many variables give me an inaccurate picture of my reality. When I allow my emotions to be the barometer for my life, I give in to self-pity and only believe of God what I currently feel from Him. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things…” Deceitful, in case you (ok, I) have forgotten, means misleading, lying, being anything but the truth. 

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.

My spiritual eyes are also, more than I’d like to admit, blinded by what others say about and do to me. To this day, I can remember a hurtful comment made to me by a guest speaker in elementary school. I hoard others’ comments like squirrels do acorns. I hang on to them, storing them in dark, secret places, uncovering them when I see they’ll be useful (like in my poorly-attended but all-night pity parties).

 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.

The intricacy of the human eye is mind-boggling. Scientists argue that the eye is more complex than any other naturally occurring mechanism, and that it would take a supercomputer 100 years to process what the eye does in 1/100^th of a second. But in order for this complex organ’s rods and cones to work properly, light must first enter the iris. Read that again. Light must enter. Without light, there is no vision.

You likely know a verse that speaks of light. Jesus spoke to people gathered around Him, those who were desperate for accurate vision in the midst of Pharisees’ clouded sight. He said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). Without the Light of the World entering, we will never see the bigger picture. We will squint at foggy distortions instead of marveling in crisp clarity. We will miss the visible wonders and never grasp the beauty of new eyes.

It is not just accepting Jesus that focuses the eyes of our spirits, though. I had been carrying the prescription for new contacts in my purse for weeks, but had not used it. I had in my grasp, daily, the cure for my poor vision, but it was tucked away and useless. How often do I do the same with my God? He is the cure to my every problem, the lens for my myopic sight, but I leave Him tucked away while I curse headaches that come from squinting at preventable blurs.

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.