Eyesight

I took my son to the ophthalmologist this week for the last time.

My son has had prescription glasses for almost four years, but I could probably count on my hands the number of days he's actually worn them. Since he first got them, he has claimed that they don't make a difference. A couple years ago, his eye doctor became concerned that his eyesight was deteriorating for no apparent reason and referred him to a specialist.

The first time we went to the ophthalmologist, he confirmed what my son had been saying all along – his glasses did not, indeed, make a significant difference to his eyesight. In fact, he has probably had fairly poor vision his entire life and it is unlikely to improve. He has never seen clearly and so he sees as well as can be expected. For whatever reason, corrective lenses don't improve his vision appreciably.

On this final check-up, as usual, my son was instructed to read the eye chart on the wall, the larger letters on the top, and then decreasing in size. First he read as far as he could without his glasses and then he tried with his glasses on. I sat there, watching my son, a voracious reader, read the first and second line correctly, and by the third row, struggling to make out the letters, sometimes mistaking one for another, regardless of whether he was wearing glasses or not. He could say with conviction that the G was a D, but that did not make it so. He could believe that a K was a Z, but reality was unaffected. What he saw was different than what was really there.

I have to wonder if this isn't a picture of how life on this earth is. I see bad things happen to people to whom I believe they shouldn't, and I see the letters B-A-D or

W-R-O-N-G or U-N-F-A-I-R. That is all I can make out on the eye chart and it makes me angry or anxious or afraid. That is what I see and that is what I can choose to believe. It is in those times that I have to instead choose to trust that God's vision is clearer than mine, that God can read farther down the chart than I can, that to God, the events of life aren't just a mad jumble of random letters, but that they spell something more, something meaningful, perhaps in a language I do not yet know.

For now we see through a glass, darkly;

but then we shall see face to face:

now I know in part;

but then I shall know even as also I am known.

1 Corinthians 13:12

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for

and certain of what we do not see.

Hebrews 11:1