To see clearly...

 “Finally brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.”
                                    - Phillippians 4: 8, 9

Yesterday I was wearing glasses. Now, many of you didn’t even know that I wore glasses because I’m always wearing contacts. But occasionally I’ll bust out the glasses, and yesterday just happened to be one of those occasions. At evening program, Randy asked to borrow my glasses for a skit… so I let him, consequently causing me to be blind for a whole 5 minutes. It was in those few minutes that a thought came to me… and I’m going to share it with you this morning.

My story takes place back in the good old days when I attended Westdale Elementary School in Saginaw, Michigan. I was in 4^th grade and if you can imagine, was a complete nerd. I mean, I wrote poetry and got straight A’s. I didn’t have any really good friends, but even now I don’t remember it to be a bad year in the least. However, it was in that 4^th grade year that something started happening…

“Tamara, why are you sitting so close to the tv?!” My mom began to ask me every time I’d sit down to watch “All That” or reruns of “Saved By The Bell”.

“I don’t know…” I’d reply. I didn’t really think about a reason. It was just what I did.

At school I began to realize that I couldn’t make out anything on the whiteboard. I’d squint to try and see, but to no avail. I knew what this meant. Glasses.

I was already a nerd to begin with, now we really have to add the glasses into the mix? Why yes, yes we did. So I told my mom the reason why I always sat so close to the tv and she quickly took me to the eye doctors where I got my eyes checked and a prescription made for a shiny new pair of glasses.

I remember the moment like it was yesterday. I was sitting there, waiting to put on glasses for the first time in my life. I didn’t think much of it, until… whoa. I could see. No really. Those big green blurry bushes, were actually leaves on a tree. Details were in full focus and all of a sudden I was so shocked at how much I was missing out before. People can actually see all of this, from this far away?! I was amazed. And happy! I could not wait to wear my glasses all the time!

But, unfortunately, the excitement died down… and two years later I couldn’t stand to wear my glasses. I was going into the 6^th grade, transitioning into Middle School and just had to look cool which meant – NO glasses. I was NOT going to be a nerd anymore. I had boys to impress! Popularity to achieve! The world was mine for the taking – without these nerdy glasses.

Contacts were not an option though. I couldn’t stand the thought of touching my eyes, let alone having something in them all day. I shuddered to think of it.  So instead, I just didn’t wear my glasses to school. By this time, my prescription had gotten progressively worse and worse. But I didn’t care. I refused to wear those glasses because I was convinced that I looked ugly and uncool in them.

How did I survive, you ask? Oh I had perfected the art of the eye squint. I would make sure no one was looking at me, and pull the sides of my eyes to make them squint. The distortion it caused my retinas made my vision to become clear, although I was seeing only a sliver of anything. But it worked. I’m sure people saw me and wondered what in the world I was doing, but I thought I was pretty clever and sneaky.

The story eventually ends in me getting cool glasses to wear (that weren’t really that cool but I just thought they were) and then eventually getting up the guts to get contacts, which I wear til this day.

But I was thinking about this story and the similarity between us and God’s truth.

All of our visions are blurry. And sometimes we don’t realize it. Sometimes we think we know what is right and what is wrong and what’s best for us… and we are content to see things the way we want to see them. And over time, we may begin to realize that our way of thinking, the way we see things, may not be exactly right or clear…

And when we make that decision to trust in God and allow him to show us his truth… we get the metaphorical glasses and our vision suddenly becomes so clear. And the things that we didn’t understand before, lines that may have been blurry, we now see clearly. And we are so excited! We can’t believe we didn’t know all this before.

And over time… maybe…. Some of us decide it’s not quite “cool” to see the right things. To really know the truth and act upon it. So we metaphorically decide to take off our glasses and try and see on our own again. Distorting the truth so that we still look cool and may be technically right, but aren’t allowing God’s truth to really show us the right way.

The verse I read in the beginning, Phillipians 4: 8,9 is one we’ve all heard many times. It gets a little bit overdone. Yeah yeah yeah, whatever is good, kind, noble, yadda yadda yadda. But if you really think about it, many of us brush this verse off because we don’t fully know what is right and good and noble because so many of us are distorting our eyes from seeing God’s truth. That’s why I love the next verse that says, “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.”

Jesus came as an example to this earth – to show us the Father. In my opinion, the one word to sum up God is Love.

So often I feel threatened by verses in the Bible that say you have to think on all these pure, good, holy, right things… because let’s face it – we are sinners. We don’t always do that. We try, but we fail many times... and we get discouraged and we feel ugly and take off our glasses because we see what’s right but just can’t seem to do it the right way.

But our God is a loving God. A forgiving God. If we stand up, put on those glasses (whether or not they are cool) we will see clearly. And no matter how many times we think we can do it on our own, we think we know what we’re doing, we can just take off those glasses and squint and see fine… Just know, God will always be there, waiting to hand those glasses back to us so that our vision can be perfectly clear.