Leaves & Vision

I remember the drive clearly. My mom was taking me home from the eye doctor with my brand spanking new pair of glasses. I pressed my face up against the car window and stared in wonder. Leaves. I could see leaves.

No one had realized the problem with my vision until one school day I traipsed off to the nurse’s office for the required yearly check-up. I had some difficulty telling her the letters on the sign, and she started to ask me questions about the blackboard being fuzzy. Sure enough, when far away, I was having to squint quite a bit at the board. I was sent home with a note (or did they call my parents? this part of the memory is a bit fuzzy), and shortly thereafter I had an appointment with the eye doctor. Always one with keen fashion sense, I picked out a large pair of glasses with pink, purple, and green paint speckles all over them. It was the early nineties folks. They matched my bangs that were teased and curled six inches above my head.

Anyways, before that fateful day of picking up my glasses, I assumed that for everyone, trees from a distance were just a blurry mass of color.  I had no idea that even from a considerable distance, you could actually see the defined edges and texture of leaves. And so I stared out of that car window in fascination at the world that had been opened up to me.

I always think about that experience whenever I’m reading through Mark and get to the account of Jesus healing a blind man. It’s always been one of my favorite healing accounts because it proceeds a bit differently than most. Jesus spits on the guy, puts his hands on him, and then inquires about his vision. Instead of replying with the expected, “Why yes, my vision is perfect!”, the man proclaims, “Sure, I can see, but the people look like trees.” So once again Jesus lays his hands on the guy’s eyes, and it’s only at this point that he sees everything clearly.

I’ve always wondered, why the two times? Why wasn’t his vision fixed perfectly the first time? While I don’t have a definitive answer to that question, the story has come to be picture of a common experience within my own life. There have been times that the Father has radically altered my vision in a way that entirely changes the way I view the world around me. Things come into sharper focus…things that I previously didn’t even recognize as blurry. This change is perhaps most obvious when a person decides to follow the Father and recognizes for the first time his sovereign control in this world. However, many of us need the Son to continually come back and lay his hands on us again, to aright our vision again. Our perspectives and vision are still to a great extent marred, and the difficulty is that many of us don’t even realize the problem. We assume that the trees are just supposed to be a blur of color. These untrained and unpracticed eyes only see a shadow, only a distortion of what is really around us. Thank goodness the Son is patient enough to lay his hands on us again, to continue to peel back the scales that cover our eyes until that glorious day when we see fully and clearly–even without speckled rimmed lenses.

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.