Flawed Sight

We were driving down the road commenting on interesting colors of automobiles when my son informed me that he wished he were color-blind.

“How would you know what’s real . . . what’s true,” I questioned. How would you know when you see yellow, that it’s not really green? Or green, red?

Isn’t it difficult enough? Doesn’t a discerning mind rage already? Battling to perceive, warring over what is seen but to be believed?

  

Mine certainly does, anyway!

Because what you see is not what you get.

Foolery reigns the day. (Or so it seems!)

We see our government and believe it can save the day, we perceive our pensions can provide. And Christians, righteous.

Isn’t there much that parades as truth?

Doesn’t the world scream, as did Pilate, “What is truth?”

Banks promise financial freedom only to take the debtor captive.

The bigger life spouts that it’s the better life.

So how do we know what to believe?

How does the color-blind know what’s real?

They learn. They train to know what their eyes can’t see.

My father was color-blind (and yet he was a painter!). I saw this as a handicap. I thought that he was cheated and missing out on so much.

Or was he?

He could tell you every color—and their proportions—that blended together to make a color, but he couldn’t tell you with certainty what the color was. He knew what it was made up of, derived from. He knew its essence.

He knew beyond what he could see.

You could ask him if something was blue or green but he only saw brown. And yet he could match a color, recreate it. He couldn’t see the color but he saw more. He saw deeper. He saw beneath the surface to its core.

And didn’t that matter more?

Jesus, all of creation’s only truth, is what’s real. Is what can really be counted on to be true.

And His disciples? Well, really they’re learners. Learners of The Master. Learners of His perfect, loving ways. Training our hearts to match His.

If I know Him and know what He taught, that’s my sight—the lens through which I must view the rest of the world. I learn to look beyond what I see…beyond the surface to what things are made up of.

So, maybe my son is on to something. Because what we see may not always be what is true anyways—we’re often world-blind. Blinded to see the worldly in things flaunted as light. And blinded by the world, its lies, and its ways.

Wouldn’t it be better then to learn to see by what we know rather than trust what we see? For we know we can really and truly trust what we can’t see.

When our sight is flawed, help us to go by what we know to be true . . . You, Lord.