Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that those who do not see may gain their sight, and the ones who see may become blind.” (John 9:39)
For five days running, the vacation Bible school told us about Jesus. The message saturated my eleven-year-old heart and pumped through my veins, right up to my eyes. Things looked different. When the man at the front said come forward if you want Jesus, I went.
The next day, my vision was still changed. My new eyes made me understand things, like why I shouldn’t punch on my sisters.
Time dulled my special sight. During my teenage years I squinted into the dark world. I was going blind again.
At age nineteen, God offered a bailout. I could join an evangelical missionary group in the U.S. Midwest, or I could stay with my druggy friends. It was time to choose.
Maybe I can understand why those who have never seen God’s light might elect blindness, but I had looked into an existence of glory and I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there. I decided to fix my eyes on Jesus.
Life is about choosing what we see. I have to be blind to the temporal or the eternal. If my sights are on material objects, then faith disappears. But when I stare at eternity, the world fades and truth solidifies into the person of Jesus.
Prayer: Exalted One, I choose to see beautiful you.