Vision

I am a near-sighted person.

That means I can see things right in front of my nose in microscopic clarity.

However, as things get further than about a foot away they get more blurry until about 20 feet away and after that, it's all the same. At that distance, what I see looks a lot like a Claude Monet painting. It's not that I don't see things. At a distance, I see things in broad strokes, just not in detail. And, when something is close enough for me to see the details it's sometimes so close that I can't see the whole thing at once.

Haystacks – Claude Monet, 1891

I have a sister who is even more near-sighted than I am. Our vision has never gotten any better or worse. We need strong glasses but we've had them since we were toddlers and that's just the way things are for us. It has some disadvantages but it has advantages too. I may never be able to become a pilot but I will never have to worry about not being able to read the small print instructions on a medication bottle because I can't find my bifocals. Plus, we don't know anything else so there's nothing to compare to.

My sister and I have an aunt who is far-sighted. She sees stuff far away in telescopic clarity. When we were kids she amazed us with her ability to see things far away. She could look at a bird across the yard and talk about whether the tiny feathers under its throat were red or orange with black tips. She could see those things and she felt sorry for us because we couldn't. We could hardly tell whether the thing in the tree was a bird or a squirrel, never mind what colour its chin was and she despaired that we would ever be able to function in the world.

However, we felt sorry for her in return. She couldn't read books or see to pick out a sliver in her hand or build a miniature model. If we made her a birthday card we had to go to the other side of the room and hold it up so she could read what we'd written in it because any closer than that she couldn't see it. We thought, ‘that must be awful.’ She couldn't see the things we saw clearly and we couldn't see the things she saw clearly. Neither of us could imagine how the other one could live with their terrible disability and each of us thought that our own situation was quite manageable.

I wonder whether our physical bodies and our personality and our spiritual sense line up with each other. I once had a job in which people sometimes laughed at me because I would plan the first few steps in great detail and then say, “... and then we'll go from there”. That's a near-sighted approach. “Do the next right thing” is a valuable near-sighted piece of advice. “One Day at a Time Sweet Jesus” is a song with a near-sighted point of view.

Jesus said some near-sighted things. “Do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow has enough worries of its own” is a near-sighted comment. Take care of the details right in front of you and things will fall in place as you go along. The parable of the Good Samaritan is a study in the benefits of doing the thing right in front of your nose and letting God guide you from there.

Paul, however, is much more far-sighted - he rarely quotes specific things Jesus said or did but he's often interested in the bigger picture of how Jesus' life, death, and resurrection work out for a wider group of people.  The book of Revelation is far-sighted in the extreme like my aunt. In Revelation, John's eyes are on the far horizon of history and he's got details at that distance that nobody else has seen but how exactly it applies at the moment is more than a little fuzzy and the church has been holding those writings up across the room trying to figure out what they say ever since.

I was intending to have a thoughtful little spiritual summary here but I'm going to leave that for another time. What do you think? Does your body and its combination of strengths and weaknesses match the strengths and weaknesses in your personality, your relationships, your faith? Do you use social or spiritual glasses to help manage areas in which you can't see clearly?  Do they need to change from time to time like a prescription that comes to include progressive lenses as you get older?

Do you wear your spiritual glasses as often as you should or do you sometimes leave them sitting on the table and forget about them until you realize you're missing things?