That morning, I almost greeted a lamppost.
It seemed like a good time to make an appointment with the eye doctor.
What came next, you probably know: the waiting room, the machine that looks like a spaceship, the lenses changing while the doctor patiently asks “Better like this? And now?” — and you answer “Hmm… I think so?” with the concentrated look of someone who isn’t quite sure what they’re looking for.
And then, suddenly, the right pair. And everything becomes sharp. The outlines, the colours, the details you hadn’t noticed in so long you had begun to believe that seeing blurrily was normal.
On my way home with my new glasses, I thought that spiritual life can sometimes be like this. We grow used to a blurred vision. We take as certainties what is only fog. We confuse our fears with reality, our doubts with the truth.
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
1 Corinthians 13:12 (ESV)
And God waits — patiently, without mockery — to offer us an adjustment. Not a forced revolution. Just: “Better like this?” He tests with us, refines, gradually illuminates what was in the shadow.
Paul received a rather radical pair of glasses on the road to Damascus. A light, a fall, and everything he thought he saw clearly turned out to have been blurry from the start.