My New Glasses

At the end of April, I started suffering from headaches. These have since been diagnosed as 'stress induced migraines’, but I elected to visit the optician in case my eyes were the cause. Sure enough, he suggested I obtain a pair of glasses, which I agreed to try. I bought the cheapest possible frames though had them coated with some kind of anti-reflective tint to guard against screen-induced eyestrain. I was a little sceptical of his recommendation; the establishment’s profits surely depend on sales and a recommendation would surely assist the monthly margins. At the weekend, the glasses arrived. They make quite difference. Blurred words which I had learned to ignore can now be read; there is a clarity I have not enjoyed for some years. Even typing these words is causing me to repeatedly lift up my glasses to marvel at the difference. There is nothing remarkable about this, of course; people who get glasses for the first time are bound to think such things. Yet the thought occurred to me that I would never have known my eyes were declining until I had something with which to gauge them. Eyesight generally wanes at a gradual rate, so one may hardly notice the difference. We assume we can see as well as ever when in fact we grow blinder by the day.

The Bible uses blindness, a condition for which ancient folk had far less recourse than we moderns, as a picture of spiritual understanding. Of Christ, Isaiah the prophet writes:

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped 35:5;

His mission would be

to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the prison, those who sit in darkness from the prison house. 42:7

When we live by and in Christ’s light, we see further, brighter, closer and better.