How's Your Vision?

          I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.  Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord. (Psalm 27:13-14)


          How’s your vision? Mine’s not so great. I’ve never gotten an official statement of what it is, but at best, it’s 20/200. I see at 20 feet what someone with good vision sees at 200. Even more sadly, I think my spiritual sight might be worse, and I suspect a lot of people are just as spiritually nearsighted as I am. 
          The greater problem may not be nearsightedness. It might be that our brains don’t recognize what we see. I’m guilty of this. I have walked by relatives, or had relatives walk up to me, and not realized who it was. My mind was on other things. One of the games that circulates on social media are the “Which one is different?” Or “Can you spot the _____?” games. Both require that you pay attention to minute details. They can be quite tricky because the mind fills in and/or removes the differences. You can look at them for hours before finally saying, “Oh yeah, his eyebrow is missing.” This is why it’s a mistake for a write to try to proofread what he/she has written. We know what it’s supposed to say, and it’s easy to miss sometimes. 
          When it comes to seeing the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, it can be a challenge. We’re looking for something big or flashy and it’s just not there. What is there is some tiny bit of goodness: a smile, a door held, a flower along a sidewalk. It’s gone from our conscious minds almost before our conscious minds acknowledge it  - sometimes actually before! But we hold on to the image of the guy who cut us off in traffic, the dead plant along the sidewalk, the person who doesn’t wear a mask. We’ve trained ourselves to pay attention to the countless ways we’re told we aren’t God, but not to the ways in which God says, “I love  you.” 
          Another connected issue is our unwillingness to wait. This is also partly a vision problem. We tend to focus on what is, not on what we hope will be. As a result, what is seems to extend is indefinitely. This was my life when I worked at a store. I would walk across the parking lot trying to keep from crying because it was another in the endless stream of days when I had to face that place. There was no escape, until there was. Then I was going to be taking care of my father until the day I died. And now, I’m lost and trying to find my way, and it’s the same thing. My mind whispers that I’m going to be wandering for the rest of my life. And even though I fully believe that God will guide and direct me, and that where I am is not where I’ll be forever, the whispers continue.  
          This is another example of the idea that our universes contract to the size of the source of our pain, fear, or anger. Those things become our personal Black Holes, and the first step in escaping them is to stop looking at them.