That I May See

             Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law. (Psalm 119:18)

          Recently, there has been pictures on Facebook that – if you squint, the picture changes from one thing to another. There are also posts in which someone shares with you something you might have missed in a book or movie. I have read books more than once, including the Bible, and gotten something out of them the second or third time. I know others who have as well.

          So while we may hear (or even think) that reading the Law is a long list of boring “Thou shalt nots…” that take all the joy out of life. But this prayer is about finding life in the Law instead. It takes looking at things differently. Our eyes need to be opened. It is like what C. S. Lewis says about Christianity: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

          I have to chuckle a little about this. Many people seem to want to establish truth from within themselves. How they see things is what is true, to them. When I was in third grade, they decided that I needed glasses. I don’t know how bad my vision was then, but if I drove my truck without my glasses or contacts in, I would get in trouble with the police even if I didn’t get in a wreck. I can identify the big E on the optometrist’s chart because I know there’s a big E on the optometrist’s chart. If they changed the letter, I’d probably be unable to identify it. In addition to nearsightedness, I have astigmatism. In short, my eyes don’t present truth to me. They haven’t since I was in grade school, if then.

          So when someone (including me) declares that the way they see something is the truth to them, I have to ask if what they see as true is objectively true to anyone whose vision is good – who can see that the E on the chart is an E, or whether what they see is true because they need “glasses” of some sort.