Seeing Clearly

By Lori Scharf

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A couple weeks ago, I got glasses. When I looked through my lenses for the first time, I was shocked. I had a feeling my vision had gotten worse, but when I put on my glasses I saw just how much. The changes had been so gradual, I hadn’t even noticed them until my vision was corrected. 

This can happen to our spiritual ‘vision’ too. The way you see the world can become clouded and blurry as sin creeps in unnoticed. The only way we can clear our sight is by looking through the lens of the Bible, and God’s Word is the best pair of glasses you’ll ever use. 

God gave us the Bible and the Holy Spirit to help us see Him in our dark and clouded world, full of blurry lines and pitfalls. But, just like glasses, these tools only benefit us if we use them. 

See, just like the glasses doctors give us to help us see better, we have to take care of our spiritual lens too. I clean my glasses at least once a day, if not multiple times, to keep my vision as clear as possible; but my spiritual lens might go for days or even weeks before I polish it up. 

If you’re like me, you often find yourself saying something along the lines of ‘I was going to read my Bible today, but I’m too busy.’ If we think about that for just one second, we see how ridiculous that is. Too busy to spend time with God? Too busy to clean off our glasses so we can actually see the world? And yet we still have time to scroll on social media for hours, or do any number of things that are really just wasting our time or even damaging us in the long run.  

Sometimes in the morning, I’ll forget I even have glasses. I’ve gone the whole morning a couple times without putting them on, then when I do, everything becomes so much clearer. Afterwards I wonder how I ever went without them at all. 

Whenever I put aside the time to read my Bible, pray, and clean off my ‘glasses’, I notice a difference in my attitude and even my strength against temptation. Once you take the time to put on your spiritual lenses and clean them off, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner; it’s that much of a difference. 

Now, when I take my glasses off, everything becomes blurry and unfocused, and because I can’t focus well on one thing, everything else seems bigger, more menacing, and very blurry. 

When we don’t put on the glasses God gave us to help us see the world, all the lines blur and everything is blown out of proportion. Suddenly, the world seems too big and too dark to handle. That’s why we must commit to keeping our spiritual lenses clean and put them to good use every day. 

Another side of that, is when you do take them off, you’ll see just how much better off you are with them on, just like when I take my glasses off at night. Once you get used to your vision being clear and focused, you’ll never want to go back to the old blurry world you saw before. 

So, will you join me in taking the time to keep your lenses clean?

Until next time,

-Lori