Choose Not to Be Blind

Yet Another Year of Choices

By Barbara Dahlgren

Years ago an article in Discover Magazine entitled Sight Unseen caught my eye. It recounted the true story of Mike May, a man who lost his sight at the age of 3 when a jar of lantern fuel fell and exploded in his face. But Mike was not going to let being blind slow him down. He played flag football and soccer in school. He held the world speed record for downhill skiing by a blind person. He earned a master’s degree in international affairs at Johns Hopkins, worked for the CIA, and became president of a company that made talking Global Positioning Systems for the blind. He even found time to marry and have two children. Then, with modern technology, a miraculous surgery gave him back his sight.

According to the surgeons, May’s eyes were given a lens that ought to provide crystal clear vision. But…it didn’t. Since Mike May was blind from childhood, his brain had never been programmed to fully process the visual information it received. Therefore, Mike had to still use his seeing-eye dog and walk by tapping the sidewalk with his cane. He was a blind man with vision. Sight signals went to the brain but they were not being interpreted well. He should have been able to discern letters on an eye chart from 25 feet away but he could only see them at 2 feet away. He couldn’t distinguish a cube from a sphere. Basically, although Mike had his sight restored, he had to learn to see which is still an ongoing process.

This article helped me to realize how amazing it was when Jesus healed the man blind from birth in John 9. Of course, it was a miracle that the man gained sight, but according to the scientific data we now have available to us, it was a miracle he could see clearly after Jesus gave him his sight.

In Luke 18, a blind beggar was persistent in shouting to Jesus as He passed. Was Jesus asking a foolish question when He said, “What do you want of me?” It was obvious that the blind beggar wanted to see. “Lord, I want to see.” Perhaps Jesus knew that gaining sight is a tricky thing. When we gain sight, sometimes we don’t see as well as we would like. Sometimes we see things we don’t want to see.

Spiritually speaking, God does not wish us to be blind. He wants to reveal His truth to us. He wants us to have minds ready to assimilate that truth. He wants us to see clearly. But do we really want to see?

Consider this… To see means we might have to actually study the Bible rather than just rely on what we think it says. To see means we might have to not only believe what God says but act on it. To see means we might have to learn how to worship God in spirit and truth. To see means we might need to reevaluate why we do what we do. To see means that things may be hazy for a little while until our brains program the information. To see means we might actually need to change.

Being able to see is a much more complicated process than we might think. Still, it beats the alternative to staying blind. Just ask Mike May.

One last thought…

When I sing the worship song Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord, it has much more meaning for me now. After all, I don’t want to have sight without vision.

 

 

 

 

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