One of the things she had written all those years ago came back to my memory this week. It was a shorter entry, and in it she expressed her gratitude for clean windows. (Shout out to the other ladies who get all philosophical doing house chores. We are a fun breed.)
The gist--and perhaps even the entirety of her message was this: sometimes it isn't until you clean your glass that you realize how dirty you'd let it become first place. You only thought you were looking out at a clear picture before because your eyes had adjusted to the dirt. Cleaning the windows reveals all the things you had been missing that you didn't even realize you were.
(Clearly, the girl was talking about much more than windows...)
This past week I underwent laser eye surgery. I've had corrective lenses since I was fourteen, so I've been seeing through contacts and glasses for the better half of my life. It honestly wasn't until this past year that they've really started bothering me, but the annoyance came upon me in full force. I realized hundreds of dollars too late in the game that only certain girls look hip and trendy in glasses, while the rest of us look like...well, not those girls. Therefore, my glasses were for emergency use only and I lived in contacts (which worked until it didn't.)
Maybe it is because we had more time to play and travel these past 18 months, but I recently discovered that contacts are also the devil. Contact solution doesn't travel well at all. I was losing contacts on bathrooms floors and in campgrounds. I looked like I had turrets every time I went to a water park and got splashed. Contacts were *RIPPING IN TWO INSIDE MY EYE WHILE I WAS DRIVING!*
Had I always lived like this and never noticed it?!?
I got the call from my eye doctor to schedule an exam, and she sweetly let me know that my insurance now only covered this service every other year.
So I sweetly laughed in her face and asked her to MAKE IT ALL STOP, MAN!!!
And so here we are--Three awful weeks where I was only allowed to wear my stupid glasses, maybe ten whole minutes of laser zaps to my eyeballs, and a million and twenty eye drops later.
And guess what? I can't see for beans.
It turns out that the specific problem with my vision made me a better candidate for PRK or LASEK. (I have no idea which one of those I got. I probably should care more about that but I don't. Just let me live.)
These procedures either remove or roll back the top section of the eye before your vision is corrected, and then a bandage (aka another contact...gah!) is placed on your eye while that top layer heals. This actually makes your vision weaker in the initial stages, but then it keeps getting better and better with time.
I get my bandages off tomorrow. I originally thought that would be the light at the end of the tunnel for this process, but I still wear sunglasses inside at night---so if this is the light, then it's burning me. The last time I saw the doc he told me that my vision might still be blurry after this first week and perhaps even worse than they were at the post-op. And friends, I'm thinking I'm one of the lucky winners who will indeed be worse.
If I chose to focus on this specific moment, everything about this situation would make it appear that I've been suckered into a bad choice.
So I choose not to focus on the fuzz of this exact moment, but on the sharper picture that's been promised ahead.
All this sitting around inside my house with my sunglasses on, pondering dirty windows and vision and fuzz, also got me thinking about someone else whose vision was muddied before they could see clearly. (Literally.)
John 9 introduces us to a man blind since birth. And Jesus, responding to his need, spits in the dirt and rubs mud onto the man's blind eyes. "Go wash," Jesus said. And when the man did, he could see.
This story confused me for so long. Jesus could have spoken and the man would have been healed. The man could have touched Jesus, believing, and received sight. Jesus could have merely willed it and it would have been so. Why did He spit in the dirt and put mud on this man's eyes??
It's because that man needed to wash more than he needed to see.
Friends, we don't have to be able to see it to know that there's mud on our eyes.
Looking past dirt takes some adjustments, to be sure. But once mastered, we get so good at looking through the dirt that we forget it's there, hiding the better picture.
Looking through clean glass takes real effort and persistence. A good cleaning is always worthwhile and met with reward, but it's a continual process. No matter how hard you scrub, the dirt is going to come back because dirt is a part of the earth we live on. It is simply going to get kicked up on our windows from time to time. Our choices will always ever be to adjust and look past it, or to wash it off. And there's a sharper, better picture at the end of only one of those options.
I say all this to you not as a profession of someone squeaky clean, but as someone who has made adjustments for far too long and has to wipe off the dirt again and again and again. Sometimes I worry that I smudge and streak more than I clean--either remnants of the massive dirt piles or evidence of the sloppy housekeeper.
But even so, I am so thankful for moments of pure grace when I can see something a little clearer than I did before.
(Even if, for now, it's through my sunglasses in the dark.)
1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV)
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
May we all help each other through the fuzz, in Love.
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