Glasses are a pretty amazing thing. Being able to see is pretty amazing. My sweet darling daughter has strabismus. When she was 3 my husband and I had both noticed that she seemed to have trouble focusing. Through an incredibly providential set of “coincidences” we were led to the perfect eye doctor. We’d already been told by another doctor that it was something she would just grow out of, so I literally almost passed out when our current eye doctor told us she’d been seeing double her whole life and that she needed immediate surgery to correct the problem. And so, shortly after her 4th birthday, she had eye surgery on both her eyes. The difference was amazing. She had been able to focus on things up close well enough, which is why she would come up with the correct number of things when counting if they were up close and twice as many when they were far away. She still runs into things occasionally, simply because even 4 years later, she still has some body awareness issues, and she still has regular eye exercises she does. It’s a beautiful thing to see how much of a difference fixing her eye sight has made for her though.
I’ve been thinking about that lately–partly because we recently had some of the same eye issues re-dealt with through CST and partly because my own perspective on life has been wildly vacillating. Some days I can look at the events of the past year and see that God has been taking care of and be able to trust that He has a plan for our future. Other days I can’t understand why we’ve had to deal with all this craziness. I can’t tell you how sick and tired I am of being sick and tired.
This week I shared a set of circumstances with two of my closest advisors and their responses were totally different because of their own personalities and life experiences. And it made me think about how I view those particular circumstances. Am I seeing them as an opportunity for freedom or something to grieve over or something to get bitter over?
And this morning in my Esther study, this quote from Beth Moore stuck out: “Esther shows that ordinary events are never coincidental in the lives of God’s people.” It reminded me that the lens I need is God’s character. He is sovereign. He is love. He is always working out my best. That’s where meaning and purpose and safety and peace and joy all come from. Not from looking at my circumstances. Not from trying to muster myself into a good frame of mind. Not from having circumstances that are “happy.”
A good lens comes from just sitting in God’s presence and letting Him remind me who He is and who I am.
