Seeing Clearly
As many of you know, last week, our middle son Eli had surgery to correct something that was wrong with his eyes. Everything went well, and he’s doing great, recovering quickly, and his vision is getting better day by day. I wanted to pause and, on behalf of myself, Amanda, and Eli (and Jonah and Zeke – who just had shoulder surgery too!), thank you for your love and care throughout his recovery (as well as Zeke’s!). Your prayers, offers to help, drive, and babysit, and the meals you provided for us were so encouraging, thoughtful, and helpful.
We are so grateful for you, and blessed because of you.
It’s in times like this – because of people like you:
it is so easy for me to see the love of God through the church.
That thought got me thinking and reflecting about vision, about seeing clearly.
To go back to Eli – it turns out, his eyes were slightly misaligned, and it has been like that all of his life. Because of this, his brain has had to slightly recalibrate what he sees so that he sees ‘correctly’ – but things had begun to go a little haywire. The surgery was basically to realign his eyes, but the issue is, now his brain has to unlearn how it learned to see clearly and relearn – or recalibrate itself – to his new eye alignment. Right now, he’s seeing double, but it’s getting better and better everyday as his brain recalibrates and relearns to see clearly. Thank God for surgery and surgeons who can correct such issues – and thank God for our adaptable and resourceful brains!
One of the things I want to see more than almost anything else, is the world around us come to see the love of God as clearly as I have.
Our friends, neighbors, co-workers, family members, and everyone in-between. So many of them can’t see God’s love because, like Eli, their vision needs correcting! They’ve learned, mostly through no fault of their own, to see God’s people (the church) with suspicion, as hypocrites, or even as hateful. And so, many of them see God like that. Or they, like Eli, see with a kind of double vision that, on one hand, wants to believe in God – but on the other hand doesn’t because of what they’ve seen from us. We know that we can’t go around performing surgery on them – that’s not how this works.
So how can we help them see the love of God more clearly?
I think the answer is pretty obvious, and pretty clear:
love and care for them,
just like you did for us.
When the church loves those around it, cares for those who are suffering, feeds those who are hungry, welcomes those who are outcast, visits those who are alone, and shows up for people who are scared, the love of God becomes easy to see. Maybe not at first, maybe not as clearly as we’d wish at times, but it becomes visible, because it becomes tangible, touchable, relatable.
And that’s what God wants: for his love to made visible through us.
This is what John writes to us in his first letter (which we happen to be starting tomorrow in our bible reading plan!):
11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.
1 John 4