When I was just eight years old, I began wearing glasses to correct my terrible nearsightedness. Believing the glasses obscured my beauty, I got contact lenses as soon as my parents would let me (age thirteen, as it turned out). My vision continued to worsen, and when I was about 35, my optometrist told me at my late-afternoon appointment that I had “the worst prescription” he had seen all day.
The two patients before me had both been in their 70s.
So yeah. I’m basically blind without corrective lenses.
I am also VERY vain, so I wore the heck out of my contacts…and after I became a parent, I wore them way too much. I hated waking up in the middle of the night to nurse a baby and not being able to see, so I began wearing my contacts to bed.
Despite repeated warnings from aforementioned optometrist, I never stopped.
UNTIL…Â at the age of 38, a full twenty-five years after I began wearing contact lenses, my eyeballs just gave contacts a big “NOPE” one day. I couldn’t see right, I thought I had a brain tumor. My left eye hurt and I saw spots and “floaters.” I went to the eye doctor fearing the worst.
I got a diagnosis of “you wore your contacts to bed for 12 years straight and now your left eye is swollen and really, REALLY mad at you.”
After a couple weeks in my old glasses, I tried about a million different brands of contacts, but in the end, my left eye decided it was DONE. Done done done. So, I gave in and got new glasses. It was WEIRD going back to glasses after 25 years in contacts, but eventually I got used to them and came to even *like* they way they look, despite my vanity.
BUT. You guys.
Keeping them CLEAN soon became the bane of my existence. I SWEAR to you I do my best to avoid touching my lenses with my fingerprints, but somehow they became irritatingly smudged every darn day regardless. I found myself cleaning them so often that I eventually bought a special cleaning cloth with a clip on it that I could attach to my purse. Turns out, having glasses is PRETTY high-maintenance, if you wanna be able to SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING.
UGH. I’ve never been much of a “Maintenance” person. I cannot even keep a potted plant alive. This is the sole reason why I don’t have pets, dye my hair, or get fancy manicures. Keeping three children and a house maintained is ALL I can do. Well, that, and keeping my GLASSES CLEAN. Sigh.
The other day I was walking out to my car, about to head out on some errand, when I stopped in the middle of my yard because I realized I couldn’t freaking see. I pulled my glasses off and peered at them…yep, they were disgustingly filthy. How had I been seeing through them for the previous few hours? How had I continued to work, to write stories, to use my computer while looking through such a dirty, cloudy lens?
The answer: my glasses had started out clean, but they’d gotten dirtier as they day went on, gradually picking up more and more filth minute by minute. As the smut accumulated, I just got used to it. I didn’t realize they were dirty until I walked out into the sun, and a light was shone on my the dirt that covered my lenses.
And I will be honest, you guys, I have never heard God speak to me OUT LOUD. But in that moment I heard a voice inside me say quite clearly: “Jenny, this is how you are seeing the world. You are looking at the world through DIRTY GLASSES.”
That’s it, that’s all I heard. But the Holy Spirit did not need to be any more clear. I KNEW what it meant.
My worldview was getting fuzzy. I was spending too much time getting my news from Facebook and my opinions from “popular” leaders and speakers and well, let’s face it, from people in my Facebook feed that IÂ admired. They SEEMED like good people, they preached LOVELOVELOVE, they told me I was bad and needed to change.
And I had started to believe it. And just like with my physical glasses, as the smut accumulated, I just got used to it.
So, as I looked down at the dirty glasses in my hand and I heard the Lord speak to my heart, I knew I needed to wipe off my literal glasses with that special cloth I’d purchased and some cold, clear water and I needed to give my figurative glasses a serious wipe-down with some living water and some pages from the Word of God. What’s more I needed to keep that worldview-cleaning cloth attached to my person just like I kept my glasses-cleaning cloth attached to my purse.
