Growth means change and
Change involves risk, stepping
From the known to the unknown.
My first real “incident” on the race happened in Ukraine. This looked like me dressing up as a tree for halloween and through a series of unfortunate events, acquiring a messed up cornea on top of a nasty eye infection. The day after halloween is when this chaos really went down. I woke up with a slightly blurry left eye that quickly turned into a red, puffy, watering, light-sensitive and visionless left eye. I went to the doctor three times in one week consisting of Ukrainian eye doctors referring to my condition as, “very bad, very dangerous, not good.”
And my only response was, “Yup, I’m getting a glass eye.”
No joke that was my only thought after these doctor visits. Each day I would pray and pray for healing. I would say how I trusted God but each day there was no healing and I was more frustrated and anxious than before. I could only see it for what it was on the surface. I only saw the cloudiness that had covered part of my forest green eyes. In reality I only saw this eye thing as pain from light sensitivity and headaches because of the cloudy vision. I was trying to be strong because after all it was just a stupid eye problem. But I had no clue if this was something I would be stuck with for the rest of my life or for the next 6 months or just the next week. I couldn’t bare the thought of a clear and vibrant world only being a memory. It turned out it was something deeper than that. It was a fear that truly, I may never be able to see the world the same again. I loved how stimulating the beauty around me was. From the vibrant autumn leaves to peoples faces so full of expression. I was having to cope with this dark feeling that I would never be able to see those in fullness ever again. I couldn’t escape that insecurity. It was a fear of change. That the world through my eyes might stay different and I was not okay with it. But The Father met me right there and He was faithful with His purpose for this.
God had withheld part of my sight in order for me to focus on hearing Him. He needed me to still praise His name in the midst of this confusion and fear of never being able to see the same again. That is when the dam of my emotions broke open. God had such incredible things to say to me and I was finally in a position to listen to them.
As creatures after God’s own image we bear part of His being inside us. The part of His being that I am referring to right now is His sight. Our God is not bound by visuals through the eyes. When He looks at us, as His creation, as His children, He doesn’t see what fleshly eyes see. He doesn’t see ugly or handsome. He doesn’t stamp us as sinner or inferior. He doesn’t not see us as broken or scarred. He doesn’t see us as our mistakes. Although He is well aware of our brokenness and pain. He looks at us with a different kind of sight. He sees our heart as they were created to be. He sees what lies so far beneath the surface we cannot even comprehend it. He is omniscient. God knows our greatest screw-ups and our deepest pains but He calls us His. The way we see people, through our flesh, is false. The Creator of the Universe declares that, they are blameless and they are mine. He brought me to a place of awareness of how I have been seeing the world through fleshly eyes. He illuminated a spirit of sight that I had never once thought about. I realized that people are never just people. They carry in them the weight of an entire life story and they are worthy of an infinite love. The world around me had changed in an instant.
Of course I would never see the world the same again.
But as the thought crossed my mind this time, it was not fear that gripped me but tranquility. I am on this life-changing journey. I have encountered people literally from all over the globe, seen the breathtaking cityscape of Ukraine and the mountain tops of Chile, prayed in beautiful European Cathedrals, read scripture to an elderly woman in her home in Romania, seen peoples lives be transformed by Christ’s love and now I am sitting in a cafe writing all of this down while surrounded by the Andes Mountains. My world will never be the same as it was once before. The Lord opened my spirit to get a glimpse of how He sees this world. Of course nothing will ever be the same. And yes, growth is still scary. It took a good shove to get me to where I am now. I know I will soon need another reminder of God’s sovereignty in the hard times so that I can walk again into the unknown. But His love will constantly meet me right there in my weak and fallen flesh. He is constantly changing us to be more like Him and it is scary to accept but it is an indescribable thing to grow towards.
Los Andes, Chile
