So as I’m thinking about how the eye works with colors, I start wondering if that means that all the colors we see are actually not accurate, because if we’ve been looking at other colors, aren’t our eye muscles stretching back and forth and therefore not exactly in the right position? Well, no, not exactly. See, it only happens if you stare at one spot for awhile. Your vision is only goofy if you aren’t changing what you’re looking at. My mind makes another related jump back to a talk our youth care director gave a few years ago about being on the growing edge of our faith as youth leaders. The message was, in a nutshell, that if you’re not continually growing in your faith then all you’re teaching and leading from is a water source with no streams to feed it – it will eventually run dry. Sure, you can fake it for a bit, go through the motions, but no one can keep it up too long, and you just don’t inspire passion if you can’t be passionate. So what’s the parallel I’m getting at? Just this: we weren’t designed be finished products, to stand still, or to stop looking around. So often we get into our goal oriented mind set of getting to the end of something, and we bring that into our Christian walk, like it or not. We make it about getting to this end product, this state where we’ve finished developing and can just exist. But we’re told throughout the bible that we are works in progress, being developed through the constant renewing of our mind and being refined by God bit by bit. Our faith dries up and becomes empty motions and traditions if we ever stop growing and changing. So my point, if I had one to start with, is this: wherever you’re at, go deeper. Start studying an aspect of God you don’t understand. Share your faith with your co-workers. Spend time with prisoners, homeless, orphans, mentally ill and street kids to name a few groups that we’re usually uncomfortable with. Do something, read something, study something, give something up, anything that forces you to rely on God for understanding, strength, and provision. Most importantly, take the time to listen to God instead of just having one sided conversations with Him in your prayers. But whatever it is, don’t let yourself be satisfied with where you’re at. God is ginormously huge; you can’t understand everything about Him in this life. So no matter where you’re at, there is more. Go seek it.
As we drive through the countryside of Cambodia I find myself, as I often do on road trips, staring out the window at the passing ground. Not so much at the passing scenery, but at the passing ground. I don’t know why I always do this, but whenever I stop daydreaming and thinking for a second I usually realize that this is where my eyes have been focused for the last hour or so. So once again, there I was. As we come to a stop for a moment my eyes do that really weird thing where they make it look like the ground is flowing forward just a little, like a slow moving stream. If you’ve never experienced this, think of the way the world seems to continue to move after you spin around a bunch, just without the dizzy feeling. It always makes you blink a bit, rub your eyes hard, and discover that rubbing your eyes does nothing to make it go away. For the first time though I start thinking about why this happens (the moving ground effect, that is). I remember back to studying about how vision and the eye works in film school, remembering how when you stare at a spot of color without moving your eyes for a minute or so and then look away you’ll see a spot in your vision that’s the opposite color from what you’ve been looking at. This is because (and I don’t have the technical names for the parts of the eye here) the little muscles or whatever they are in your eye that send signals to your brain have been held in a specific form and position for awhile, and upon being released, bypass neutral and go to an opposite position in order to un-stretch themselves. This isn’t the same thing as what I’m seeing with the ground flowing, but hey, welcome to my brain – it sometimes follows a pattern, but it never stays on one thing for long.
