Sight. Sometimes we don’t notice when our spiritual sight is dimming, but we always notice when our physical eye sight grows worse. Our spiritual vision can dim very slowly. It can happen so slowly, we might not realize how we don’t take time to do the things we need to fill our soul anymore; how we let the things of the world come between us and things of eternal value, until we are figuratively blind. Then we sit there and wonder how things got so bad in our lives.

I started having problems with my eyes a few months ago. At first I figured it was just allergies, and there were so many other crazy things going on in my lives, and I didn’t have insurance, or any extra money, and, and, and then I noticed that the blurriness in my left eye wasn’t going away. This blurriness began to impact my day, and then it began to cause headaches and eye pain and then it got worse. At first I tried a general practitioner, then a chain-store optometrist. No one could figure out what was wrong, so I finally pulled out the big bucks to go see a fancy eye doctor. By this time I was seeing a double image out of my left eye. It looked a lot like this. 


 With his fancy equipment the doc was able to make a map of my eye and finally tell me what was going on. I had Keratoconus. This meant my corneas were thinning. Huh?

I went home and headed to the computer. Three hours of mad Googling later found me sitting in front of the screen in shock. I had read words like “LEGALLY BLIND”, “BI-LATERAL CONDITION”,”HEREDITARY”, “CORNEA TRANSPLANT”. Now, just so you know, anything with my eyes would be on my list of top 5 fears, the others involving things like being trapped underground, under water, or in small spaces. It seemed especially cruel to me. I may not be a famous one, but I am an artist, you know, a VISUAL artist. And I’m a mom of four very rambunctious boys. A mom who needs to SEE what they are up to. I let myself be swallowed up in fear that night and the next few days. It was not a good time.

Maybe if I hadn’t been so drained by the other trials that have been thrown at me this year, maybe if I’d kept my spiritual vision healthy and strong, those first few days after receiving the news wouldn’t have been so dark. Maybe I’d have found the possible solutions to halt my vision loss sooner. I don’t know. All I know is that in having my physical eyesight dimmed, I had to turn once again to my spiritual vision for help. It is a dark place to think that maybe God hates you; maybe He is doing these things to you because you are a failure and you deserve it. These kinds of thoughts don’t come from a place of clear seeing. They come from spiritual blindness. It took me a while to wade through those feelings.

God sent me help in the form of doctors, friends, parents and church leaders and the internet. He sent me help even though I was pretty angry at Him. He let me know that He cared about what was happening to me. Apparently I’m supposed to have faith. Do you know what faith is? It is believing without seeing. Well alright then. I’m there. Psalms 146:8 says, “The Lord openeth the eyes of the blind: the Lord raiseth them that are bowed down: the Lord loveth the righteous.” Sometimes He opens your eyes literally, sometimes He opens them spiritually.

I don’t know what the future holds for my vision. I hope to raise some serious money somehow to try out a new procedure called cross-linking, or CXL as all the cool kids are calling it, that seems to halt the progress of the corneal thinning. There are some rigid contacts I can try that might help my doubled vision straighten out. Here’s what I do know; I don’t like that dark place of fear. Feeling that way certainly didn’t change the reality of my situation. I’m going to try to keep my spiritual eyes open and clear. I’m going to allow God to heal my fears and anxieties, and lift me up from my bowed down place, even if my physical eyes aren’t healed. I’m going to try to have faith. Here’s hoping.

Of course I needed to paint about my eyes. Here’s a detail from a painting I started when I was just pulling out of the dark place. My art students think it’s "creepy". I’m not quite done yet, but I dig this part. Too bad eyes don’t grow like this, huh?