Fuzzy Sight

Pastor Obvious is a blind guide today. I went out this morning without my contact lenses. My soft lenses are really comfortable and lots of times I don’t remember if I’m wearing them, until I realize that I can’t see something that I ought to be able to see. I don’t have really awful eyesight - mostly that means that I can’t read a street sign at a good distance, but I can see well enough to get along. I can still see that a tree is a tree, a fence is a fence, a cow is a cow, and I’ve never had any trouble finding my lunch. I can even drive if I know the neighborhood and I won’t run over you. So I thought it would be OK to walk in the country without going back for my glasses. The thing is, that while I know where I’m headed, the country is fuzzy territory. The colors of grasses and trees blend together; trees and shrubs that are growing right next to each other look like a single plant (a real problem if one of them is poison ivy), ditches and other indentations have tall grasses in them and you don’t realize they are holes to be avoided - the details are mushy.

We read the Bible to learn about God. John Calvin said that Scripture is “like a pair of spectacles” - that when we neglect to read the Bible we forget what God looks like. We might even begin to think that Morgan Freeman knows what he’s talking about. God’s details get mushy. And when we read the Bible regularly, the glimpses that we get of God help us to develop a correct understanding and picture of who God is.

But sometimes reading the Bible can be like walking in the country without your glasses. If you’ve never been there before and you don’t know where you’re headed, you may not be able to read the signs that make things clear. You can understand the words of the story, but even if you read it twice it may not make sense in a life-changing way. And if you are familiar with the Bible, you may read a passage or a story several times, but do it too quickly because you’ve done it many times before and you think you know what it says and how the story ends. But you miss the details. The ones that are revealing or life-changing. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth. So it’s good to remember that we should “put on our spectacles” of the Bible before we set out to walk through the day; and we should ask the Holy Spirit to take us by the hand and lead us through the tall grass.