Jesus – “But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!”

Matthew 6:23

In one of those great “coincidences” that come along once in a while, the 10 Life-Charged Words chapter I was supposed to teach Tuesday morning at the men’s Bible study was titled “CLARITY.”

The coincidence part was me missing due to Rebekah having eye surgery (for cataracts no less)! This week it was her left eye; in a couple more it will be the right one.

My friend Steve led the study and I am sure that he crushed it. But no kidding, talk about a great illustration for what I consider a really important idea! Especially if we are to live as faithful, thoughtful, insightful followers of Jesus.

What happens with cataracts is that the lens we see through gets cloudy and opaque. Eventually, vision is affected and what we see becomes blurry, distorted, unclear and darkened. When we can’t see clearly it is difficult to process information that comes at us visually. So if we don’t replace the lens then we continue to misread, miscue, misalign, stumble and misinterpret.

Not only that, but we have this off-kilter filter that sits directly between us and reality.

A tragic situation!

This is what Jesus was talking about when he said that if the eye is unhealthy then, if we are not careful, what we believe to be light can turn out to be darkness. And that, friends, is a tragic situation.

Sometimes our spiritual eyes need a Jesus adjustment to the extent that the cloudy, blurry, distorted, negative lenses through which we see this world are removed. We can run into trouble in many ways, but most dangerous is when we actively choose to keep ourselves in the dark because we have already decided we prefer the negative to the disarming purity of light.

And so we choose – contrary to the Spirit of God:

• Darkness over light;
• Anger over understanding;
• Bullying over reconciliation;
• Double down lies over learning from others;
• Tearing down over building up;
• Diatribe over dialogue;
• Lecturing over listening;
• Slogans over substance
• Fighting over coming together;
• Digging our heels in over compromise;
• Being right over being faithful;
• Destruction over democracy;
• War over peace;
• Fear and distrust over love and vulnerability… and so it goes….

Jesus is in the business of adding light and of building community and of healing across the board. I don’t care what position we have staked out on the spectrum of political opinion, we all need to have our cataracts (our dark filters) removed.

We will not see clearly if we look through the cloudy, distorted, unhealthy lens of judgment and fear and closed-mindedness. There is only one lens that lets in the light and fills us with love and compassion – while eliminating the darkness, the acrimony, the fear and the hate.

That lens is Jesus. – DEREK