Surrounded by the Impossible

If I hadn't been looking, I would have missed it.

I stood by the back door before six this morning, taking in the early morning cool, and waiting to put down the garage door for my bike-commuting husband.  As I waited for him to emerge, I looked over the backyard.  In last year's drought, our small yard looked bleak and wilted, the trees and bushes suffering and stressed from the lack of water.  Thanks to plentiful spring rains this year, lush green has become the color of the season.

As I looked at the beauty before me, my eyes were distracted by the telephone cables and poles along our back property line.  Indeed, that is often the first thing that I see when I look out there. But I have learned to look past it to the beauty all around.

When I was a very little girl, my eyes had a problem focusing, one eye doing most of the work and the other going along for the ride.  I am forever grateful to my mom for realizing that this problem wasn't going away on its own.  The doctor recognized that if this now-small malfunction was not addressed, it would follow me into adulthood and grow into an even bigger problem.  It was not a matter of surgery, but of training.

The doctor gave my mother a list of eye exercises and outfitted me in a pair of tiny blue eyeglasses with a patch over the good eye.  There are no pictures of me at that age with my glasses on.  I don't believe that it was because my mom was embarrassed by how I looked, or necessarily what others would say or think.  But I believe it was her form of protection.  She did not want me to be limited by my handicaps and by how I saw myself.  She wanted me to view this as just a season, not what defined me.

Doing those eye exercises is one of my very first memories, sitting on a small padded bench in my parents' room and following a small pen flashlight only with my eyes.  My mother would move the flashlight in the shape of a large rectangle, which forced my eyes to move together to the right and left, up and down, to the very corners.   ":Look here," she would say to this very wiggly and distracted four year old.  "Follow my hand.  Follow my light."  Over and over again, day by day, my eyes were strengthened.  I didn't realize it at the time, but I could now see from a much larger perspective and in greater detail.  My eyes were trained that way.

And this morning I thought of how much beauty I miss in this world, how many of God's blessings are hidden because I have not trained my eyes to see them. They are there, but I let so many distractions -- like the phone wires --rob me of what is good and nourishing.  My eyes are like a camera lens moving the focus back and forth from the wires to the dense green trees, and back again.

Just then, a red fox darted out of the bushes into our back yard, as if emerging from a different dimension.  A rare sighting, the sleek beautiful animal with mischief in his eyes hesitated for only a moment, and just as quickly disappeared into the vacant lot next door.  It made me wonder about what rare and delightfully impossible things surround us that we never see.

If I hadn't been looking, I would have missed it.

On what am I focusing in my life?  The wires that distract and trip me up?  Or to train my eyes to see the reality of His Presence? 

"Look here.  Follow My hand.  Follow My light."

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From whence does my help come?
My help comes from the LORD,
       who made heaven and earth.

                  Psalm 121.1-2