Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

When I was a little girl, not yet in kindergarten, my Mom’s cousin told her that my eyes looked similar to his own daughter’s at my age.  She was then grown, wearing Coke-bottle thick lenses. 

I didn’t even realize my vision was inhibited, and apparently each day more so. My mother sought out a pediatric ophthalmologist, at that time a rarity, only one in the entire city of Chicago.  Instead of the doctor just throwing up his hands and concluding, “Well that’s the way it is, she’ll have to live with it,” nor just applying stronger and stronger lenses, he gave my mom a list of exercises for me to do several times a day. 

One of my earliest memories is following only with my eyes, a little pen flashlight held by my mom, without turning my head. 

These exercises helped to align my focus.  Practicing over and over and over again, they strengthened my lazy eye to see differently.

We didn’t observe those exercises doing anything for a long time.  And then we did. 

Practicing the rigors of prayer is like that.  Because praying allows us to see things very differently.  And God reveals Himself.   

Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.”  Genesis 28. 16

My husband enjoys fly-fishing.  He can drive by a river and see fish rising.  I look and see water.  He has taught me to focus not just on the surface, not just on the bottom where the rocks are, but in the in-between.  And occasionally there, I will see what appears as a slender rock moving.  

I kept trying to align my vision and saw nothing at all.  And then, once when I was waiting for him to call it a day, I walked across a bridge near our truck.  As I looked down on the beautiful river, I said almost out loud to myself, “Oh, look how those rocks are all in a row.”

And then I saw the flicker of a tail.

And I realized with a start that they were not rocks at all, but a dozen or so enormous trout lined up like planes on the runway at O’Hare.

Praying helps us to focus differently and see differently.  Not just in helping us to know how to approach the hard things, or navigate the storms, or care for others, or live faithfully, but in seeing God.  And He changes everything.  Even our hearts.

In the shadows, we realize God is real.  Praying empowers us to see that.  God helps us to see Him, to know He is here, even in the improbable, impossible, and unfathomable.  “I am with you.”

By praying, we do not just sense His Presence but know Him more in dimensions we could never comprehend any other way.

With our myopic eyes, we miss so much more than objects that appear in the mirror, through the windshield, or the river that runs through it.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.  1 Corinthians 13. 12

For now we see in a mirror dimly. 

But God is so much closer than that.

Be Thou my vision.