Seeing clearly...

Luke 11:34: Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are bad, your body also is full of darkness.

I took the bug hunter in for a real eye exam for the first time this week. He's been fidgeting in class, and I'm trying to eliminate all of the obvious problems. He's said that he sometimes can't see the board, which causes the fidgeting. He's more like me than his dad, and I got glasses in third grade after my teacher moved me to the back of the room (I obviously was well-behaved for her to do that... *snicker*) and my grades dropped because I couldn't see the board. It turns out that I had terrible vision and apparently a very good memory; I would look at things up close and memorize them so that I could spout it out later without being able to read it. I guess I just thought that was the way it was supposed to be; I didn't realize that my vision was blurry. And I'm sure that there were times when what I remembered didn't quite match up with what I saw in the first place. But I did well enough to get by, at least until I was too far away to even have a chance to see what was there in the first place.
Isn't that how we are a lot of times with God? We memorize pat phrases that we hear from others; we mimic what "good Christians" do and say. But our own vision is blurry, because we haven't sharpened it with real knowledge from the Word, and we just aren't "close enough". We don't walk with God on a daily basis, we don't put the time in that we need to reading the Bible and in prayer, and so He hasn't been able to knock the scales from our eyes so that we truly see as He wants us to see. To see the hurting people all around us; to see the desperate need for His love. And so, we stumble on, giving an "I'll pray for you" here and a "God loves you" there, without REALLY seeing the people to whom we're talking. Without REALLY reaching out, because we can't see what they need. I've begun to realize that only Jehovah-Rapha can heal my blurry vision and give me the clarity that I need to "pass the test". But first, I need to actually show up for my appointment.
Oh, and as for the bug hunter? He's got 20-20 vision. He is SO busted...