Lenses

What we are seeing and the lenses we look through in life are often determined by how we were taught and what we experienced. I was at a basketball game as a teen-ager in Poyen, AR. I was sitting by a class-mate in the stands and cutting up with her and some others. I was showing off, and took her glasses and put them on. Boom! Suddenly I saw a clear world. I didn’t know I was seeing a fuzzy world until I put those correctional lenses on. After that, I was never the same. I got glasses and have had glasses ever since. In these latter days of my life, I had the surgery done, but I still use readers (as many of us do). I did not know I was not seeing things clearly, until I experienced correction. It’s just the way I was. All over the world, children grow up believing certain things, because it was passed on down to them from their parents, which was passed on down from their parents, even from generations back. The lenses that the people look through in life were passed on to them. That does not mean they are right or corrective. If you put some people’s glasses on the whole world goes fuzzy, and you go dizzy. Experiences shape our outlook. Certain repeated experiences leave us with a skeptical and even cynical outlook. Experiences can leave us bitter. Those are the lenses we are seeing through, even though we might not realize it. Certain things are magnified; other things are diminished. We can be looking through the overly optimistic rose-colored glasses seeing only the good and ignoring or refusing to see the bad. Or, we can be looking through dark-colored glasses, seeing only the bad. I like my green lensed and framed sun glasses reminding me of being seated together with Christ in the throne of God (there is emerald green rainbow around the throne of God—Revelation 4:3). But it takes the working of God to give us a good, wholesome outlook on life with clarity of vision. It takes the Holy Spirit to reveal to us the early and latter influences in our life that cause us to see things the way we see things. A good prayer for us all is in Psalms 139:23-24: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thought: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Notice the words: “see”—Let’s go by what God sees; and “wicked” in the Hebrew means “an idol, also pain.” What has dominated our life or caused pain in our life? By our daily, total surrender of all to the Lord Jesus Christ, we can see what God sees, so we can repent and be set free to see clearly. God’s healing of our hurts and God’s correction of our present outlook will give us a whole new outlook on life.   

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