Now I See

Lately I don’t see so good. (Bad grammar intended) Ah, the joys of growing older! My first collection of reading glasses made their appearance several years ago and have since been replaced by more powerful models. "We need morrre power, Captain!" (Thank you, Mr. Scot.) Blessed with perfect eyesight until sometime in my forties, I have found my diminishing ability to see things up close to be, well, frustrating. If only my arms were longer…

I still reach for the nail file and start in with my shaping only to realize that I cannot see what I’m doing…at all! I’ve mastered the art of holding an item as far from my face as possible while tipping my head back a little farther and scowling down at the teeny, tiny, sort-of-coming-into-focus writing. And my true transition to paying by debit card alone began about the time that I started scrawling out very blurry looking checks...blurry to me, anyway. Who has time to fish for glasses in the check stand?

This morning I simply wanted to find my little zirconia earrings. They were somewhere in that handful of tiny baubles floating in the small greenish ring bowl on top of my bedroom bookshelf…at about chin level. Needless to say as I peered at this collection of silver balls and sparkling studs all I saw was a cluster if shapes and glitter, kind of like when you squint at a disco ball. Everything is just vaguely…shiny. So with a sigh I picked up the bowl, and held it down, and tipped by head back, and scowled…and finally found what I was looking for. But all the while I’m thinking, “I can’t believe I have to do this!”

There was a time, a good long time, that I could see things up close. Now I have to stand back or do that stretchy arm, tippy head, scowl down your nose thing. My 12th grade English teacher has unknowingly found revenge. I used to sit in the back row of Mrs. Thompson’s class and offer to hold her book “back here” for her whenever she started tipping head and stretching arms. Good thing she liked me. (Actually, she was my favorite teacher. My inner word nerd blossomed under her enthusiasm for expounding on our weekly vocab words, mapping out the culture of Chaucer, diagramming sentences, and making us pump out yet another essay. But I digress…)

Tonight as I felt for the black pair of specs on my nightstand and crept out of the bedroom to begin another night of insomnia I saw something I hadn’t seen before. Not a real thing, but a flicker of a thought that captured full attention. My journey of sight to blur to holding it away and seeing again parallels my inner journey of seeing. So many years spent immersed in life, children to be raised, issues to be pressed through. Mulling around in that crowded stand of trees and trying to find my way. Only seeing what was right in front of me. But now as I’ve grown older there has been a knowing that standing back from all those things, gazing upon the whole forest, gives the keenest sight.

I have loved each new decade of my life better than the last for this very reason…or reasons: insight, perspective, context. And with those a deeper knowledge of the God who knew me before time and formed me in my mother’s womb with these very eyes – sort of greyish, but sometimes looking green or blue depending on what I’m wearing. You have to look at the whole to see their color. It’s His amazing grace that has taken me from blind to “now I see.” These are good thoughts on my countdown to fifty. The next decade is days away. Though my eyesight is going, I can praise Jesus that my vision is getting better.