Key Concept:
Clear vision for the future comes from trusting God with the present.
Simple Focus:
For the eyes; seeing with clearer, broader, better vision
20/20 Vision in 2020, by Jenny Spidell
If you have 20/20 vision, congratulations! You have avoided the pain of an eyelash sticking to your contact and scraping against your eyelid (or really any foreign object fighting your contact); it doesn’t feel awesome… You have also avoided the conundrum of wearing glasses with a mask, where you have to decide which is worse: fogging over the glasses with every exhale, or being out of breath from trying to breathe shallowly enough so as not to fog over the glasses, and you can forget about trying to speak a syllable without fogging up completely.
I’ve known for several weeks that I was on my last pair of contacts and that I needed to order more, so when one of my contacts ripped Monday morning I had no one to blame but myself for having to wear my glasses to work. My irritation toward myself was only increased when I put my mask on as I was about to walk into the church and suddenly I could no longer see a thing. I found my way to my office where I gladly removed the mask once I was at my desk, but then I spent the next hour and a half dreading staff meeting because I knew I’d have to fight with the mask fog again. As we sat in the worship center for the staff meeting, I found myself growing more and more out of breath as I was trying to avoid fogging up my glasses. I was seriously considering pushing my glasses up to rest on top of my head and resorting to the squint method to get me through the rest of the meeting, but then I found myself lost in thought about the lenses we use to view the world.
Our worldview is shaped by the lenses we look through. Your faith is a lens; if you’re a parent, that’s a lens; if you’re single, that’s a lens; your ethnicity is a lens; you get the idea. As people of faith, probably the most important lens we have to look through is our faith, because it is the lens that brings us hope and reminds us that God loves us more than we can fathom. As I sat frustrated by my glasses fogging over in the meeting, pondering if I should remove them or not, I wondered: if my faith is a lens through which I view the world, and if I get frustrated with that view and remove the lens, then can I still clearly see God at work in the world?
Even if you have 20/20 vision, at some point since March we have probably all felt a little like we were trying to look through glasses that just wouldn’t stop fogging over. I don’t know about you, but Advent came at just the right time. The birth of the Christchild is piercing through the fog of 2020 to bring hope, love, maybe even a little joy, and comfort.
Clear vision for the future comes from trusting God with our present. God is in our midst right here, right now - celebrating our joys, holding us as we cry, walking alongside us in our frustrations through a year of fog. I beg you not to remove your lens of faith. Trusting God with the present probably won’t manifest itself in our ability to predict the future (if this does happen for you, do tell!); instead, trusting God with the present just might give us 20/20 vision for what God wants for our world. Put your trust in the God who came to earth in the most helpless form all those years ago; the God whose love for you is unfathomable; the God who dances with you in your joy; the God who comforts you; the God who is present with you even now in the ordinary reading of a devotional.
May our hearts be joyful and eyes less strained as we focus on the Light of the World that is quickly coming into view; a light that lifts the fog and has the power to better our vision if we let it.
Prayer:
Good and gracious God, what a year this has been. Thank you for your faithful presence in the ups and downs that 2020 has brought. Remove our desires for rigid control of our present so that we can instead see your vision for this world more clearly. May our trust in you stir us to action so that this world can have a little more hope, love, joy, and comfort this Advent season. Amen.