My dad called me in a panic today.
Something had gone wrong with his phone plan, and because both his phone and his plan are a black box to him, he was certain what had gone wrong could never be undone. Pacing urgently in the parking lot, he kept spilling out all the details, telling me what was wrong, that he didn’t know how to fix it, that he really really needed his phone to work and—
“Dad,” I said. “Dad.”
“What?”
“Go sit down a second. Give me like five minutes. Stay on the phone.” He sat. I accessed his account online. I fixed a blip in settings. “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay it’s fixed.”
“It’s fixed?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m sitting right here looking at it.”
A pause while he fiddled with the phone to confirm. Then, two seconds later, sheer exuberance. I’ve never heard a man so happy in his life. The sun was back out; pizza was on the menu; the day had fallen back into alignment.
It made my day to help him.
It was also a reminder of the myopia we experience when we’re struggling with something we don’t understand. Something about fear and confusion makes the world shrink. We get so tangled up in whatever’s drawn our attention that the clamor overwhelms almost everything.
Last week, I walked right into traffic.
I stopped at the same stoplight I always stop at when I walk to work: a busy urban intersection. There is a walk signal there, and I almost always have to wait. Even when the walk sign is illuminated, I sometimes pause, since over-eager cars slip through just as the light turns.
But last week I stood, looked at the giant flashing DO NOT WALK sign, and—with my mind hyper-focused on the current set of challenges I am facing—stepped calmly and with absolute authority into traffic.
My horrified colleague, who was walking with me, grabbed me by the shoulder and yanked me back. What I remember most beyond his bewilderment was how stunned I was: who does that? And yet, as scattered as my dad in the parking lot, I let the panic of the moment pull me out of the broader context of reality.
This happens spiritually all the time.
The worry, the failure, the loss, the fear grows bigger and darker and sharper. God shrinks, becoming smaller and less omnipotent. This isn’t actually true, of course, but it’s a trick of temptation and of the mind and the heart. Our vision fails us. A veil frequently falls over the eyes of faith.
When I first got glasses, I didn’t think I needed them. My ophthalmologist studied me as I sat there in the exam chair contemplating the prospect of prescription lenses. “But I can see fine,” I explained. “When I drive and—”
He knelt in front of me. “Do. Not. Drive. Not until your get your glasses.”
When they arrived and I put them on I immediately felt sick to my stomach. The world felt over-sharp and unnatural, tilty and strange. I knew they were working—I could actually see the definition in leaves on the trees—but it wasn’t clear to me that this new form of vision was preferable by any means.
Years later, when I take off my glasses, I’m astonished by how fuzzy and askew the world looks.
All this to say: we grow accustomed to our ways of seeing, sometimes in spite of how inaccurate or flawed they are. To see differently, or to embrace a bit of view, requires a fair bit of effort. It can feel alien and uncertain. Even, sometimes, wrong. Our fear and panic and grief responses often default to what “feels natural” even when it’s wildly inaccurate.
It’s not wrong to feel that shift in vision. But we err and often sin when we trust it. So as I face my challenges this coming week, and indeed in anything I fear, I find that awareness is the best weapon of all. What are my tendencies? How’s my spiritual vision? And I try to become intentional about developing and strengthening a gaze of faith especially at the times it seems the most unnatural to do so.
This is the seeing God Himself calls us to engage in.
Samaritan's Song 