Double vision

An odd thing happened as I opened my eyes this morning.  With daylight savings time finally giving way to sanity, sunlight pressed upon the blinds in our bedroom.  My head resting upon my pillow, I saw the blinds clearly, and yet something seemed amiss.  My eyes which were focused at the distance of the blinds traveled to the doorknob adjacent to them.  I saw two door knobs.  I looked at the book case beside my bed.  There seemed to be multiples of each book.  I felt like I was in an episode of "Gilligan's Island."

Considering my eyes were just waking up, too, I forced them to fixate upon the words on the bindings.  Ah, focus!  But the book case was at a different distance than the blinds.  I looked back to the blinds and my sleepy eyes retained their book case focus.  Again, the peripheral things did not appear as clear as the blinds.  Because I was laying on my side, my eyes did not focus on a single slat in the blinds, instead one eye focused on one slat while the other eye focused on an adjacent slat.  This could only happen if the line between my pupils was exactly perpendicular to the slats in the blinds. 

This was freaking me out.  As I sat up and my eyes got out of the perpendicular, everything focused in its proper perspective in an instant. 

I thought of my wacky perspective this morning as I read yet again Nancy Pelosi's take on the recent off-year election.  "We won last night" she said.  I've often thought the Representative from California akin to Marty Feldman, but such a freakish viewpoint on the heels of the political drubbings in New Jersey and Virginia took the cake.

Such perverse focus can be found in any party and in any person.  This very morning, I could not come to terms with the blinds hanging on my bedroom window.  Even after refocusing on another concrete object (words on the binding), when I went back to the other issue (the blinds), I utterly mis-saw reality.

This is man's nature.  We think we see an issue with utmost clarity, but in conjunction with adjacent issues, something's askew.  Even when we recheck our bearings bearings against concrete reality, when we go back to our particular issue, our focus often times remains incorrect.  Only when we become righted in total can we see the world around us with proper clarity.

So it is with man in all things because he stands in rebellion to God.  While still created in God's image, the image is marred.  The eyes with which man sees are set now 90-degrees out from God's perspective (Jeremiah 5 is a pretty good descriptor).  Our problem?  We cannot aright ourselves.  Only God can right our listing ship ("Open my eyes that I might see wondrous things from your law" - Psalm 119:18).

Few wonder about the double vision in their periphery.  Most do not even know that clarity stands available as a free gift from the ultimate Optometrist.  I remember when my eldest first got glasses.  Not an eager man was he.  He thought about how he would look and the pain of spectacle upkeep.  Then he put on his glasses for the first time.  "I can see leaves on the trees!"

Many go through life contended with their jumbled world.  Such a one does not surmise that something's amiss.  Rather than turn to the light (John 9:5) and live,

"He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, "Is there not a lie in my right hand?""

Isaiah 44:20

How much better to know healed vision like the man born blind and be able to declare, "One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see!"