This morning I followed through with something I have put off for too long; an eye exam. With eye insurance thru my new job, I had no more excuses. It had been years since my last exam, and I’d been noticing long distances getting fuzzier. Fortunately, I found that my prescription hadn’t changed much, and in a couple weeks, I’ll get some new frames. My eyes aren’t too bad, but I need to wear them consistently when I drive, read, and work on the computer to avoid eye strain.
As part of the examination, I agreed to the eye dilation. The doctor dropped that burning liquid into my eyes, and warned me a second too late about the sting. Yikes! When the exam was over, I walked out of the dark, comforting cavern of an exam room into the WAAAAY too bright lobby (what eye doctor has windows ALL over the lobby? AHHH!) and squinted my way through all the frames, looking for the one I liked best. We found them, and paid the copays we owed. When we walked out of the office, I found myself still squinting, even with sunglasses on. We stopped at Publix for a few things (luckily Drew drove) and I tried to take the sunglasses off. The fluorescent lights were too much for my overly sensitive eyes. I put them back on, feeling like one of the Blues Brothers. Drew made jokes about how I was getting high so early in the day. I stuck close to him, because all my peripheral vision seemed a bit blurry. I was afraid to venture away too far. I wanted to explain to everyone why I was wearing sunglasses inside. On the way home, the sunlight was still too bright, and I stuck the cheap, plastic wannabe sunglasses from the doctor behind my sunglasses for a little extra dark. Ahhhh, relief.
Funny how sensitive our eyes can become to the light. And perhaps this is a far stretched comparison, or maybe it’s really cliché, but some days my faith gets like this. I get comfortable in the dark. It’s easy to be lazy there. If I make an attempt to take a glimpse at God, the brightness is often too much, and I find myself running back to the dark. I know that it’s better in the light; more rewarding, more fulfilling. But it’s also harder in the light. It sometimes hurts. The light brings attention to things that I need to work on, things that I would often rather ignore.
The light shows me what I could be, what I should be. Unfortunately, rather than embracing it, I often run back to the comforts of the dark, hiding my eyes to the painful brightness. I want to change myself for the better, but change is hard. So I slip my sunglasses back on, and walk through life, feeling a bit out of sorts, much like walking through the dairy section of Publix feeling like all eyes are on me, wondering why I’m still wearing my shades.