What My Eye Surgery Taught Me About the Christian Life
I’ve been blessed with excellent health my whole life. I never get sick. In fact, at my high school graduation, I was awarded a $25 savings bond for never having missed a day of school from third grade on. That’s about $2.50 per year.
The one exception to my crazy-good health is my eyesight. I started wearing glasses at seven and experienced continued nearsightedness until my glasses entered the Coke bottle range – minus 13.00 diopters – until it was greatly improved through surgery.
About ten years ago, I started experiencing double vision, a condition that was controlled by adding prisms to my glasses. However, in the last year, it got progressively worse to the point where my ophthalmologist recommended strabismus surgery where she would reach behind my eyeballs to adjust the muscles.
After waking up following the surgery in July, I noticed an immediate improvement, but the double vision had morphed a bit. I was still seeing double, but in a different way.
What happens is that, although the underlying muscle problems had been addressed, my brain needed time to “reprogram” itself to the new reality. Over the years, my brain had adapted to compensate for the muscle deficiency, and it needed time to relearn how to see. My surgeon told me this is normal and that the transition would take several weeks. And she was right. Over the next month or so, the symptoms gradually diminished, and things are back to normal now.
As I thought about this physical progression, I realized it’s also highly parallel to our spiritual growth. My double vision problem was immediately resolved by the surgery. But it took weeks for my brain to catch up with this new reality.
Isn’t that exactly what we experience as Christians? The moment you recognize your need to have your sins forgiven based on Jesus’ death and commit your life to follow him, your biggest life problem – separation from God – is solved. If you were to die at that moment, you would be immediately ushered into Jesus’ presence in heaven. However, if you remain on earth – which you clearly have done – you are still human with all the problems and limitations created by living in a messed-up world and by your past experiences, sin and mistakes.
Just as it took weeks for my brain to catch up with the new visual reality, it takes time to allow the Holy Spirit to transform me to become more like Jesus. In fact, the process will continue for the rest of my life.
Here are two implications of this dynamic:
Give yourself grace for your mess-ups. You’re never going to completely “arrive.” The main thing is that you are submitting yourself to God’s leadership in your life and seeing him gradually change you.
Extend the same grace to others. I know of some Christian leaders who demand immediate changes in a new believer’s life. Addictions and deeply ingrained patterns of sin take time to get uprooted. Of course, we should lovingly and graciously encourage changes based on God’s standards, but it’s important to give the other person time to mature into a more Christ-like life. You can’t demand someone go from 0 to perfect in a few days.
I’ve been writing about grace a lot lately, and this transformation process is just another example of how we need it for ourselves and others.
