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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

Two Things that Are Not Instant

Mezquita-Cathedral in Cordoba, Spain

As I’m writing this, my wife Annette and I are flying back from Madrid after two great weeks in eastern and southern Spain, our sixth or seventh trip to this wonderful country. Before each visit, I break out my high school Spanish textbook to reactivate the foreign language brain cells.

In college, I studied in Madrid for four months during which time I would occasionally dream in Spanish – a sign of true fluency. I also became certified to teach high school Spanish, and at one time I would have rated myself a 7 or 8 on a 10-point fluency scale. Today. I’m a 5 or 6 at best.

Unfortunately, once Spanish-speakers discover I’m pretty fluent, they often assume I can understand everything they say and start speaking as if they were a finalist is the “See How Many Words You Can Get Out in a Minute” contest. Not helpful.

During this trip I referred to my digital Spanish-English dictionary several times a day to look up technical words we encountered, and I learned the Spanish words for “drought,” “sickle,” “shortbread,” and (believe it or not) “Smurf.”

Somehow, a few months ago Face Book figured out we were going to Spain, so I have been flooded with offers to “learn Spanish in just 30 days” or “become conversational in just 10 minutes a day.” I doubt that any of these courses teach you the word for “Smurf.”

Residents of other countries love it when you at least try to speak a few words, but really feeling “at home” with a new language takes much more than casual study.

I learned this the hard way on my first trip to Europe while in college. Since I had a postcard to mail from Ulm, Germany, I decided to apply my one semester of college German to find a mailbox. After consulting my German-English dictionary, I patched together the German for, “Where is the postbox?” which I confidently asked the hotel desk clerk. He proceeded to deluge me with four rapid-fire German sentences, none of which I understood. It hadn’t occurred to me that if you ask a question in German, you will get an answer in German.

So, implying any truly conversational fluency in 30 days is optimistic at best. The fact that I’m only 5 or 6 in my Spanish fluency with my extensive background illustrates that language acquisition isn’t instantaneous.

I know this is disappointing in a day where “instant” is almost a given. I can “instantly” message anyone across the globe or “instantly” create an object using 3-D printing. So why not “instantly” learn a new language?

But it doesn’t work that way.

Nor does it when it comes to growing in your faith. Of course, anyone can start a relationship with Jesus the moment they recognize that their sin has separated them from God and that trusting in Jesus’ death and Resurrection is the only remedy. It’s free, and it’s available to everyone.

But some people who have been Christians for years lament the fact that they don’t know more about understanding the Bible, growing in their faith, grasping theology, or knowing church history. Well, how do you excel in anything:  a new language, tennis, piano? By study, diligent work and persistence. Why should it be any different with your walk with Jesus and knowledge of the faith?

You master Spanish by devoting yourself to memorizing vocabulary words, studying grammar rules, working on your pronunciation, and practicing your conversational skills. Historically, things that have helped Christians grow are reading the Bible, memorizing important verses, spending time in prayer, attending worship services, meeting with other Christians, sharing their faith, investigating church history, and studying theology.

Disclaimer! I am not listing these activities as yet another set of burdens or requirements. Anyone who knows me knows I hate anything that smacks of legalism:  doing good things so God will think more highly of you. What I’m pointing out is that people find the time to pursue the things they really care about. You don’t accidentally become fluent in Spanish. Nor do you accidentally become fluent in all things Christian. The latter takes motivation and determination empowered by the Holy Spirit. Rather than guilting you, I’m trying to challenge you to consider if you need to step up your game when it comes to deepening your understanding of the faith and your walk with Jesus.

And beyond this encouragement, let me recommend that if you ever have the chance to visit Spain, do it!