For context, you need to know that I really need my glasses.  But I’m not one of those people whose eyes got worse with age, and now I need glasses for reading.  Nope.  I have to take my glasses OFF to read.  I can see just fine, even teeny tiny print on the side of a pill bottle, for about a foot.  Then the world gets progressively fuzzy.  By the time you are, say, 5 feet away, your features are indistinct to say the least.  I can see you. I could probably pick you out of a lineup,  but nothing is clear.  So, although I wear glasses all the time for distance, I tend to take them off if I’m working on my computer, looking at my phone or even reading a letter or a recipe. Of course, I also can’t sit still for more than about 18 seconds, so I often walk away from wherever I last put my glasses down and wander semi-blindly throughout my house.  Generally, that’s not really a problem.  I can see well enough… most of the time.

I also know my house pretty well.  It’s never exceptionally clean, but I wouldn’t call it hazardous either.  So I can wander around here for quite some time without really missing my glasses.  That is until something goes wrong, like the other day.

I like to do canning.  My little (actually pretty big) garden produces a shocking amount of food given my absolute ineptitude at gardening.  I love to fill jars with tomatoes and jams and chicken soup.  I’m diligently faking being a farmer.  Canning is a farmer thing to do, right?  In the fall my cupboards have pretty jars full of brightly coloured yummy stuff lined up looking delicious.  By this time in the winter, however, many of those jars are now empty and I tend to shove them wherever I can find a spot, including on top of my fridge.  In retrospect, it was just a matter of time before I was going to open the fridge and one of those jars was going to come flying off and shatter at my feet.  This is exactly what happened a couple of days ago.  Suddenly, I find myself in my sock feet surrounded by shattered glass. Now, recall that I mentioned that by the time things are 5 feet away I can’t see anything clearly.  Coincidentally, my eyes are roughly 5 feet away from my feet.  So I’m standing surrounded by shattered glass, wearing my socks and I can’t see where the glass is, especially not all the tiny pokey shards.

Thankfully, and perhaps a little anti-climactically, my youngest heard the crash and poked his head around the corner, “Everything ok?”

“Well, no, I’m kind of stuck here because I can’t see where the glass is.  Can you find my glasses?”   To his credit, he paused only a moment to giggle at my predicament before disappearing on his newly assigned treasure hunt.

A minute or two later, he reappeared with my glasses, a broom, dustpan, and my shoes.  (He’s a good egg.)

I know it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyways.  It’s a lot safer when you’re in a mess if you can clearly see what you are standing in.

The fact is, when I don’t have my glasses on, I am always in danger of stepping in something I’d rather not.  I live with four people, a dog, a cat and a bird.  Puddles of spilled something-or-other and coon hound drool regularly identify themselves only after I step in them.  It really wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to wear my glasses at all times.  But especially when things are a mess and I know for a fact I’m standing in shattered glass, it’s really important to make sure I’m seeing clearly.

Looking back on my little mishap, I couldn’t help but reflect.  Spiritually speaking, every single one of us is visually impaired.    Sure, we can see well enough most of the time that we rarely encounter circumstances more tragic than stepping in a puddle of uncertain origin.  We can get through most days without making horrible life-altering decisions just by trusting our gut.  Right and wrong are often pretty obvious.  Our spiritual eyes, though imperfect, generally give us a good idea of when we are wandering off in a wrong direction, and we can see clearly enough to get turned around without incident.

But then there are days when life suddenly slides sideways.  We find ourselves surrounded by shattered glass, whether we broke the jar or someone else threw it into our path.  Suddenly our next step is a dangerous one.  And honestly, we aren’t sure where it is safe to put our foot down.  Those are the days we need glasses, and not just any glasses.  We need our prescription, the only prescription that enables us to see clearly.  AND, we need to be wearing them!  Leaving them on the counter does us no good when we are standing in a pile of broken glass in another room.

No matter who you are, you are made in the image of God.  He lovingly designed each person with a sense of good and evil, and we often instinctively know and choose what is good.  But sometimes our vision just isn’t enough to keep us safe, and we need to take care to wear glasses that sharpen our vision rather than obscure it. The people we spend time with, the ones we follow online, the things we allow to influence us are lenses through which we see the world.  They shape the way we understand what is right and wrong, wise and foolish.  My friend, if you spend any time at all on social media (and heaven knows I do) the algorithms are working with our inclinations and interests to shape and intensify our perception of the world.  And trust me when I say, they are not concerned with giving us a clear picture of the world, they just want to give us a picture that will keep us clicking.

Here’s my point.  Somewhere in the relativity that ensues from our collection of spiritual cataracts, myopia and astigmatisms, we need a clear picture of reality.  We need prescription lenses to see what is real, what is true, what is good and right.  We can’t do this on our own and we certainly can’t do this by following a bunch of other people with lousy eyesight.

May I commend to you (and to myself for the thousandth time because I need this reminder on the daily) looking to the creator of reality for guidance to help us see what is true and real.  Let’s spend time with the creator of all that is real by reading the Bible, talking to him and asking him to show us what is true, to help us discern lies and to be wise.  Objective truth exists.  For all of the insightful and often well-meaning experts whose advice we consider, let’s also make time to hear from the one who designed the experts.  If those of us who follow Jesus spent as much time studying God’s word as we do learning from total strangers online, I think the church would be transformed.  I think we would find a lot less to bicker about.  I think we would get a few more things right and maybe even provide a cleared pathway that those who haven’t yet met Jesus might want to follow.

One of the many hard facts of life in this world is that there is a lot of shattered glass lying around.  If we aren’t seeing clearly, it’s just a matter of time before we step in it.