Imagine being able to see and then suddenly, your sight is gone. You are a young and ambitious, talented musician, and athlete. Your future is bright and very promising. The world is at your fingertips, and your success seems inevitable. One day you’re playing a good game of basketball, and then the unthinkable happens!! You reach for the rebound, and your opponent’s fingernail accidentally cuts your eye causing excruciating pain. You try to shake it off, but your gut tells you that something is terribly wrong. When you finally go to the doctor, the news confirms your worst fear: you have a detached retina.
The pressure and severity of this strike to your pupil causes your sight to completely leave your right eye. As if this is not bad enough, just when you’ve adapted to your new circumstance, you realize that the strain of only using your left eye ultimately causes total blindness. How do you deal with such profound hardship especially when you have relied on your eyesight to navigate through life?
You were not born with this condition!
Overwhelming thoughts convince you that your chances of being successful have been compromised, and you gradually slip into the dreary fog of depression.
Why me?? What does this all mean? Now I must depend on others to guide me DAILY, and learn to function without using the eyes that God, himself, gave me! I have to re-learn LIFE?!
This is not merely a scenario; this happened to my father. I can’t help but recognize the correlation between my dad’s experience and a Christian’s obligation to walk by faith.
Hebrews 11:6
“But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.”
Well, when the Bible tells us to walk by faith and not by sight, my dad’s story helps me to put it in perspective.
Before coming to God, I viewed and handled my life the way Daph wanted to handle it. Then I experienced something in life that altered my whole outlook: I received the spirit of God. I no longer saw life as I did before. My old view was a thing of the past. Although I wanted to revert to “images” that reminded me how life used to be, I simply could not. I had to look to God as my “guide”, and realize that he wanted navigate for me. He helped me walk according to his principles and not how I felt or what I thought was right! I had to walk by faith!!
Walking by faith is parallel with not being able to see! We have to trust God even though we cannot see what he’s doing and where’s he leading us. There is commotion all around us and we’re enduring hardships and changes in our everyday lives, yet we must believe that God will get us through it! Wouldn’t it be better if we could just see the way we used to?? Not necessarily!
We will bring more glory to God in our blindness than we would have if we still had our sight!
This is what I mean: my father lost his eyesight at about the age of 14. He hasn’t seen the world since this age, nor my mother or any of their 6 children or grandchildren. He has lived his life minus the ability to physically see. Nevertheless, he is one of the most intelligent and resilient human beings to ever walk the face of this earth. He’s gone to college, was an awesome husband to my mother, raised me and my siblings, became a minister, worked for one of the biggest cell phone companies as a switchboard operator, and even taught me to play basketball!!
How did he do this?? BY FAITH!!!
He didn’t have to see because he saw through the lens of faith! He is my biggest inspiration! What amazes me is that my father still believes God for his healing someday! However, if God does not grant him his sight again, God has certainly allowed my father to impact so many lives by his determination to please God despite his circumstance.
I asked my dad once, “Daddy do you see images in your mind or do you see total darkness?” He answered, “I see images, not darkness, necessarily, but I only have images from what I’ve previously seen”.
This is how life seems at times. We only have memories of what we’ve engaged in prior to coming to God, but we should not reference these thoughts and mindsets when striving to please him. We need him to change our perspective on life and see things as he does. We must trust him to be our “guide”. Just as my father needed an individual to lead him and be his eyes, we need God to be our eyes as we endeavor to please him daily. I am so grateful that I was able to see firsthand what it is to walk by faith, in a literal and spiritual sense. It has helped me tremendously to maintain faith regardless of life’s obstacles. I hope that my dad’s story will help you to remember that faith is necessary, and with it, there’s nothing you can’t conquer. Whatever you do, don’t lose faith!
“I Can’t See, But God.” – Daph
