Put Your Eyeglasses On
“Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.” Psalm 100:4
“Honey, hand me my glasses, will you? I can’t see a thing!” Okay, so my vision, despite its slow downward decline due to middle age, yikes, is still relatively manageable with or without glasses – albeit definitely a little challenging considering one eye sees better far away while the other sees great closer up. But my understanding of those with very poor vision is they can be desperate when they’ve misplaced their glasses – enough to depend on somebody else to locate their glasses ASAP so they have the vision they need to get around and function properly. Desperate enough to call out, “Honey, hand me my glasses, will you?” For the most fortunate, they have a loved one bring them their glasses without even having to be asked. Their loved one sees the missing glasses, knows the glasses’ owner’s great need, and lovingly, mercifully, interrupts his or her daily routine long enough to retrieve the glasses and humbly bring them to their owner – without expectation of a thank you mind you.
Such was the case one day when a beloved friend from hundreds of miles away on the telephone found my misplaced “spiritual eyeglasses” and handed them to me. I hadn’t even realized my glasses were missing! But in the course of our talk, the Spirit of God moved through my friend’s heart and words to make me see I had lost my glasses. See, I had been focused for some weeks on stress, pressure, challenges, losses, exhaustion, hurt, and rejection – what my life looks like when I am not walking humbly in the love of the Lord and focused on Him with a heart filled with thanksgiving. I had been wallowing under the weight of great stress, pressure, long-time grief over a tragic situation, the persistent, growing attack from the devil, combined with the Lord’s continual testing and refining, and had misplaced my “eyeglasses” that allow me to see how indescribably, phenomenally, amazingly blessed I am 24-7 to have an awesome relationship with God and to receive endless, wildly beautiful blessings and provision from Him. I had resorted to my old, poor, miserable vision of focusing on the negative instead of focusing on the Lord and His magnificence and His countless blessings. My friend didn’t shove the glasses back on my face. He simply yielded to God’s Spirit and handed them back to me. I repented and peered out my heavenly eyeglasses – and how bright the light of Christ and how clear the manifold blessings of the Lord! Hours later, the Spirit of God placed upon my heart to remind others this:
BE THANKFUL for the Lord and for His infinite goodness and grace! If you’ve misplaced your glasses, here they are. Be thankful!