The Bungee Cord 12-6-21

Hello,

Has this happened to any of you? You are on a trip, and you are staying in a hotel. When you wake up in the morning, you are looking forward to a nice refreshing shower. You walk into the bathroom and see three small tubes sitting on the counter top by the sink. You know that one of them is shampoo, another is conditioner, and the third is body lotion. You pick one of them up to find out which is which. Unfortunately, you have left your glasses on the bedside table and the print on the tubes is so small that you can’t make out the words? Then decision time comes: should you go back and get your glasses so that you can see the words, or should you squint really hard and try to pick out the shampoo?

I’ve done both. Of course, the safest thing to do is to go get your glasses, but if there are people in the room….well, at least I wouldn’t go out into the room in my birthday suit. Of course, the moral of the story is: whenever you are in a hotel, wear your glasses into the bathroom.

When I was younger and my eyes were much better, I never encountered this problem. But as the years aged my eyes, I have gone from mildly needing glasses to I can’t read a thing without them. For me, at my stage of life, I need to put my glasses on before I go into a hotel room bathroom.

With this happening in mind, it seems to me that it is also a corollary to our life of Christian faith.

When a person is young, it is quite easy for a person to see God at work through the eyes of faith. Clearly, it is God who puts food on our tables, so why wouldn’t we pray before we eat? Clearly it is God who watches over us in the night, so why wouldn’t we pray before we go to sleep? Clearly, it is God who gives us friends and neighbors, so why wouldn’t we include them in our prayers every day?

But as time goes on, as with our eyes, what was clearly seen in our youth by our eyes of faith get blurry and hard to see. The lenses of our eyes of faith get stiffened by the coarseness of the world that we live in and we can’t pull God’s love into our focus. We get cataracts from exposing our eyes of faith to the suffering around us and it is harder to see the goodness of God. Just like with the eyes that lie on either side of our nose, so it is with the eyes of faith that lie on either side of our heart, the older a person gets, the harder it is to see.

One solution to the problem with our eyes of faith is to have large print to read. Why doesn’t God just make his working in the world bigger? Well, how much bigger do we need it to be? He has already made it life-sized. If we can’t see something that is life-sized, surely the day will come when we can’t see something that is printed larger.

The other solution is to wear glasses, glasses that fight the vision decay that happens as we age. And the good news is that God has given you and me such glasses. That is what Sunday morning worship is, glasses to put on so that we may see God’s presence more clearly. That is what prayer and Bible exploration is all about, glasses to put on so that we might have better focus to see God at work in our lives. That is what prayer is all about, glasses to put on that bend the light of Christ so that it isn’t blurry anymore.

So, learning from my hotel experience, I think there’s a greater moral of the story to be heard, whenever you are in this life, put on the glasses that God has given you before you step out into the world.

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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