Waterlogged Cellphones, Conjunctivitis and Dim Lamps

“Eye boogers” is the term Andrew used to describe them, and they are as gross as they sound. The morning they crusted his eyes shut, he panicked, thinking he had gone blind. We washed them away and they fell like scales (yeah, maybe a little like Paul’s), from his eyes, and he could see! Well, sort of. “Everything’s foggy,” he said, as he peered through his swollen, red peepers.

Thus began pinkeye’s romp through the Pilet household, and a particularly virulent romp it proved. Moriah succumbed, and then Josiah, and Grace, and Jonan, and Andrew again, and then… as to one born out of due time… I did. (No, really, I thought I had avoided the infection. I know it is really contagious, but I had lasted more than a week without contracting it.) And that morning I awoke with swollen pus-filled eyes and opened them to a blurry half-lit world. No amount of blinking or rubbing helped. It all was a blur. Bugger.

This turn of events coincided with the recovery of my cellphone. Sunday evening, the church’s neighbor brought my phone to the church, explaining he had found it in the church’s driveway as the snow had started to melt. I had prepared myself, mentally, for this possibility, so I was not surprised when the screen remained blank as I powered up the phone. Water had seeped into the screen and damaged the display.

I took the phone home and put it in a bowl of uncooked rice. A couple of days in the rice helped a little, as it soaked up some of the moisture and caused the display on the outside of the phone to start working partially.

Yesterday morning, I sat at our kitchen table and struggled to clear my (treated but still recovering) vision and examine the cell phone. It was hopeless. The combination of my boogered eyes and the phone’s waterspotted display made it impossible for me to use the phone. Yep, like Andrew said, “Everything’s foggy.”

These events caused me to ponder Christ’s statement concerning the eye. He said, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light.” Wow, isn’t that the truth? A week before, I opened my eyes and light flooded in. This week, I opened my eyes, and a dim stream trickled in. And, so He continues, “If your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.” Again, how true. How disheartening and frustrating it was to find myself robbed of this most basic sense.

But, of course, Christ was not talking ultimately about the physical body. He was talking about the eye of one’s soul. In the context of the Sermon on the Mount, it seems that He is speaking of one’s eye as that which reveals the truest desires of one’s heart. Right before His statements concerning the eye, He speaks of treasure and encourages that heavenly treasures be sought, rather than earthly treasures. And then, immediately following His statements concerning the eye, He speaks of the impossibility of serving two masters and the necessity of choosing between the two options… God and mammon. Thus, it seems that Christ’s emphasis is that the light-filled eye, the one that is a bright lamp for the soul, is the one that sees material things and temporal matters with an eternal and God-centered perspective. And this only makes sense, as we seek to emulate the One who is the True Light, the Light of the World.

So, as I sat at the kitchen table, I found myself ironically reminded by a poor cellphone display and blurry eyesight of the relative unimportance of those things. What matters most is clear spiritual vision and a perpetual focus on eternity. Perhaps this is was what Paul was driving at when he wrote, “we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

This week, I hope your physical eyesight and cellphones are doing better than mine. But, more importantly, I hope that your spiritual vision is clear and your sights are set on eternity.