Not long ago, I shared this quote on my Facebook fanpage: “The eyes are useless when the mind is blind.” My friend Nate, an incredibly brilliant medical researcher, wrote this comment:
“The human eye only sees a very small amount of light in the Light/EMR spectrum. Much, much less than even 1%. These include Gamma rays, X-Rays, Ultraviolet, Infrared, Microwaves, Radio waves. So from a scientific view, we are very blind to the world around us. It’s like seeing through a very, very small slit.
So, that being said, just imagine all of the blessings we have each day, that go completely unseen because we only can see much less than 1%.”
First of all, I didn’t even know that the human eye only sees “much less than even 1%” of all of available visual data. Second, I wasn’t even thinking about blessings when I posted that quote! I was thinking about biases, bigotry, or judging people without knowing them. Blessings! Wow…that’s really cool. Isn’t it amazing that my friend helped me see the blessings to which I had been blind?
A few years ago, I was working with my friend Ronnie, at a wilderness therapy program in Arizona. We were hiking with a group of teenagers when we came across something absolutely stunning: ruins—a massive area filled with Native American ruins. And it wasn’t even on the map! Ronnie and I were so excited that we dropped our packs and ran back and forth, scouring the landscape, taking in all of the amazing history (while being careful not to touch anything, of course). For all we knew, we were the first visitors to those ruins in centuries! There were stone walls, foundations, pottery shards, and lots of other incredible things! We were archaeologists! I was finally Indiana Jones!
Imagine our surprise when we realized that the kids we were hiking with didn’t share our enthusiasm. Instead of reveling in this glorious moment—which was clearly the gateway to some marvelous, treasure hunt (with Sean Bean as the title villain, no doubt)—these kids were sitting around chatting about pop music. POP MUSIC!!
How on earth could you possibly talk about pop music at a time like this?!
I turned to Ronnie and vented my frustration. “Dude, how is this possible? They’re sitting in the middle of a historic wonder, and they don’t even see it.”
I then waxed philosophical. I do that sometimes.
“I wonder how often we do that in life. How many times are we sitting in middle of the most miraculous things, but we don’t even notice because we’re too caught up in the trivial things of the world?”
Ronnie nodded, and then said something that blew me away. “Yeah, like when we’re sitting in church and not paying attention to what the sermon is about.”
Whoa.
I have come to realize that we are always sitting in the middle of a sermon. God has created a most miraculous world, and is constantly using it to preach to us. Let us not be blind (or deaf) to His sermons.
Let us choose to constantly see all the miraculous that is all around us.