“Honey, close your eyes.”
“But why mommy?”
“So when we pray, you can shut out the world and focus on Jesus.”
Once her little eyes squeezed shut, a pint-sized heart poured out gallons of blessings upon everything she held dear.
I remembered that this morning when I read Acts 9 about Saul’s conversion on the way to Damascus. I wondered if that’s why Jesus chose to make him blind when He confronted Saul’s rampage of religious sin. Thinking himself wise and zealous in his torment of the bride of Christ, the One he truly persecuted intercepted his plans, confronted his sin, then struck him with complete blindness. The Pharisaical behemoth now needed to have someone hold his hand. He who led others down the path of dead legalism was brought to a halt and forced to sit in Light-induced darkness.
The world is now shut out from Saul’s view. His only sight is what happens in his memory, the imaginations of his heart, and whatever might be played across the screen of his thoughts from God. Three days with his eyes forced closed. Verse 11 tells us “And the Lord said (to Ananias), ‘Arise and go…to one called Saul of Tarsus: for, behold, he prays.”Basically, “Go to this once angry madman, because look…take notice…he’s praying.” A broken heart is a magnet to God. Repentance is the key to unlock clarity of sight to the blind. Paul would later right in Romans 2:19-21“Are you confident that you yourself are a guide of the blind, a light of them which are in darkness…an instructor…a teacher…with a form of knowledge and the truth of the law? You which teach another, don’t you teach yourself?” He thought he saw when he was blind, but when the Light blinded him, he saw.
Even Jonah the prophet decided he didn’t like God’s ways of grace and mercy and had to be swallowed by darkness. It was only when he prayed, that he was spit out to proceed in a new direction.
I closed my eyes and thanked the Lord for sight. Then asked him if there was any area of blindness in my perspective that I’d brought on by my own sin. I’m still praying. He knows my heart. And if there is, then I trust He will allow the scales to fall so I can see again with a holy perspective. That’s much better than having to be spewed.
Wanna close your eyes with me?
