Imagine going to a 3D movie without wearing the 3D glasses. The picture is blurry, fuzzy, and out of focus. However, it's been a long day, you're tired, and so you sit there and think you'll get used to it. Gradually it may become easier to see, though it gives you a headache.
Then the person next to you hands you a pair of glasses. Wow! The colors are sharper and look how much depth everything has! Everything changes in an instant. The simplest things look fantastic. And the scary stuff is more than awful.
The same thing happens when we try on God-glasses for the first time. We may have spent our whole lives living in a world without glasses and assumed that's just how things were. Stuff was just stuff. Not much was great. There wasn't much bad stuff because it looked like all the other stuff around us. We assumed what we saw was all there is. Our vision of the world was as limited as that of a man in a cave staring at shadows of forms on a wall.
When we put on God-glasses, everything changes in an instant. For the first time, we realize that those common things in our world were created by the hand of God and can help us know Him better. The common stuff isn't just a flat picture on a screen, but things with depth that we can see, feel, hear, taste, and smell in order to better experience what God gives us.
And suddenly, we see sin. It isn't common, everyday and to be expected like we thought. We slowly realize how dark and evil it is. We see that it can eat away and destroy the life of Christ in the soul. When a community and a culture accepts or promotes it as normal or makes that which is sinful into that which is common, all that is common is degraded. The more we fall into it, the colder, darker, and flatter the world becomes.
It can become so dark and cold and lonely that those who embrace it reject the God-glasses. They have spent so much time in a dark cave that the prospect of experiencing a great light and the fullness of colors is painful and anathema to them.
If you've spent a lifetime without the God-glasses, expect some transition issues. Maybe your friends and family don't wear the glasses and don't understand how you've changed. They don't see what you see, and they ridicule, scorn, or hate you for changing. It's hard to change a lifetime of habits.
This fall, I've watched my son struggle to adjust to his first regular pair of glasses. He's constantly conscious of them and occasionally takes them off because he's not used to wearing them all the time. Sometimes he slides them down his nose so he can try seeing without them to compare the difference. Other times, he simply forgets to put them on at all. Or else he gets active with a bunch of his friends and takes them off so he can go wild and dive into a four-foot pile of leaves. Glasses hamper his style. He hasn't yet learned to live with them.
The same things happen to us when we put on God-glasses. Sometimes when I struggle with mine, I grow discouraged. I hear the clamor of voices of criticism surrounding me and I forget to look forward. Looking back is easier, especially when others are grasping at us and trying to pull us back into destructive habits.
If we drop our God-glasses or set them aside and forget them, they are always there waiting. If we want to, we can one day put them on again and begin to see the world through God's eyes.
When John Henry Newman was sick and struggling to get home from Italy to England, delays hit him until he was suddenly filled with the peace of knowing he was being lovingly led. He wrote the hymn, "Lead Kindly Light":
Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home –
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene – one step enough for me.
I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that Thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path, but now
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.
So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.
