See the Good

A few years ago I had the privilege of teaching French to a totally blind student. I say privilege because that’s what it was. It was also one of the greatest challenges in my teaching career up to that point. Angie had never seen in her life and teaching her colors forced my brain to work in ways that it had never gone before. I could say blue is like the sky, but she had never seen the sky. The expression, red like a rose, is meaningless to someone who has never seen a rose.

I learned many things from that experience but one lesson I continue to reflect upon is how much sight impacts our judgments. Generally speaking this is not a bad thing. God gave us sight to interact with our environment and help us make good choices.

Our sight works against us, however, when we make assumptions about the evil in others and are blind to the good that a little love on our part might bring out.

Becoming a successful man requires you to:

look beyond the mistakes that others have made,
the hurts that they have caused
the scars that they carry.

You must look deeper to see only the potential within. To a certain extent, we all need to become like Angie-blind to what is visible to others-so that we can truly see the good that may be lying just underneath the surface.

Yesterday I thought of how Jesus looked beyond the cracking, scaly skin of a disfigured leper to see a human-a hurting man like any other who needed a healing touch. Whereas others would run from the man’s ugliness and the stigma that surrounded leprosy, Jesus-the perfect Man-touched him.

Christ went beyond the physical evil of disease that was working in that man’s body but on a deeper level, God’s love blinds Him to the faults we carry enabling. This “voluntary blindness” enables Him to see beyond what we are to what we can become if we surrender to Him. That is perhaps the greatest example of “seeing the good” that we can ever hope to imitate in our own dealings with our fellow man.

Today, blind yourself to the evil in the world and focus on the good. Maybe a little love in your part will make it easier to see.

Have thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear from you.