Eyes of Light

Our eyes act as information grabbers and memory makers all through our lives. It depends on where and what we would focus our eyes on to gather the information we prefer to build our memory and enhance our experience in life.

As a young boy I was sitting in church one day, waiting for the sermon to start when I gathered something through my eyes. A tramp walked into church through one of the side entrances and took a seat close to the front on the right hand side.

He sat for about a minute or two when a woman who sat behind him leaned over and whispered something in his ear. The man then stood up and walked out of church. We later learned that she asked him to take a seat in the back of the church. He felt so ashamed that he chose to leave.

I imagined a scene experienced through the eyes of the tramp. He probably saw a church and, having had positive memories about it from the past, he longed to experience that love and peace once again. He saw his own worn clothes with months of dust and dirt clinging to them, but he gathered enough courage to enter and quickly sat down on the first empty space he found. His heart grew warm inside as he listened to the music. Then he heard someone whispering in his ear, “Sir, would you please get up and go sit at the back.”

I suppose the woman who appointed herself as tramp whisperer felt she did everyone a favour by asking this man to take a seat of lesser class.

As he left, his eyes filled with tears and he could only see blurred images of people walking towards the entrance, staring at him with frosty frozen expressions of disgust, pity and shame. The tramp did not blame the tramp whisperer or the church, but reminded himself why he had become the man he was. Sheer pain throbbed where his heart was supposed to be.

God noticed through His eyes the wasted past of someone who lost the way many years before, but He also saw the longing for love, the desire to come back and sit at the feet of Jesus again and to hear someone say to him, “Hi, I love you”, or just “ How are you?”

We are the instruments Jesus uses to touch broken hearts and to lead them to the hands of the Creator, the Healer and Mender of broken hearts.

If it had been a feast organised by Jesus, He would have stopped the tramp, invited him back into the hall and asked the tramp whisperer to take a seat at the back to make room for him (Luke 14:8,9).

Luke 11:33-36 says the lamp of the body is the eye.

This lamp shines in two directions. What we allow to enter through our eyes, determines our way of thinking which in turn determines where we want our eyes to rest upon.