A couple weeks ago, both Bay and I had our eyes checked in Oklahoma, where we had lens replacement surgery last summer.
Over the months, both of us developed a filmy “opacification” that formed over our eyes that left us just a wee bit cloudy, even if our eyesight was pretty near perfect!
Without taking care of it, vision would increasingly get worse and dim the light coming in needed for good sight.
Hence, our doc said, we needed a YAG capsulotomy.
Basically, Dr. Morgan just used a laser beam and shot that cloudy stuff to smithereens.
An easy little surgery, taking no more than a few minutes for each of us.
But as he performed the surgery, Dr. Morgan had to look deep inside our eyes to find exactly what needed to be zapped.
Tuck this away.
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Things happen in the middle of the night when I’m awake and sleepless.
I’ve shared before how my mind generally gets the best of me.
It has a tendency to cycle around random things that left me confused over the course of a day; tornadoes of what-ifs; stormy seas of doubt that crash into my faith-boat and leave me wondering.
Sometimes my mind wanders off and spends time sitting in the shadows of the what-else-could-possibly-happen, conjuring up all manners of fear.
What’s even worse are the conversations I should have had, with words I didn’t think of in the moment, but have come to surface at 2:00 AM.
AND, along with all the above, quite frankly, my imagination brilliantly creates all kinds of stories about what’s happening in the here and now.
I could probably write some award winning novels if I could remember them all in the morning.
In the midst of all this, my wise-mind begins to recall all the tools it knows to step away and move out of the path of this onslaught, but that emotional-mind somehow seems to chain it’s counterpart to the wall and shuts out all possible communication between the two with duct-tape.
(This is not literal, you understand, it’s just what it feels like in the middle of the night.)
This whole scenario played itself out just a few nights ago, until sometime around 5 AM, I drifted off to sleep til 7:00’s morning light woke me.
As is typical, coffee in hand, I journeyed to my place on the couch where I meet with Jesus each morning.
I turned in my Bible to where I’d left off reading the day before: Philippians 2:14.
Paul writes:
“Do all things (EvErY! ThInG!) without grumbling or disputing.”
Grumbling. Disputing.
“Certainly that’s not my problem, right, Lord?”
So, I dug into the words.
Grumble (gotta love it’s Greek Word: goggysmos) – to murmur, to mutter, to grumble, to complain.
Here was the kicker, however – to hold a “secret debate within oneself.”
Dispute (Greek Word: dialogismos; where we get our word for dialogue) – literal meaning, the internal thinking of a man who deliberates with Himself, inward reasoning, a hesitation or a doubt…
The whole concept of inner/inward/secret grumbling, murmuring, deliberation, and doubting brought a new awareness.
I’m fine (ahem) for the most part on the outside.
I don’t often see myself as a complainer or an arguer.
And, because I think I’m fine on the outside, I think I’m FINE….
BUT…my middle of the night struggle, where the emotional-mind took over and silenced all wisdom, revealed much more to me about what’s in the secret places of my soul than I realized was there; and, it wasn’t pretty. In fact, it was sin-ugly!
When I filtered it all through God’s Words, what was left were those two words: grumbling and debating with the Lord.
As God’s Word says, what’s on the inside will eventually come to the outside.
So….
This, like any sin, blatant or “secret,” required the spiritual discipline of confession…that I might be a “blameless and innocent child of God without blemish in a crooked and twisted world (2;15).”
It’s the secret places of the soul that trip me up time and time again….and, what’s in there clouds my spiritual vision…and, it will dim the LIGHT shining in!
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You get the parallel, I recognized the next morning the need for a spiritual YAG procedure…to look deep within and zap away the stuff that’s obscuring my spiritual sight.
In the Kingdom world, we call that repentance.
I acknowledged the secret stuff in my soul, the stuff that the Lord revealed to me in the midst of my sleeplessness, and allowed the Lord to blast them away, clean it all up…and begin again, forgiven.
Forgiven: to have our sins lifted up and carried away.
I love what David says in Ps 32 (especially verses 1-5):
BLESSED (Hebrew- eser: made straight) ARE THE FORGIVEN!
In a crooked and twisted world, I can move forward on a straight, level path, because God is so good at His spiritual surgeries.
He straightens up my heart that I might be a testimony to a crooked generation.
Need a YAG procedure on your heart?
They are incredibly helpful.