Sometimes our vision gets cluttered. The stuff of life overwhelms us. Sometimes it’s problems we can’t fix for ourselves or others. Other times it’s busloads of little things that drain energy and eat up time. Always that is a signal that we need a touch from the healer. There’s a miracle of Jesus recorded in Mark 8 that speaks of this for me.
In the miracle story, an extremely fortunate blind man had friends who took him to Jesus. It was the friends who begged the Lord to heal him. We must be intentional about choosing friends who take us to Jesus! Blind people can’t see the solution.
Jesus reached out and took the blind man’s hand. Doesn’t that thrill your soul? It wasn’t the blind man who took the initiative to go to Jesus—nor was it the blind man who reached out to Him. Earthly friends escorted the blind man to the eternal, all-powerful friend – Jesus!
But here’s where the story takes a challenging turn for many of us. We’re okay with walking along with friends to Jesus. We’re okay with Jesus taking our hand. But then Jesus led the man out of the village. Here is where we begin to resist the cure. We think we are safer in the crowd than in the sole company of Jesus—and that’s a lie that keeps us blind. The first step in healing our vision is walking away from the noise to hear Jesus.
The next step only happens when we genuinely believe in the goodness of our friend. Jesus spit in the eye of the blind man. To spit in the eye conveys ‘shame’ and ‘reproach.’ Our souls bristle at that – we like to be right, to be honored not admonished. With Jesus, the reproach is never condemnation, it is a call to come closer to Him, to see Him more clearly. And His question to the man confirms this: “What do you see?”
His reply is the level of healing many settle for in life. “I see men as trees.” People easily cloud our vision of Jesus. The problems we see in this world relate to people, and if we look through our human eyes, we’ll be overwhelmed. We need to see through the eyes of love – through God’s eternal perspective. In the healing miracle of Mark 8, Jesus then puts His hands on the blind man’s eyes again—and His sight becomes clear.
The Lord then told him, go home, don’t go back in the crowd. That’s not an instruction to become a hermit, that’s the way we learn to be in the world but not of the world. The crowds confuse us, blind us. We need to have our hearts firmly rooted in the presence of God and that is a private effort. It takes place in quiet, personal times with Jesus. So, if you are feeling crushed by life’s challenges, let Jesus take your hand, show you what needs to change, touch you with love, and call you into His presence.
