Curative Grace

Faith is the seeing eyes that find the gauze to heaven torn through; that, slow to witness the silent weight, feel the gold glory bar heavy in palm, no matter the outer appearance. Seeing is the spiritual life: “they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and return and be healed” (Isaiah 6:10 NASB). “Looking comes first,” wrote C. S. Lewis.^a

First the eyes. Always first, the inner eyes.

Looking is the love. Looking is evidence of the believing.

I remember reading it only weeks before, sitting in the surgeon’s waiting room with Levi, the hospital renovation progressing slowly, the patients healing only slightly faster. (Transfiguration can be the long miracle.) Levi had daydreamed out the waiting room window, listened to the stories of car accidents and work injuries from the bandaged, and I had held my book. I’d read how the Israelites looked about and saw much to bemoan, much to complain about: “They spoke against God and against Moses, and said, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die here in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!’ “ (Numbers 21:5).

I had looked around at the wounded all waiting. I had turned back to the page. And what does God send the ingrates? What came to the ingrates in the Eden beginning? A slithering blanket of snakes that coil around the complaints of the Israelites, open wide and pierce the flesh with the fang. Always, ingratitude makes the poison course.

The cure against the bite of thanklessness.

The remedy is in the retina.

How we behold determines if we hold joy. Behold glory and be held by God.

How we look determines how we live … if we live.

And I had read how Jesus says, “In the same way that Moses lifted the serpent in the desert so people could have something to see and then believe, it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up — and everyone who looks up to him, trusting and expectant, will gain a real life, eternal life” (John 3:14 – 15 MSG). I had looked up from my book and into the face of a boy with his ear bandaged and I didn’t want to imagine what had happened.

I had tried to take it in. Isn’t Jesus Himself saying that people need to see and then believe — that looking and believing are the same thing? That in the right inner looking we can gain the right outer life … the saved full life?

I had read it and had forgotten (always!), but I remember it now. “Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God.”^b

Faith is in the gaze of a soul. Faith is the seeing soul’s eyes upon a saving God.

That’s what makes us persevere through a life: to see Him who is invisible!

Lord, You heal every infirmity. Heal my stunted sight. Open the eyes of my heart. I long to see Your heart — even when I can’t see Your hand. The remedy is in the retina.