Be Careful Little Eyes What You See

Be Careful Little Eyes What You See

Little Theodore never felt like he belonged. It would be years before he figured out why. By then his rage was off the charts.

His teen mother named him Theodore Robert Cowell, giving him her maiden name. She took her baby to Philadelphia to live with his grandparents. Ashamed of being an unwed mother, she told her son that she was his sister. He would be an adult before he discovered that his “big sister” was really his mother, and that his grandparents weren’t Mom and Dad. He never forgave that deception.

When he was four, his mom took him from the only home he had ever known and moved across the country. Theodore never recovered from the trauma of that move or the fact that his mother was incapable of showing affection. To make matters worse, she married an abusive alcoholic. The boy withdrew into a shell of bitter loneliness. Though he grew up to be quite handsome, Theodore had few friends or dates. He could never shake his paranoid fear of intimacy.

At age twelve, he found some porn magazines in a garbage dump. Through soft porn he tried to connect with women without risking intimacy. But the flesh is never satisfied. So Theodore graduated to the hard stuff. He tried to break his addiction by incessantly repeating a mantra he learned in Sunday school: “Be careful little eyes what you see.” But he couldn’t overcome the weaknesses of his flesh.

After the only girl he ever loved broke up with him, Theodore snapped. Somewhere outside Seattle, he killed his first victim. Before he was finished, he became the most prolific murderer in US history. Some experts say that he may have tortured and murdered as many as one hundred women in a cross-country killing spree. On the night before he was strapped into the electric chair at the Florida State Prison, Theodore “Ted” Bundy confessed to Dr. James Dobson,

There was an unfulfilled longing in my heart. I thought that pornography could fill the emptiness. My mind was always focused on the wrong things. They became the doorways that allowed sinister spirits to come inside me. Violence became part of my fantasies. I drank lots of alcohol to reduce my religious inhibitions. When I committed my first murder it seemed like I was possessed by something awful and alien.

Ted Bundy spent the last night of his life praying with a minister. He wept over the horror and pain he had inflicted on his victims. In the early morning hours, Theodore finally smiled and said, “My eyes will soon see something beautiful for the first time.” What will you look at today? Herman Melville wrote, “Eyes are windows to the soul.” If you recall Ted’s story, you might take this truth seriously:

Eyes are glass doors through which the visible world enters to take control of the invisible soul.

Your eye is like a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness.

Matthew 6:22-23