Have You Found What You’re Not Looking For?

Have You Found What You’re Not Looking For?

“You have eyes—can’t you see? You have ears—can’t you hear?” Don’t you remember anything at all?

Mark 8:18

There is a saying in India, “When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are the pockets.” Our motives shape what we see—and don’t see—around us.

Consider the fabled story of the man from Colorado who moved to Texas and built a house with a large picture window looking out on hundreds of miles of rangeland. “The only problem is,” he said, “there’s nothing to see.” About the same time, a man from Texas moved to Colorado and built a house with a large picture window overlooking the Rockies. “The only problem is I can’t see anything,” he said. “The mountains are in the way.” Each was blind to what the other saw clearly.

Of course, we are all prone to this problem. In varying degrees, we all share a tendency toward denial, an emotionally comfortable strategy that protects us from the distress that recognizing the harsh truth would bring. So we might resort to filtering out information, rationalizing mistakes, avoiding responsibility. Some of us will do just about anything to steer clear of the truth if it might hurt. To make the matter of getting to the truth worse, we even have ways of ensuring that people around us collude with our denial. That’s especially true of our spouses. At an almost unconscious level, we can manipulate events in our relationships so that not only we but others also avoid honest, constructive feedback, acting as though everything is fine when in fact it is not. If we are not intentional about staying clear of this tendency, we buy the illusion of harmony at the cost of the truth. And we miss the path that could take us to emotional maturity and spiritual health.

So what illusion might be standing in the pathway to your well-being? Or to look at it from another angle, what is God trying to show you? How is he revealing himself to you? What are you not seeing? Of course, you can’t answer that question now. It’s an answer that comes only with contemplation and time—as long as you are looking for it. Ask God to give you the eyes to see yourself as you are, so that you may see others as they are.

The truth, as the light, makes blind.

—Albert Camus