Seeing Correctly


I wear corrective lenses and have since I was in 4th grade. I still remember sitting in the hallway outside the nurse’s office waiting for my annual eye exam and wondering why the trees did not have small branches like they did last year. A few weeks later I received my first pair of glasses and found myself amazed at how much detail there was in the world. Suddenly my whole viewpoint changed. I could see baseballs thrown in my direction far enough away that I could catch them, a big improvement when playing catch with my older brother, and from the pew I could see the priest’s hands and what he was holding.

The world seemed a different place to the 9 year old boy that I was, but it wasn’t. Glasses changed the way I saw everything, they did not change anything. Much like the way having faith changes the way we see the world, it does not change the world. This is of course, the very opposite of relativism.

When I look at the world from the vantage point of faith I see things in correct alignment. Nature follows rules which science discovers, there exists an order to the physical world where actions force definite conclusions, and all of it is in harmony with God’s revealed truth. So when I see grass grow, or a bird eat a worm I see order an ordered plan, a harmonious rhythm.

When you go to the eye doctor you are seated in a chair and asked to look at a chart across the room. The letters go from large to ridiculously small. The last line is the one you want to read, and sometimes it is hard to do so without some help. When storms blow and earths shake, when floods drown and droughts eviscerate, when disease runs rampant and famine starves the harmonious plan of God seems absent. Individuals may be tempted to make up a reason blaming the victims for their misfortune. To even a casual observer this is faulty, it also seems faulty to say God planned it.

When God made the world he clearly set it in motion to run along set lines and evidently He is reluctant to interfere with what he put so much care into setting up. Why? If creation ran so poorly that it required Divine intervention to function, what would that say about the creator?

History tells us that nature generally follows its own course and while we may think of these events as random they most certainly are not. Storms and droughts form due to the interaction of sun and ocean; earthquakes occur due to the movement of tectonic plates, while a tornado destroying a town fills the heart with sorrow, the storm itself was created because of certain atmospheric conditions which are good for us. It is good that hot air rises and cools creating clouds; it is good that winds move the atmosphere around and it is good that it rains. The forces of nature which cause the spring rains to come, the summer sun to warm and the fertile soil to produce abundance we enjoy also cause all the disasters.

Sometimes disasters strike, sometimes the natural event occur where we live and homes are destroyed, businesses ruined and lives lost. Those storms would have been exactly the same if they had occurred a few miles away from houses and homes, the difference is what they hit not whether they hit anything. They occur irrespective of mankind’s presence or plans.

Whereas nature acts according to a neutral preset rules, we don’t. We have free will. We can decide to help the stricken, to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, to bind the wound. God works in this world largely through us and His love can best be seen in the actions of His children.