Looking Good, Seeing Clearly

I was reminded lately of an experience in an optical shop a few years ago. After an eye examination, I took the lens prescription to a local business that specialized in offering a large variety of eyeglass styles and boasted of custom fitting each customer. They took a lot of time measuring the distances between my different facial features, and promised to offer me the perfect fit of the frames that I had chosen for the lenses. When I returned to pick them up after a few days, I sat in a chair while the technician observed how the glasses fit my face.
"How do they feel?" the young man asked.
"They feel fine," I said, "But I can't see through them."
"Great!" he exclaimed. "And they look so good on you!"
"But I can't see through them," I responded.
"But they look good," he maintained.
"But I can't see," I repeated. It's like he can't hear me, I thought. Maybe he's a deaf man in an optical shop. I wondered if hearing and seeing are connected. Finally, I began to break through to this guy. Evidently, someone had misread the lens prescription. He seemed heartbroken as he sighed and told me that they would have to send them back. "And they really looked good on you," was the last thing I heard him say.
The memory of this experience was triggered after my recent eye surgery. A lens implant from a cataract surgery ten years ago had slipped out of place, causing me to see double images in one eye. I am so glad that the surgeon wasn't like the optical shop technician. They seemed to have radically different understandings of the ultimate purpose of their service. The technician focused on how my eyeglasses "looked" and not how well I saw. The surgeon wanted to correct my vision. I have learned that it's far more important to see clearly than to look good. God wants me to see clearly so that He looks good. Jesus had something similar to say to His disciples. He told them stories that helped people gain a greater understanding of God and His purposes. Some of the people didn't get it. They were more concerned with looking good than with seeing clearly. But for the ones who heard the word of God...their vision was corrected.
"But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. For truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it." (Matthew 13:16-17)
Hearing and seeing are connected. Ponder awhile on this leftover thought: Instead of asking myself, How do I look?, focus on the question, What do I see? The world looks radically different through the lens of God's word. If anyone has ears to hear...
Blessings to you,
Sam