Spiritual Glasses

      For all intents and purposes, I cannot see without my glasses. I can see blurry shapes and outlines that give me a general sense of something, but not the intricate details of objects. (After getting my glasses for the first time, my reaction was: "The trees have leaves on them?" Meaning instead of green blobs, of course.)

     Because of this, I love cleaning the house without my glasses on. You may wonder what the correlation is, but let me explain it. Without my glasses, the house looks pretty good right from the start. I can run the sweeper and feel like I'm ready to sit down and pat myself on the back for a job well done.

     Then I put my glasses on.

     And it's super hard not to be discouraged.

     The long hairs, the dust bunnies, the random crud that seems to collect, it's all still there. I just couldn't see it because I'm blind. Everything comes into focus suddenly, and I'm (unfortunately) back to work again.

     Our spiritual lives can be a lot like that.

     When we examine ourself through the eyes of the world, or with the blinders of our own self-deception, we can seem pretty good about our lives. You can sit in your blobby, formless castle without spiritual glasses on and thing: "hey, I've got a pretty swell life. No need to change or improve as far as I can see."

     And then...you put on the spiritual glasses. The dirt on your life suddenly becomes apparent, because you're looking at your life through the lens of God's perspective. You're not done cleaning house yet. 

     This can be discouraging, to say the least. It's always disheartening to find out that there are ways we can improve, or that there are things we need to weed out from our lives for more spiritual growth. It's hard, because we want to sit down and be satisfied with ourself. We want to think that we're good where we are. It's the same reason I always try and clean house without my glasses on!

     But we NEED to wear our spiritual glasses so we don't become "whitewashed tombs," as Jesus described the Pharisees. Nobody wants a Christian who acts perfect to the real world, or condemns the dirtiness of other people's houses without first scrubbing his own. It's only once we've scrubbed our own lives can we truly see the world through clean spiritual glasses, and see where we can help other people in their own lives.

     If you're in complacent in house cleaning, your house will only get dirtier and dirtier. It's the same in your Christian life. If you don't regularly assess and try and clean your life, it'll just be filled with the grime of your sins and bad habits. So don't wait to dust off your Godly glasses and put them on. Let's all take time to examine our lives today and see where the crud is in our lives, and how we can clean house to be more like Jesus.