On Seeing Clearly

Category: Theme · 4 min read

Spiritual vision doesn't blur all at once. It drifts slowly, quietly, without announcement. This is about how we find our way back.

Here is the strange thing about losing clarity: you almost never notice it happening. Blindness, if it came suddenly, you would notice — you'd panic, you'd seek help. But this isn't that. This is the slow filming-over of sight, the kind that happens so gradually you simply adjust, and squint, and call the dimmer version normal.

It happens with the people closest to you. There was a time you saw your spouse, your child, your friend as they actually were. And then, somewhere along the way, you started seeing your assumptions about them instead — the version built from old arguments and disappointments and the story you've told yourself so many times it hardened into fact. They changed, and you kept seeing the old picture. That's not malice. It's drift.

It happens with God. You started with something alive, and over the years it quietly calcified into a set of expectations — a God shaped less by who He is than by who your father was, or what that church taught you, or what you concluded the year the prayer went unanswered. You stopped relating to God and started relating to a composite you assembled from old wounds and never updated.

And it happens with yourself. You lost the ability to see yourself accurately somewhere back there, and now you either think less of yourself than is true or more, and either way the focus is off.

The reason none of this gets noticed is simple, and a little cruel: the same fog that blurs the sight also blurs your ability to notice the blur. You can't see that you can't see. It's like a prescription that slowly goes out of date — you don't wake up one morning unable to read the signs. You squint a little more each month, lean in a little closer, call it fine, until the day someone hands you the right lenses and you realize how much you'd been missing.

There's a story in Mark's gospel I keep coming back to (Mark 8:22–26). They bring a blind man to Jesus, and He heals him — but not all at once. He touches him and asks what he sees, and the man says something haunting: he sees people, but they look like trees walking around. Real sight, but partial. Shapes without clarity. So Jesus touches him a second time, and then he sees everything clearly.

I love that He didn't rebuke the half-sight. He didn't say that should have worked the first time. He simply touched him again.

Most of us are somewhere in the "trees walking" stage, if we're honest. We can see that something is there — shapes, outlines, a general sense. But the clarity is partial, and we've mistaken partial sight for full sight for so long that we stopped asking for the second touch.

So how do we find our way back?

Not by squinting harder. That's the first instinct, and it's the wrong one. You cannot force clarity through effort any more than you can force your eyes to adjust to a dark room by staring into it. You adjust by staying still long enough for your eyes to do what they were made to do.

Clarity comes back the same way. You get still. You stop adding more input to an already-overloaded field of vision. You quiet the noise that's been filming everything over. And you tell the truth — I think I've gone blurry. I don't think I'm seeing this clearly anymore — which is one of the most clarifying sentences a person can say, because naming the blur is where the focus begins to return.

And then you let yourself be touched a second time. You stop pretending the half-sight is the whole picture. You ask, the way the blind man's friends asked on his behalf, for something you cannot give yourself.

You don't have to see everything today. Trees walking is not failure. It's the first touch. It means sight is already returning.

Stay near the One who touches eyes a second time. The clarity you're missing is not gone. It's only waiting for you to be still enough to receive it.

Volume Five of the Direction Series is called Seeing Clearly: A Journey from Blur to Focus. If this resonated with you, you can begin at directionseries.com.

The Porchlight is on. 🔆
© 2025 Wylette P. Tillman | Polaris Press LLC.