Five Minute Friday‘s prompt word this week is FOCUS.

So, go:

I love stereographic pictures. You know the ones I mean, where there’s a second picture hidden in the one you can see naturally with your naked eye?

To see the hidden object, you have to focus beyond the obvious, look through and past the easily recognized pattern as if you were peering up the highway through a dirty, rain-spattered windshield (avoiding focus on the window but peering past it to some point up the road instead.)

Once upon a time I couldn’t see those hidden things at all, when everyone else in the room said they could. I don’t know why, but in recent years when I picked up one of those books at Barnes and Noble on a coffee and dessert night out and tried the exercise, it worked! “Wow!” I kept saying as new views, one after another, would appear on successive pages. A whole new world was emerging before my eyes.

All excited about what I was seeing, I tried to get others to look, too. But no one in the family seemed interested but me.

This reminded me of my experience as a new believer in Christ. Before that I’d read (parts of) the Bible and had thought I understood what I was reading, just in obvious practical terms. But afterward, suddenly I was seeing beyond the obvious, and exclaiming “Wow! So that’s what that means!” But at that time there didn’t seem to be anybody around my life that was interested in that view!

All this in turn makes me think of Colossians 3:2 and of the song “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus.” When you focus there, “the things of earth will grow strangely dim.”

Please give that me far vision every day, dear Lord!

“Open my eyes, that I may see wonderful things…” (Psalm 119:18).

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