How would you respond if somebody you knew to be blind could suddenly see, or someone paralyzed came dancing down the street? Or course, now we have medical advances… but imagine if you were around when this blind man received sight he’d never had? It caused a stir, to say the least…
The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “'Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?' Some were saying, 'It is he.' Others were saying, 'No, but it is someone like him.'”
Funny how, when we’re positive something cannot be, we can convince ourselves we’re not seeing it. Even when the man said, “I’m the guy…” they couldn’t quite buy it.
He kept saying, “I am the man.” But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.”
Do we need to understand “how” to accept “what?” The man himself seems remarkably untroubled by how this came about – even before he gets the third degree from the religious authorities. Maybe it’s because he had no prior visual data to contradict his new reality. He did not have a lifetime of “that’s impossible, if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist” to overcome. He had never seen anything with his eyes. Maybe that’s why children believe so much more easily than adults – less contradictory data.
We can get so locked into our understanding of how the universe works – an understanding that the best scientists admit is incomplete – that we can’t entertain the possibility that the Creator of the whole thing has “laws” we have not yet discovered. Or have not discovered fully. That’s the “Kingdom of God” Jesus was making known, what I like to call the Energy Field of God.
Have you ever been asked to believe something that you knew to be impossible? Was it really? Or was your understanding too limited? Is there something in your life now that you’re being invited to believe? A step of faith you’re being invited to take? A prayer you’re being invited to try on? Can you take a step in that direction in prayer today?
The God we worship as Christ-followers is One who "calls into being things that were not.” (Romans 4:17). Faith is our ability to believe in what God is calling into being. We don’t have to be limited in prayer by what we’ve already seen. We do have to open ourselves to the possibility that God’s ways are bigger than we can imagine. That’s the beginning of faith vision, seeing what we have not previously been able to see.
God is calling things into being all the time. Imagine the sensory rush as our Spirit-vision kicks in and we truly begin to see the Energy of God at work around us.
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