On this pre-Thanksgiving Monday, I’d like to share a small story that happened to me in the past month or so. I wrote this in my private journal after it happened and am copying it from there:
For the past few years I have really struggled with contact lenses. It used to be that I could pop in my contacts every morning before school or work and then go all day without them bothering me. For several years now, I haven’t been able to keep my contacts in my eyes for more than a few hours at a time, and even those few hours are usually wrought with torture. No matter what contacts I’d try, my eyes would soon reject them.
I went to the optometrist in August and got myself another pair of contacts. After trying on three pairs, the optometrist handed me what felt like a miracle pair. I couldn’t feel them in my eyes at all. (Oh yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be!) For a couple months, I was in heaven. I actually put them on when I got up in the morning and wore them all the way until bedtime with absolutely no discomfort. I felt like a human being.
Then, a few weeks ago, I started experiencing discomfort in my right eye. The same old problems: I could feel the lens moving around, and I was always opening my eye up wide, trying to roll my eyeball around and smooth out the contact. I counted back to the last time I’d changed my lenses and thought it maybe was just getting old, so I threw out the old lens and put in a new one. It didn’t help. I experienced the same problems. Stopped wearing my contacts again.
Finally, this morning, I had had enough. I kept taking the contact out and putting it back in trying to get it to work. As I approached the fourth or fifth attempt at getting it to sit comfortably on my eye, I mumbled a pathetic little prayer, hardly formal, more of a conversation opener. “Heavenly Father, please, I just want to be able to wear my contacts again. Why isn’t this working?” and I stuck it in my eye.
Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, my contact went in without any problem and hasn’t bothered me since.
I am grateful for so many things in my life, large and small. This Thanksgiving week, however, I would like to express in particular how grateful I am to know I have a Father in Heaven who loves me and is interested in the details of my life. I know, too, that He loves all His children, and is just as eager to help them with anything in their lives that they struggle with, big or small. If He can help me put a contact lens in my eye, He can help you too with whatever you might struggle. If it’s important to you, it’s important to our Father.
I’ll quote E.M Forster’s “The Beauty of Life” again:
The beauty of the fine day amid dingy weather; the beauty of the unselfish action amid selfishness; the beauty of friendship amidst indifference: we cannot go through life without experiencing these things, they are as certain as the air in the lungs. Some people have luck, and get more happiness than others, but every one gets something. And therefore, however pessimistic we are in our convictions, however sure we are that civilization is going to the dogs on account of those abominable—(here insert the name of the political party that you most dislike)—; we yet remain optimists by instinct; we personally have had glorious times, and may have them again.
Forster’s remarks are not really religious in nature, and I can appreciate them fully without making them so. However, because I feel they speak to absolute truth I have no qualms in applying them to other absolute truths in my life. In this case, I apply them to my religious experiences.
Just as Forster argues we all have beautiful moments in life, I argue that we can all have experiences with God. We can ignore them, deny them, belittle them, but they are there. They are there in the stars and in the flowers and in the trees. His creations surround us, and so does His love. He loves us. His love doesn’t mean that every moment of our lives will be perfect and joyous, but it means He is always there. We can have comfort and joy in the knowledge that He has provided a way for us to return home to Him, whatever our struggles may be. All we have to do is look for Him, and we will find Him there.
We must insist on going to look round the corner now and then, even if other people think us a little queer, for as likely as not something beautiful lies round the corner. And if we insist, we may have a reward that is even greater than we expected, and see for a moment with the eyes of a poet —may see the universe, not merely beautiful in scraps, but beautiful everywhere and for ever.
Life is beautiful, everywhere and forever.
Elinor
Marianne
