September 20th

The Eye is the Lamp of the Body

            The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

Matthew 6:22-23

            A lamp allows you to see in the darkness.  It allows you to discern what is safe and what is dangerous, which path is good and which path would be bad for you.  Our eyes…our vision…how we look at the world are the lamps of our lives.  How we see the world determines how we discern what is healthy and safe and good and what is corrupt and dangerous and evil.  If we look at something that is evil and call it good, our hearts and our minds and our relationships are broken and we are in need of rescue because what we think is light is actually darkness.

            I thought that what I saw in my son was rebellion.  Before the diagnosis, before the therapies, I looked at my toddler and saw someone who had no self-control, refused to obey his parents, would not eat, would not sleep, and was determined to go his own way.  It was clear that he was incredibly smart.  I looked at his behaviors and what I understood was that he could obey, he just chose not to over and over again.  So we sat in timeout.  A lot.  And then he would do the exact same thing that got him into trouble in the first place and we would go back to timeout.  He had to learn to respect his parents.  That was my best understanding and his refusal to adapt made me so angry.

            Then we learned about autism.  And I discovered that there was a different interpretation to what I was seeing.  In my head the narrative had been that they boy was introverted and stubborn.  A new narrative was introduced that painted a different story.  He was overstimulated with some of his senses and understimulated with others.  He could not tune into our voices.  He was trying to make his way through a world that was too bright and too loud and hurt his skin and his guts and his father kept making him sit down while talking about disappointment and expectations and all sorts of other things that made no sense.

            I thought that I understood what was happening.  I thought that I was helping my son become a mature and responsible boy.  In reality, I was driving him deeper into isolation and pain.  The light in me was darkness and I caused needless tears from my ignorance.

            We can only work with what we know and we cannot be expected to know everything.  But what we have to be careful of and mindful of is how we are looking at people and situations and which narratives are playing in our minds.  We may be wrong.  We may not have all the information.  We may have all the information and we have just pieced it together to make the wrong picture. 

            Being a parent does not mean always being right.  It means always doing what is right for your child.  Sometimes that means admitting you were wrong and learning a new way of looking at your child and your situation.

           

A moment to reflect:

What area of your life do you need to re-examine?  Where do the details not quite match up with the internal narrative?  Ask God if there is any place where your light is actually darkness.