Julie Lyles Carr shares her experience of discovering an eye condition at the age of 10 that affected her central vision. She talks about how she had to learn to look at things differently, and how this experience taught her the importance of perspective. Find out more ways to be ready to see what God can do in your life, even in challenging situations.
What’s New!
Monday Story:
- We should be ready to see what God is going to do. Looking for the good, looking for where God is at work. Story of Jesus healing the blind man and at first he thought he saw trees.
Tuesday Key Verse:
- Psalm 27:13 – Yet I am confident I will see the Lord’s goodness while I am here in the land of the living.
Wednesday Prayer:
- Lord, help me to see the things that you are doing. Help me to see the good in people. Help me to see what is right, even when other things want to get in the way. In the name of Jesus, amen.
Thursday Question:
- What is something you’ve seen God do in your life?
Friday Fun Fact:
- Q: Which animal has the very best eyesight, can see the best?
- A: The eagle! An eagle can see a rabbit from 2 miles away!
Show Notes:
To get this week’s episode and daily text prompts, text the word Go to 89419.
If you are in Canada, text GodOnTheGo to 866-729-1065
Transcription:
When I was about 10 years old, I got up one morning like I usually did, and I got ready for school like I usually did. And I got on the school bus like I usually did. And I went to my school and I went to my classroom and I sat in the desk where I usually sat… But then something very unusual happened. I started feeling like I was seeing something, like seeing something in my eye. That sounds weird, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t anything that was actually in the room with me. It wasn’t something that was on the page I was looking at. It was something that felt like in my eye. And around that time I started to have a terrible headache and I kept thinking that maybe the headache would go away and it wouldn’t go away. And so, I finally told my teacher what was going on and she took me to the school nurse and the school nurse called my mom. And my mom came and picked me up and she took me to the doctor. And that one doctor visit led to a bunch of other doctor visits.
I’m Julie Lyles Carr. And this is God on the Go, part of the Purposely Podcast Network where we help you make the minutes matter. And that little eye thing turned out to be kind of a big deal. I have a condition in my eye that makes me see something right in the middle of my central vision. And this was the first time that they discovered that. And I have to tell you that for a while, oh, it really was hard to learn how to look around that thing to be able to ignore it. But God has this amazing way with our brains. Eventually I learned not to see it, but to see what’s around it. And so, what that meant was that over time I had to learn to look at things differently.
I had to learn how to sort of look around this thing that they found that was in my eye. And yet God is so amazing in the way that he has designed our brains and our eyes and the way that all of our senses work together, that eventually I was able to work through it. Our eyesight is something that’s really amazing. Do you know which animal has the very best eyesight? Do you know which one? It’s the eagle. An eagle can see a rabbit almost two miles away. Can you imagine having eyes that can see something that tiny, a little rabbit, two miles away?
We’ve been talking about what it means to get ready. This is a season of advent if you’re listening to this in the late fall. And advent is one of those things that it’s part of the word for adventure. It means to be ready. It means to be looking for something that’s coming. And part of what God shows us is that we need to be able to see things the way that God sees things. So often it can be really easy to get pulled into how other people are choosing to look at something. Maybe they’re looking at something in a way that’s kind of grumpy. Maybe they’re just looking for the bad in something, and we can get pulled into that, and just like that issue that I discovered I had with my eye when I was 10 years old, sometimes that can be the only thing we want to focus on is just the thing that isn’t going well, the thing that doesn’t seem to be good. And yet, Psalm 27:13 says this to us;
Yet I am confident I will see the Lord’s goodness while I am here in the land of the living.
It reminds me of a time that Jesus healed a man who was blind. Jesus was able to give this man his sight back. But here’s what’s really interesting. When Jesus first heals him, the man says that what he can see are things that kind of look like trees. And that after a little bit, he realizes that what he’s actually seeing are people. It takes a little while for him to be able to see the way Jesus healed him to be able to see. His eyes started working, which was amazing. But then it took just a little bit longer for him to learn again how to see things the way they needed to be seen.
I think that’s what we need to be doing too. We need to be ready to see what God is doing through our spiritual eyes. Have you ever heard those two words together, spiritual eyes? That sounds kind of like a mysterious thing, doesn’t it? It is something of a mystery because there are those things that we can see in our world, those things we can physically see. But there are also the things that we look at with our hearts, with our souls, with God’s spirit. And in those things, sometimes the thing that the world says is going to be awful or is not going to go well, actually, we can see God at work. Sometimes the very things that we think are not going to be any fun or are not the way that we would want them to be, God has a plan. And so, when we are able to see with spiritual eyes, sometimes that helps us see what God’s plan is.
Now listen, maybe all you feel like you can see right now is maybe you didn’t make the team for something you really wanted, or maybe you had a bad grade on your spelling test last week, and that makes it really hard to see anything that’s good. But what if you get ready to see what God can do in your life? Maybe God has something better for you. Maybe God has something more exciting. Maybe God is up to some good. And when we learn to see past some of the things that seem like they’re bad, then we’re ready to see the way God sees. He has a plan and he has great things for you, and we need to be ready to look for it.
I’d love to send you some great bonuses as part of God on the Go. If you text the word go, that’s the word GO to 89419 we have texts that we’ll send you with memory versus discussion questions, some of these fun trivia facts that we talk about, and I would love to see you next week right here at God on the Go.
