Depth Perception

It was freezing as I walked to work that morning and I pulled my jacket sleeves over my dry, cracked hands. I blinked in a frenzy, feeling the increased pressure of my newly purchased contacts behind my lids. The cold pressed on them too and I bent my neck against the breeze. The concrete went from smooth to pebbled and back to smooth as the campus swept past. I was breathing deep, concentrated on moving quickly to my office. But the contrast of my black tennis shoes against the gray sidewalk and the movement of my feet, almost a rhythm with the rustle of dead leaves and bushes, it began to grab a memory from somewhere in my mind. "I have big feet," is what I was really thinking as the sun found some spaces in the fog. The memory floated in a bit more. I thought about my shoes and how it always seemed like shoes looked better on small feet. I looked again. An image of DVDs in a small store back in Minnesota popped into my head. I blinked twice. Again, holding my eyes closed for a second. No, my feet can't be that big. "Darn these contacts!" I thought, as I recalled the warnings of my friend Maggie as we walked around ShopKo in Marshall, MN, me in my trial pair of contacts, her in glasses. "Everything looks different!" She explained in her broken English. "What do you mean, different?" I asked my Chinese friend. "Bigger." She said. The DVDs looked totally wrong as we tried to scope out the right one for Dad for Christmas. Huge! "What a waste of plastic!" was my thought as we roamed the isles. "Why would ShopKo decide to have different sized DVD cases than Wal-Mart?" She just laughed as I asked if the movies looked bigger to her and shook her head. "My shoes are normal size." I told myself a few times. And this is where the lightening bolt came. So if a little piece of plastic covering my eyes can make me see something different than I know to be true, how many things out there are making me to believe God is something different than I know and the bible tells me is true. The promises of God still hold true today. The sacrifice of Christ is still covering us today. God's character doesn't change. As I pray, lately I've had a hard time believing in these promises; feeling like I'm not doing enough, or doing it right. But make no mistake: the God that made the sun peak through the fog this morning to shine a beam on my rosy cheek, that God is still here, is still with us, is still relevant, and will never change. However, when I don't stay faithful to reading and studying the Word of God, it is even easier to become blinded, confused, or doubtful, usually without even realizing it. And through those little confusions, even less noticeable than the change in the DVDs and my shoes, Satan grabs a hold of us. My best friend once told me that even when we feel the furthest away from God and we read His Word and feel like we are getting nothing out of it, the Word is acting like an X-ray. We can't see the effect, we can't feel the effect, but it is penetrating us none the less and is leaving a lasting imprint. So God, even though I read sometimes and just don't really get any sort of deeper meaning from it, I am going to try to not stop. I want to know your character and let it leave it's imprint on my heart. "Wait on the Lord; Be of good courage. And He shall Strengthen your heart; Wait, I say, on the Lord!" -Psalm 27:14