her eyes said it all

"How can eyes talk?" we might ask. Its not uncommon to mix the senses to understand how we receive insights from others and the world around us. Most of us have said at one time or another, "I can see it in your eyes." Eyes have a way to tell us things that words cannot express, don't they?

Such it was over 15 years ago as I watched mother struggle with the horrific disease called dementia. What an injustice it was to her that nature was robbing her of all she had gained over almost 80 years. She so feared Alzheimer that she would try to convince the doctor she had Parkinson disease as she felt the symptoms coming on. Everyone who knew her shared the sense of unfairness she must have felt. She had just cared for dad in his late life and looked forward to returning to her own active life after his passing. 

Toward the end I remember sharing with family and friends that I no longer visited with mother, I simply visited her. It was during one of those visits, late into the disease's thievery, where I saw something amazing. It seemed as if God wanted me to know mother in even a deeper way, a way only her eyes could tell me. She was completely disabled. Couldn't talk, eat or even respond to the question, "how are you?" She could only sit in the wheelchair and look up into the air. To the casual observer, it was just the way her head hung as she could not control her posture. She seemed totally detached and unaware. She no longer could interact with me or anyone, she had nothing to offer the world, but more interestingly, it became apparent to me she no longer needed anything from the world.

It was in this state that mankind would consider her useless, less than a person, worthless and lost to all things and people around her. Yet, it was in this moment her eyes said to me, "I am fully in God's presence, nothing in this world distracts me from my time with Him, my soul is enjoying God like crazy." What seemed to the world an injustice for mom, was right in God's sweet spot. Her identity had moved from a white woman in Alabama in the late 20th century to a child of the King. It wasn't that she had not been God's child, but it was so fully apparent to her. This is what she told me with her eyes.

This could just remain a story of one woman, whom I witnessed God transform her identity and bring fully unto Himself. If we stop and pay attention, there is a larger lesson here. After all, that's what life in this world is for. This world is finite, temporary and visible. God desires to form us and inform us, not leave us in our social identity. God is always pointing us to our identity in the Heavenlies. Christians live there now but get too distracted by how the world defines us to see it.

Like unwelcome disease, in some strange way the injustices of this world are not as much a problem for man to fix than they are opportunities for God to use. He's plenty capable of handling anything us puny humans think we must do. The injustices of nature and bigotry and bullying and seeing people as non-people are right in God's sweet spot. Its in these moments that we see more clearly God's divine plan. The fact that injustice on a human plane disgusts us is good. WHAT? How can injustice be good for us? It's in seeing the terrible aspects of injustice that we can more fully appreciate the cross. The terrible taste of injustice left in our mouth from what we see it in this world points us to the most grievous injustice of all, Jesus willful march to the cross. Through the lens of the unfairness of disease or racial injustice in the world, we see in the injustice of the cross the loving hand of God. We fall down. We fall deeper in love with Him. Our hearts are broken and turned toward Him.

What greater step can we all take but to move past the distractions of this world because its not fair and doesn't work well to see the outstretched arms of a loving God? 

My visits to mother were never the same again. I no longer pitied her. I no longer looked with disdain at the injustice of her disease. I envied her. I saw my mother closer to her Father, and I longed for the time I too would not be so distracted by the things of this world. Injustice looks terrible and in man's eyes it is. Yet, injustice can be a wonderful thing too, especially when it ushers into my soul the song, "when I survey the wondrous cross."

Her eyes said it all ....