I Once Was Blind, But Now I See - September 3

Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 37:1-18; PM Psalm 37:19-42; Job 16:16-22,17:1,13-16; Acts 13:1-12; John 9:1-17

Today’s Reflection

In today’s readings, we hear two stories that revolve around blindness and sightedness. In John 9, we read of Jesus’ encounter with a man who was born blind but who then receives sight after Jesus anoints his eyes with a salve of mud and saliva. When Jesus told him to go wash at the pool of Siloam, “he went and washed and came back able to see.” Then, in Acts 13, we read of an encounter between Barnabas and Paul and two men they meet in Cyprus: a magician, Elymas, as well as a proconsul named Sergius Paulus, who “wanted to hear the word of God” from Barnabas and Saul—but Elymas “opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul away from the faith.” Paul looked at Elymas, and said, “the hand of the Lord is against you, and you will be blind for a while, unable to see the sun.” But Sergius Paulus, as he saw all of this unfold, “believed, for he was astonished at the teaching about the Lord.”

Seeing is believing. Oftentimes, we humans need to experience something firsthand in order to believe it and understand its importance. During World War II, a young Texan named John Howard Griffin, who had been studying in Paris, got swept up in the French Resistance. He had to flee after his name was put on a Nazi death list due to helping Jewish children flee. He returned home, where he joined the Army Air Corps, serving in the Pacific. Toward the end of the war, Griffin was injured by shrapnel and lost his sight. For the next decade he learned to live without sight, and then this was compounded when he was paralyzed for a time. But as Griffin lived through all this, he deepened in his Catholic faith. While he had lost his physical sight, he gained in spiritual insight.

Suddenly, Griffin regained his sight around the same time he began to regain his ability to walk. When Griffin regained his abilities to see and to move, he embarked on a career as a journalist—and the spiritual insights he gained when he lacked physical sight changed the way he perceived the world. It was the 1950s, racial segregation was widespread throughout the United States, and the civil rights movement was building momentum. African American authors and journalists, as well as activists, were writing of what it was like to experience racism and to live in such a deeply segregated society. And yet, many whites would not take their perspectives seriously. They had seen racism and lived beneath its crushing weight. But many whites could not see it or feel its weight, and so they did not believe racism was a real problem in our nation.

John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who had lived for 10 years without being able to see the color of people’s skin, had an idea. He proposed to write a series of articles (and ultimately a book, Black Like Me) from the perspective of a white journalist who, for several months in 1959 and 1960, passed for a black man as he traveled throughout the South, from Louisiana into Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and then back to his home state of Texas.

His experience of physical blindness played a role in giving him such a strong sense of empathy and holy curiosity that he felt called to take on this dangerous project. After his undercover mission was complete and his reporting was published, Griffin and his family faced death threats to the point that they had to leave the country for a time. And some believe that Griffin’s death, years later, from skin cancer was related to the strong medicines he had used to change his skin tone for this project.

The stories we encounter in John and Acts today, as well as John Howard Griffin’s life story, teach us how God can use blindness to help us see more clearly. If we are open to it, God can use our blindness—whether physical or spiritual—to teach us to learn to see our world, ourselves, and one another with new eyes.

—Becky+

Questions for Self-Reflection

Has there ever been something you just could not see that someone else has been able to see very clearly? How do you account for these different ways of seeing the same thing?

Daily Challenge

Read something written by someone—or listen to a podcast by someone—whose way of seeing things seems quite different than your own. Give yourself some time to reflect on or write about your response to this person’s different perspective. How did you respond to their viewpoint? And why?