Restoring Sight Looks Easy Enough...

There was a show on television, I was told, about a boy who was born blind. He underwent, with the aid of breakthrough medical research technology, a procedure that restored his sight. When he eventually came to, he could see! But that is not the end of the story.

Apparently, for those of us fortunate enough to be born with normal vision, from the moment we enter this world, our brain files and catalogs every image we see. Eventually, we will recognize certain images, such as our mothers or our favorite toy, and even link these images to certain emotions and feelings attached to those things.

So the boy in story, though he could see normally, had no recollection of things visually. He could recall a voice or a sound, but could not match anything with its image. He could not walk, write, tie his shoes, etc. without having to close his eyes and repeat from memory what he was forced to learn in his past. His brain had never cataloged any images, therefore had nothing to relate what he was seeing with what he knew to be real. He eventually learned, as babies do, to tie the two together and function normally.

What amazes me is that in the bible, we read about Jesus healing men blind from birth, men twice as old as I am, and those men functioning immediately with full rationality and clarity. They were able to communicate with others, spreading the fame of Jesus without delay or any time to "catalog" images. Jesus spits dirt in a man's eyes and is able create this mental system of visual recognition from the moment the man opens them!!!

I'll leave you with Matthew 15:29-31:

"Jesus went on from there and walked beside the Sea of Galilee. And he went up on the mountain and sat down there. And great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute, and many others, and they put them at his feet, and he healed them, so that the crowd wondered, when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled healthy, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they glorified the God of Israel."