Seeing the Unseen

"You will only be able to do this if you close your eyes. You will need to visualize the muscles around your mouth working independently from the rest of your face." These were the directions I received from my physical therapist. After my brain surgery my face was paralyzed for several months. This trauma caused my facial nerves to rewire so that even after the paralysis was gone my face was permanently altered.

Because of the rewired nerves, the muscles around my mouth are connected to the muscles in my cheek and my eye and my neck. The therapist told me that I could retrain my brain to overcome this misfiring of the muscles. Looking in the mirror and trying to do the exercise she had given me seemed utterly hopeless, and I would have just given up if I had not talked to others whom she had helped. If I was ever to get better I had to close my eyes and believe that things could be different from what I saw in the mirror.

Recently I have been suffering from spiritual paralysis. This sometimes happens when I become overwhelmed by the suffering and hurt I feel and see around me. To overcome this paralysis of spirit and soul I have to fix my eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen. I must look beyond the temporary and focus on what is unseen and eternal.

My physical therapy involves not only believing that healing can take place in my face, but also doing the exercises prescribed. In the same way, in order to overcome spiritual paralysis I have to act on what I believe. By faith I choose to rejoice in hope because I believe that God is at work. Focused not on what I see with my earthly eyes but what I perceive with my spiritual eyes, I rejoice in suffering knowing that the testing of my faith produces endurance. Endurance must do its complete work, so that in the end I may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.

One of the reasons I was willing to even listen to the therapist was that first I had talked to someone else she had helped. In the same way my faith is strengthened when I read about the heroes of faith. Some were miraculous spared others were not, but what they all had in common was that their focus not on what is seen but unseen. Because I am surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses who chose to live by faith and not by sight I too choose to lay aside the doubts and not let what I see cause me to be discouraged. I choose instead to fix my eyes on Jesus.