A New Devotion - Disabling Blindness

Here's a new devotion that I wrote. You can find a recording of this devotion at the bottom of the page. 

1 John 2:3-11

Now by this we may be sure that we know him, if we obey his commandments. Whoever says, "I have come to know him," but does not obey his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist; but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection. By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever says, "I abide in him," ought to walk just as he walked.

Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word that you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. Whoever says, "I am in the light," while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in the light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought on blindness.

Disabling Blindness

My father-in-law was blind. Now, I never met him; my wife and I got together after he’d passed, but I feel as though I’ve gotten to know him just a little bit by all the stories I’ve been told. You see, his blindness came as a result of an accident when he was an adult, and since he was a jazz musician, it changed everything. But this life-changing event didn’t seem to alter his ability to live, because we worked every day of his life and took care of his family. I’ve seen pictures of him and my mother-in-law in Hawaii. And my wife even told me that when they were around a pool, he would drive off the high diving board, something he learned to do when he was a teenage life-guard. You see, although he was certainly blind, he was never disabled.

But, according to John, there’s another kind of blindness that can render us absolutely useless, and oddly enough, it’s a blindness that we choose ourselves. As he wrote, “Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in the light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought on blindness.” You see, if we buy into the hate and the fear that seems to permeate our society, we’re choosing to be blind. And regardless of the spiritual-sounding words we use, we’ve decided to stumble around in the dark, because we’ve turned our backs to light. And even though this condition has nothing to do with retinas and optic nerves, this is what I think we could call disabling blindness.