#2-Feb. 24, 2016

"Once I was blind ..."

by Dave Jackson

. . . but now I see.” You may think that title refers to my change of heart regarding gay people since this series of posts is background for why and how I wrote RISKING GRACE, Loving Our Gay Family and Friends Like Jesus. But first, God had to show me something far more basic about my relationship with him. And he chose to do it through my physical vision.

Four years after our daughter came out to us as gay, I wasn’t doing so well with why we couldn’t talk her out of, or at least “pray away the gay.” And we certainly had prayed and fasted diligently . . . until God told us to quit telling him what to do. We refocused and simply prayed that he would work out his purpose in her life. A year or so passed, and we adjusted again to more humbly ask, “Lord, what are you trying to teach us?”

That’s when he began preparing me.

In November, 2004, I developed a small blind spot in the center of my left eye that I couldn’t blink away. It was diagnosed as a macular hole, and within two weeks my vision in that eye had deteriorated to 20/200 (legally blind) with the increased possibility that the malady could develop in my right eye as well. But of course, God wouldn’t let that happen to an author who needed his sight to serve him. Would he?

My first surgery on January 4 went well, and I braved three weeks of 24/7, face-down recuperation with typical macho defiance. By six weeks out, my vision in that eye had improved to 20/70, and my right eye was still 20/20. I was going to make it.

But then my left eye began to fall apart. Things kept on going wrong and getting worse. Retinal tears. Retinal detachment. More tears. More detachment. I felt battered by bad news on top of more bad news. During those horrible months I had four more surgeries attempting to arrest the deterioration. There seemed to be no end. At my age, the prospect of being blind was worse than death. I knew death would come some day, but the idea of years of what I imagined would be uselessness . . . It was unimaginable.

Why hadn’t God healed me? Where was he? In fact, I’m embarrassed to say, that after a lifetime of walking with him, I began to doubt his very existence.

And that really terrified me!

If the fear of going completely blind seemed greater to me than death, the possibility that there was no God was far worse than either. If there was no God, then there was no meaning. I had to know if Jesus was there.

And then, as I acknowledged my desperate need to know he was there, I realized my trial was not meaningless. I had just learned something experientially—which far outstrips second-hand knowledge—that I might not have learned any other way: Jesus’ presence was more important to me than regaining my vision. And in realizing that, I knew God really was there, proven by the fact that he cared enough to teach me something. After all, a nonexistent being can’t teach you anything.

One evening not long after that, God spoke to me and said, “The nightmare is over,” so clearly I’ve often said it could have been recorded had there been a microphone in my head. Wishful thinking? Of course, I wanted to hear something like that, but the fact remains, from that moment on, I began to recover with no further reversals. Today my vision in my left eye is corrected to 20/30 while my right eye remains corrected to better than 20/20.

But as though God wanted to reassure me he is the healer, I had a couple of other issues. Thyroid cancer was cured three months later with nothing more than outpatient surgery and an I-131 treatment. Then, a year later, my leaky mitral valve doctors had been watching for 15 years was fully repaired, and I was up and walking five miles a day two weeks after the surgery.

“Once I was blind, but now I see”—just like the blind man Jesus healed (John 9:25). And what I see is that my relationship with Jesus—knowing that he is really present with me—is far more important than anything else. Of course, I believed and would have been able to say those words long before this incident with my eyes. There was nothing wrong with my belief. I am confident I was “saved.” There was substance to my relationship with him, and I’m not disparaging anyone else’s relationship. But in preparation for what was to come with my daughter, God needed to teach me this truth at a far deeper level than I had previously known it.

Why? Because I needed to realize that anyone’s relationship with Jesus—including any gay person’s—is far more important than whether we have all the right answers.
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Next installment: Overcoming the fear of hard questions.