"Which is better, 1 or 2?
How about now, 1 or 2?
...and A or B?"

If these questions sound familiar, you've likely had your vision checked recently.

For the last several years, the vision in my right eye has been improving. Every year or so, I would notice that I began to feel a little cross-eyed, or that I could see better when I closed my right eye. In the late evenings, as I got sleepy, I often found myself feeling better with my right eye closed. Inevitably, I would get my vision checked and, sure enough, I needed a weaker lens in my right eye. Once I adjusted the lens through which I viewed the world, everything became clearer and less tiring.

What struck me, sitting in that chair, is how differently needful everyone's eyes are. While I might struggle to read a menu across the restaurant, you might be squinting at the one in your hands. Someone else sees two of everything unless the lens bends the light just right to bring it back into one image. Someone else gets a halo around every streetlamp and car light after dark, and many others (the young ones, right?) on the road don't see them. There isn't one correction that works for every eye. There's only the specific way your eye receives light, and the specific lens built to answer it.

Here's what I keep circling back to: it's not only what our eyes need. It's also what we choose to look through. A lens doesn't just correct — it tints, it bends, it lets some light in and turns some away, and everything we see afterward carries that lens's particular slant, whether we are aware of it or not. We all do this without an optometrist manipulating lenses in front of us. We carry a lens for how we read a friend's silence, a lens for what we expect from a stranger, a lens ground years ago by one bad day that still bends how we take in every ordinary day since. And the strange part is, we rarely remember we're seeing through it. We think we're just seeing what's there.

That's the harder eye exam, not finding the one correct way to see, because there isn't just one, but learning to notice our own particular tilt. What do you assume before anyone's spoken? What do you brace for, expect, discount, or magnify, instinctively, before the light even reaches you? That kind of noticing doesn't happen in a chair with someone clicking through options for you. It's slower, and less comfortable, because it means admitting that some of what you've called clear sight was never the world exactly as it is. It was the world as it looked once it passed through you.

I don't think the goal is to see with no lens at all. I'm not sure that's possible, or even desirable; a lens is what lets us see anything at all. But there's something worth doing in knowing which one we're wearing, and asking ourselves, every so often, whether it's still the one we'd choose. Perhaps it's time to update.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is that you'd catch sight of your own particular lens prescription, just to know it's there, and see if it aligns with the core values of your faith commitment. If it needs an adjustment, make it, that you may take in all the Light, Life, and Love God has for you. That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa