Sight is an undervalued gift. We learned that painful truth as we watched the slow vision loss our daughter experienced. It was a loss that compromised independence, required adaptations, removed the simple and replaced it with complicated.
Simeon acknowledged sight as a gift, but it was not just about physical sight. While it was a simple thing to see a new baby, cute and cuddly; Simeon saw more. He saw salvation face to face. God allowed his simple faith to become sight just long enough to understand the answer to prayer this infant would become. God had promised he would see The One Israel waited for. What his heart knew would happen, his eyes saw. It is the true nature of trust for the heart to be ahead of the eyes. Faith from sight is never a right; it is always a gift.
As Simeon stood before stunned parents and thanked God for keeping His promise, can you imagine the startled awareness Mary and Joseph couldn’t even voice. Again, a stranger reinforced what God had already told them about this baby. And can you imagine how Simeon lived the rest of his days knowing salvation had come. Did he see it happening? No. Rome still oppressed. People still lived trapped. The promise was simmering but had not come to full boil. But Simeon wouldn’t have talked that way. For his heart-eyes overtook his physical eyes. He saw what God wanted him to see. Promise fulfilled. Hope come. Salvation in the making.
Simeon believed before he saw. That’s why he could connect the dots. This was no maybe-this-is the-one guess. His faith took him there. If you try to form your own answer to God’s promise, decide what He must do and then look for it; your detoured search reduces faith instead of grows it. Pray your own wants and solutions without asking for God’s edit and you could be looking for answers you will never see.
We stumble here more than anywhere. We think that seeing is believing, that sight grows faith. But it doesn’t. Our sight is too limited to what is around us. We need God’s vision to remove the boundaries. When God raises the curtain like he did for
Simeon to help us see beyond ourselves and make faith connections our logic couldn’t, our faith grows. We find an anchored faith in a God whose promise-keeping vision takes us farther than what we can see.
If you want to grow your vision from faith, focus on God first. See Him as your promise-keeper, your 20-20 vision in the middle of any circumstantial fog. Then, your heart will lead you to Bethlehem for another look. But this time, you will see more than a baby, just like Simeon.
