Transformation

People often get me confused with a smart person because I wear glasses. Glasses can make even the dumbest person look remotely intelligent so I am partially grateful that my eyes hate contacts, but I have not always had glasses. When I as in 9^Th grade, I started getting headaches and my eyes would hurt when I would read things. At first nobody believed me, thinking that it must have been an elaborate story to get out of doing homework but eventually I made it to an eye doctor.

I discovered a couple things at the optometrist. The first was that I had astigmatism which was causing my headaches, but also I found out I had extremely poor vision in my left eye. I was practically blind in the one eye and it caused my total vision to suffer greatly. I became very amused at closing my good eye and then my bad eye and seeing how blurry things got as I went between the two. I remember wondering how I could have been so ignorant to the poor vision in my left eye.

After a few days I got my glasses and it changed everything. The world came to life in a vivid way that I could not have imagined the day before. I remember looking out the window into my backyard, nothing in the backyard had changed overnight but I perceived it in a whole new way. The redwood tree I had climbed as a younger child was no longer a reddish pole with greenish blobs attached; it had a trunk, complete with bark that was peeling off as squirrels playing tag scrambled up and down. The green blobs were made of individual branches each with smaller twigs full of needles bursting out of the long brown arms.

In the days that followed it became alarming at how I had gotten so used to the blurry world that I had lived in for so long. I was completely unaware of the vivid realities that were around me. I had not made a decision to view the world in a lesser way. I did not even know I was missing out. However, the reality was that I was not viewing the world as it was meant to be viewed. I had been settling for a blurry version rather than the vivid reality of what was around me.

I was reading through Romans a while ago and read the part that says "Do not conform any longer" (Rom 12:2). I am sure I had read that passage many times but for some reason this simple phrase really stuck out to me. Paul says “any longer" which implies that it was something the Church was actively doing. I often see myself in the characters of scripture and began to wonder if this was still true today? Does the church still conform to the world around them? Do I as an individual Christian still conform to society?

 As I began to think about all the ways that I look no different than the world around me it became alarming how often I go to society for my identity rather than the cross. I have a hunch too, that this is not a problem that is limited to me. As I look at the church I see that collectively we are conforming to the society we are called to change. The scariest thing about conformity is how subtle it can be. It is not as if Christians are trying to live just like the people next to them, most of the time we are unaware we are even doing it. It happens when we view issues and define terms through the lens of society rather than that of Christ. Our definitions and understanding of things like of success, love, holiness, salvation and so many others get blurred by their cultural understandings.

However, there is hope in the second half of the verse. It goes on to say "be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Rom 12:2). When I think of this notion of being transformed it brings me back to when I got glasses. Just like I was ignorant of what was around me, we are unknowingly settling for the blurry versions of what it means to be a Christian. We are not necessarily actively choosing to conform, but rather are passively defaulting to what is around us. In calling us to be transformed, it is as if God is asking us to stop living in a dim and shadowy world and to put on new lenses that will allow us to view the world in the vivid reality that God intended.

When we look at the life of Christ it is clear that He viewed the world differently. He looked into situations and people and saw things that other people missed. Where others viewed failures and lost causes, He saw opportunities to love.  He looked at the world with a fresh perspective that was anything but what those around Him saw. Paul is essentially challenging Christians to try and see the world that Jesus saw; to try and see people the way Christ did.

I believe that if we do this, if we allow God to change the way we view the world and think about simple ideas, we will be transformed. We will be the salt of the Earth. We will be the light of the world. We will shine Christ’s love into the darkness and illuminate a world around us with a vivid reality that we have been unknowingly blind to for so long. We will change the world through simple acts of love like Christ and we will open other people's eyes to that very world which we had failed to see for so long.

We will be transformed and transform the world around us.