Seeing in HD
I started wearing glasses in 5th or 6th grade, In 7th grade I routinely, and stubbornly, requested for contact lenses, and I started wearing contact lenses in 8th grade. I was so cool.
What was actually cool, though, was that my first contacts prescription was somehow mistakenly, slightly stronger than my regular glasses prescription. I could see clearly in all my peripheral vision, and I could see sharper than ever before. I called it “seeing in HD.”
My wife and I have a specific moment engrained in our memory, one where we can recall every detail, for her, even down to the clothes she was wearing. This was February 5, 2017 – a rainy Superbowl Sunday. In my wife’s words: “I was staring into space as my mom bluntly threatened to disown me and take her own life if I married my then fiancé.” I remember the shock, fear, and disappointment that froze her in my passenger seat as we drove away from her mother’s apartment… We had waited, prayed, and believed for God to miraculously move hearts, but then this.
What I remember most about that afternoon was being able to see in HD. It was so easy to see my now mother-in-laws reaction as an undeniable defeat; to see our difference in ethnicity, our young age, or lack of money to be that which dooms us. But for me, it was just as easy to see her fear, or loneliness or hurt from her own marriage in the middle of this moment.
So instead of crumbling like we felt like, we sought vision from God in prayer and asked for our close church community to keep praying for us; we kept, giving God our tithe, we kept fasting, and reminding each other to see that my wife’s mom was never the enemy.
We powered through months of radio silence with my mother-in-law this way, and with our faith “pedal to the medal,” when my wife went to meet her mother once more in May of 2017, God was faithful to miraculously do the rest. Within one month, my wife and her mother were able to sit down at brunch and share their honest feelings, then I had lunch with her mom, then the next weekend we had lunch with more family, then the cards and gifts came in from her family out of town, then we were married June 30th, with the blessing and support of both our families. She’s asked me to just call her mom now.
Jesus does not promise us no suffering on this earth, but He does promise us SO MUCH else! I’ve only been amazed by the promises of reaping what you sow, finding peace with even your enemies when you live striving to please God; no matter the difficulty of any situation, or the timing of the outcome, I believe God WILL do what He promises to do. It’s our job to step out in faith and put in the contacts, and by His grace we’ll get a glimpse of what seeing in HD looks like!
Corbin Jones,
Denver, CO