What do you need?

Charlie knows:

The drive-through window at my local Burgerteria sends me into a minor panic. There are a dozen choices, every one mouth-watering delicious. I'm starving. I need food, but I want the right kind of food. Something memorable. Something to delight my palate without emptying my wallet. Something juicy, tangy, fresh and hot.

But what?! There are so many choices. I don't know what I want, and the woman with the screaming kids in the car behind me is fast losing her patience.

And here's the kicker: too often, the very thing I most want isn't what I need at all!

The ads on television are cleverly designed to make us want what they're selling. With the right pair of blue jeans, I could be King of the World! With the right credit card, I could live the life I deserve. With the right colored pill, all of my problems would vanish.

It's not true, of course. We know it's not true. But these claims resonate somewhere deep inside of us in an empty, aching spot that wants something, longs for something, needs something... real, something significant, something meaningful, something that will restore our hope.

We keep grasping for something that always seems to be just out of reach.

One day on a dusty road, Jesus encountered a blind man. The man thought he wanted to see. Perfectly understandable. Blindness is a tough gig. Even with today's technologies — cochlear implants, prosthetic limbs, computer speech recognition software — the blind still walk about tapping a cane and listening carefully for things that might kill them. In the first century blindness meant constant dependence on family and friends.

Sight is our most complex sense, and it can go wrong in dozens of ways. There can be complete blindness due to injury, a failure of the optic nerves, or damage to the mechanisms of the visual cortex. There can be color blindness, acute myopia, macular degeneration, cataracts, retinal detachments... We have no idea what this blind man suffered from, but Luke's account tells us that he was dependent on the crowd for information and had to be led to Jesus when he was called. It would seem his blindness was nearly complete.

You need to read the rest.

You do.

Comments

[Mommynator]

I'm very slowly coming to the same conclusions for myself. Prayer is becoming more and more a different thing than "Please, I need/want/blah blah blah" thing, simply because if God knows my needs and will supply them, if He's truly interested in maturing me in all ways, etc., then everything that happens (good and bad) is the raw material used to achieve those ends.

Hanging onto Him for the wild ride then becomes the thing.