Couple of Quotes

O Lord, open my eyes that I may see the needs of others; open my ears that I may hear their cries; open my heart so that they need not be without succor; let me not be afraid to defend the weak because of the anger of the strong, nor afraid to defend the poor because of the anger of the rich ... And so open my eyes and my ears that I may this coming day be able to do some work of peace for thee.

- Alan Paton

And this is the difference between myself at age 17 and myself at age 27. It's not that the world has changed so much--it hasn't. It's not that I have changed so much--I haven't. It's not even that my faith or my concept of God has changed so much, although it has, in every way but the most essential. What is different is that while I may yet feel the need to qualify my faith, I no longer feel the need to justify it to my non-Christian friends. In the same way, while I may feel the need to explain my perspective on issues of politics and culture, I no longer feel the need to justify it to my Christian friends. This may not seem like a big leap to you readers out there, but believe-you-me, amigos, it is--it's the difference between the shopping mall and the sewing room, the produce aisle and the garden. My master's program friends might call it agency, my Christian friends might call it grace and if I had to call it anything at all, I'd call it a relief.

Meredith Kathryn-Case Gipson Hoogendam
"Out of the closet, into the forest" in catapult magazine

I'm not sure why this lady has quite so many names....you'd think there'd be few Meredith Hoogendams around...!

Presbyopia

Presbyopia is a noun, and means the inability of the eye to focus sharply on nearby objects, resulting from loss of elasticity of the crystalline lens with advancing age.
[New Latin : Greek presbus, old man; + -opia.]

What has this got to do with the Presbyterian Mission Resource site? It just struck us as amusing that the word relates to a lessening of our eyesight (insight?) as we get older. It's common to all people, not just those who have trouble with their eyes.

However, Presbyterian as a word doesn't have the same roots. The 'Presby' bit of it isn't derived from 'old man' (as is Presbyopia) but from a Greek word, presbyterion, which was used by the church to mean elders long before the Presbyterians themselves took it up.

In a pamphlet on the subject of Presbyopia put out by the NZ Association of Optometrists, we're told that normal healthy young eyes have a wide range of focus, and the lens are very flexible. As we get older, the lens of the eye thickens and slowly loses its flexibility.

Does this have any connection with Christians (not just Presbyterians) as they get older? Do they lose their focus and their flexibility? It's a question we older Christians need to keep asking: have I lost my focus on Jesus and his mission to the world? Am I no longer as flexible as I was when it comes to doing what He asks?

Photo courtesy of Bex Shaw from her Eyesight series.