Sometimes object lessons go just a little too far.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, our pulpit minister was preaching on purity and was reading Mark 9:47:<\/p>\n
\nAnd if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell,<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
To emphasize the point, he brought his hand to his eye to illustrate what “plucking” looked like and to drive home his point. I immediately sensed danger, and I leaned foward at the ready, my professional instincts suddenly on full, red-eye alert. We all watched in horrified fascination as he sharply thrust his fingers toward his orbit in pincer-like fashion. Together we tracked the flying object which now arced through the air, landing on the auditorium floor, rolling, rolling, almost in slow motion now, toward the feet of the man who was to lead the closing prayer. There was an audible gasp from the congregation, followed by a long silence and then…<\/p>\n
Laughter.<\/p>\n
As it turned out, our preacher had accidentally hooked his glasses frame with his fingers as he illustrated his point, launching them about 10 feet from the podium toward the front pew. In his usual smooth fashion, he recovered nicely, poking a little fun at himself along the way (self-effacing humor is the magic WD-40 needed to extricate oneself from a sticky, public speaking jam). Luckily he appeared to be farsighted rather than nearsighted, so he was able to spot the glasses and recover them, although he did seem to grope a bit once he bent down and got close enough to pick them up.<\/p>\n
As the only eye doctor in the house, I felt like it was my duty to do something, but I just wasn’t sure what–I’ve seen some things in my time, but never anything like that. I wondered if I should rush toward the pulpit to see if his glasses were bent or otherwise damaged, hand them back to him and ask him how many fingers I was holding up. Or maybe, “Which is better, one or two?<\/a>“<\/p>\n
But it was over with in the blink of an eye, and the sermon went on without further incident or injury. It did get me to thinking that maybe I should start sitting with the “real doctors” in the “Reserved for Medical Personnel” section in case of another ocular urgency or emergency refraction.<\/p>\n
If that wasn’t unsettling enough, our Sunday School class afterwards read the following pearl from Proverbs 30:17:<\/p>\n
\nThe eye that mocks a father, that scorns obedience to a mother, will be pecked out by the ravens of the valley, will be eaten by the vultures.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I’m thinking maybe I should get Eyegal to cross stitch that, frame it and put it on the wall of the boys’ bathroom, or else write it on a sticky-note and place it on the refrigerator door where they’ll be an approximate 100% chance they’ll read it.<\/p>\n
Still, enough is enough already! I know we’re talking about rhetorical devices and metaphors here, but all this is enough to give an eyeguy like me a serious case of the willies. An eye, after all, is a terrible thing to pluck.\n<\/p>\n
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