“And if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you; and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things.” (D&C 88:67). The fovea is a pitlike structure in the eye that is jam-packed full of light- and color-sensitive cone cells and is what we are using when we focus on something. It is barely more than a millimeter wide and takes up just 1% of the retina. However, despite it’s relatively tiny size, it utilizes a full 50% of all of the optic nerves. The visual processing power in our brain is as much devoted to the sensory information coming from that one dot as it is to all of the data coming from every other part of the eye. Basically anything that we see sharply, clearly, and distinctly is centered on that tiny part of the eye occupied by our fovea. Outside of that small cone of focus, everything else gets more and more blurry or is ignored by the brain entirely. Also, most of the light-sensitive cones are in the fovea, and almost none of the dim light-sensitive rods are in the fovea, but the rods make up most of the rest of the eye. When we have our eye single to the glory of God, then we have Him and His glory centered directly in our fovea. This means that we can see clearly and sharply, and most importantly, we are using the part of the eye that is most able to detect and make sense of light. If we have our gaze directed anywhere else, then at best we will see the glory of God only in a blurred and out of focus way, and we will be depending more on our rods which are not as sensitive to the brilliant light of His glory. If we only have God’s glory in our peripheral vision, then we are missing out on half of our visual cortex. We will misunderstand and misconstrue the mind and the will of the Lord. But the more we keep God and His glory right in the focus of our fovea, the more and finer distinctions and intricacies we will discern and discover and we will begin to comprehend and understand and know our Heavenly Father and His glory so much better than we could have even imagined when it was merely a blurry blob in the corner of our eye. We can only love the Lord with all of our heart, might, and mind if we are absolutely focused on Him.
