The Gift of Blindness
When Thomas missed the visit of the resurrected Savior, refusing to believe He had returned, and then finally got the chance to confess, Lord, I believe, when he saw Him again, Jesus said, Blessed art thou, because thou hast seen and believed, but more blessed are they that have not seen and yet believe. We might wonder why so often in the scriptures seeing and believing seem to be mutually exclusive. Why can't we have faith, and know beforehand what's going to happen? You know how sometimes when you're driving to a new place and you're not sure which house it is, so you turn down the radio, even though finding a house doesn't involve your ears at all? We do that because we are trying to limit the amount of information our brain is processing. By turning off the sound, we can save our brain for looking and finding the right place. They say that when a person goes blind, the brain resources that would have been used to process visual images get redirected to enhance the other senses. Blind people hear and touch and smell in ways that people who can see just simply can't. For someone who can see, they might not notice the difference in sound that a foot makes walking over concrete or asphalt, but for a blind person this can be obvious and necessary to navigating a city block. I believe that we have a sense for spiritual truths, in very much the same way that we have a sense for sight or hearing or touch. If we walked around seeing obvious miracles left and right, with full knowledge of exactly what God was doing and why, then we would have no reason or need to develop our spiritual senses of faith and belief. But if, instead, we don't get to see God in all His glory right away, then we will start to develop our faith and our Spiritual senses so that we can learn to detect the subtle hand of the Lord in our day to day lives. Most of the Universe is made up of dark matter, which is just a more scientific way to describe stuff we have no way of seeing. You can't observe dark matter directly because it doesn't directly interact with any instruments we would use to try to look at it. But scientists know that it is there because they are able to observe the subtle effects it has on the universe. They have been driven to develop these less direct methods of sensing dark matter and its effects that they would never have thought of if they could just look at it in the normal way. This is how our faith works. If we had God by our side every moment of our lives we would never try to develop our faith because God's glory would drown out our Spiritual senses. But with a veil between us and the Lord, we have the opportunity when deprived of some of our senses to let our spiritual senses and our faith to grow and use some of the resources that would have been taken up by sight. I know that it is vital that we develop our faith and spiritual senses and God in His wisdom and mercy has given us the gift of blindness so that we can learn to see in ways we never could have imagined.
