This post has little spiritual insight, but it is so amazing to me that I have to share it. Did you realize that God designed your eyes to see depth? It is probably so common to you that your reaction to that statement is "Yeah, so?"
Think about it, though. With all our technology, we can't really capture what our eyes do on their own. The images we record with technology are flat. The only real way to see depth in a recorded image, currently (that I'm aware of, at least), is to wear special glasses. Or look through a Viewmaster. Maybe virtual reality is totally 3D, but that's still with glasses on.
Your eyes do that all on their own, because that is how God made them.
I've worn contacts since I was 15. As I am currently 56, that's a very, very long time. I just had an eye appointment a couple of weeks ago, and the eye doctor (new to me) was astonished that I still wear contacts all day most days. I am lucky in that I do not have dry eyes at all. In fact, you can ask my friends, and they will attest that my eyes are pretty leaky. A subject for a different post.
My contacts are still comfortable for me, and that's great. However, the biggest reason I wear them is so that I can see well. My prescription is very strong, and that has a lot of drawbacks for glasses. Without any correction, I wouldn't even recognize you as human from across a room. That means, for me, there is no peripheral vision with my glasses. And that whole "near, far and in between" that you are supposed to be able to get with the right glasses? Doesn't work so well with me, probably because of my astigmatism. It's fine as long as my head is perfectly still, but as soon as I move, it's like being on the deck of a moving ship. Makes me sea sick as everything around me becomes a blur until I'm still again. Hard to walk that way.
So, I wear contacts (corrected for astigmatism) - but, like many people with a strong near-sighted prescription, that means I can't see close up. To compensate, I've had monovision since I was 35. One eye is powered to see in the distance and one eye is vastly underpowered to see close up. Many people's brains just can't handle that, but I've been lucky. I sew and make jewelry and just about any other craft you can think of, and seeing up close is important. Over the years, as my near-sighted prescription for my right eye has had to get stronger, the prescription for my left eye has had to get weaker for it to still work. Counter-intuitive, I know.
The drawback has been depth perception. To actually see depth, your eyes have to work together, and that is fairly impossible with eyes so unequally powered. But, your brain uses a lot of ways to determine depth. It's kind of like adding depth to a painting. Perspective, lighting, detail all work together to make some things "near" and other things "far." That's the way I've been seeing depth for so many years, that for me, it's just normal. I really hadn't noticed that my world had become flat.
Well, back to the eye appointment. This year, for the first time, I failed the depth perception test miserably. So much so that the eye doctor didn't think I was able to drive safely. I am fine driving, seriously (see the paragraph above), but I let him talk me into a pair of driving glasses that would undo my monovision. I'd wear them on top of my contacts, and really only in the car.
I picked them up a couple days ago, and OH. MY. GOODNESS. My world is 3D again! It's like living inside a Viewmaster! I came home from errands a few minutes ago, and it's like a whole new world opened up for me. I pulled into my driveway and couldn't stop staring at my crabapple tree and how the branches crisscrossed each other. I could see the depth. Astonishing.
Makes me wonder how many other of God's gifts that we just take for granted in any given day. And, how much more will open up to us in resurrected bodies? I can't wait!
Thank, you, Lord, for the eyes that you created to see your world.
Edit to add - hologram, I know. We can record a hologram. Still not as good as our own eyes, though.
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