looking good
Adam shows up at the brunch table on Saturday morning wearing his glasses, a little smudged, because he’s still learning to clean them, and I treasure it up, because he has chosen to wear them on his day of rest.
Here I am too, drawing my chair–blue, like a summer sky—up to our table, also showing up to feast with a blur right across my vision, smearing my view. Here I am, waiting while the One who loves me gently wipes away the blots I have made with my own fingers.
Ask me what’s critical to my life, who, and then look for the way I spend my time, where, when I feel no obligation.
“You look handsome in your glasses,” I say to Adam, but my meaning strikes deeper than the words sound, because I find it beautiful that, recognizing their benefit, he has chosen to wear his glasses even when we only gather at the family table for a simple meal.
Ask me what’s critical to my life, who, and then look for evidence of Him appearing in the most obscure places and in the smallest details, wherever audiences dwindle.
“Oh,” Adam gushes sheepishly, his grin reaching into my heart.
The ophthalmologist had wanted to excuse Adam of the need for eyeglasses before we even tried, had assumed that, because of Autism, Adam might not tolerate wearing them at all, and anyway, he’d said, “Adam can see most things.” The exchange had left me wondering why anyone, including Adam, should settle for a blurry view. It can be easy, from a human perspective, looking through those inevitable smudges, to believe that some people just don’t care if they see or don’t want to or can’t even comprehend the difference, but citing what Adam’s teacher had shared, that Adam struggled to read things at school from a reasonable distance away, I had insisted that Adam could learn to wear the glasses. It’s often this way with the best choices, that they start as structured habits before they become our way of life.
The day after Adam got his glasses, I texted his teacher, asking her to help me remind him to wear the glasses at school—at least there, to help me by making it part of Adam’s routine to put on his glasses whenever he walks into the classroom. There is, after all, a different kind of knowing that comes with seeing, and that’s the kind of knowing I want for my son, the kind of knowing God has always wanted for me.
I typed the text while Adam and I waited at stoplights on the way to school, looking up after every word to be sure the stoplight hadn’t changed. Whenever I set the phone down to drive, Adam took it up to read my words, scrolling with his thumb, having noticed that I wrote to his teacher, having seen his name written in the text. It changes the reading, see, when the words get personal.
As we wound our way to school that day, he had read and read and then put the phone back down without comment, sitting back against his seat, turning to stare intently through the car window. He had rubbed a finger over his top lip, as though absorbed in a problem and carefully considering, and then, catching my gaze, he had softened, as he often does when he looks at me, in recognition of love, his for me, mine for him. Love compels in a way nothing else ever can.
The glasses certainly weren’t Adam’s idea, and they represented a change with maybe countless sensory complications for him that I couldn’t even begin to understand, but that morning as he looked at me, I saw on his face a certain conclusive trust that overwhelmed any cost.
As we arrived at school, having learned what I wanted him to do from the text I’d written to his teacher, Adam slid his new glasses on without the first acknowledging word, only just that tender smile, those adoring eyes, startling and clear.
Adam’s teacher said that Adam seemed happy wearing his new glasses, giddy even. I wondered if Adam had felt immediately relieved by the way his glasses helped him see, or if he just felt happy to be responding out of love for me, to be doing what he knew I wanted.
It had taken a week, maybe two, before Adam started coming home from school with his glasses still on his face. Then I knew for sure that Adam understood how much clearer his vision became when looking through those lenses. Some nights, he came down to dinner wearing them, his hair slicked, still wet from the shower, tiny droplets of water slinking slowly down his neck toward the collar of his shirt. A few more weeks passed, and Adam started trying to clean his glasses himself, glancing at me with a bit of a question as he pressed his thumbs against the lenses on one side and vigorously swiped at the other sides with a bit of soft cloth.
The cleaning, as I said, is a work in progress.
So it goes, though, with the discovery of insight. What an interesting word, insight, itself a simple definition for knowing. To be in sight is to know by what, by whom, I see, and then to look that way on purpose. Over time, clarity becomes something critical.
It is insight that brings Adam here to this table on a Saturday, with those glasses on his fresh morning face, with that grin playing at the edges of his mouth as I tell him how delighted I am to see him looking so good. I hope it’s clear— I’m not talking about mere appearances. It’s the wholeness of our seeing, the healing of it, that makes the looking good.
