By Insight Not by Sight
Perception is not always reality. In other words, our eyes can sometimes deceive us.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul famously writes, “For we live by faith and not by sight” (5:7). Is Paul telling us that we should just put on blind folds and blindly walk through life hoping that everything will turn out fine? Not at all! At the time of Paul’s writing Corinth was a wealthy metropolitan port with several “shiny” distractions that were not too different from major metropolitan hubs today, like my own Toronto.
Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash
Emerging from the subway steps onto Dundas Square in the heart of downtown Toronto we are immediately bombarded with shiny colourful advertisements, loud music, and several restaurants, cafes, and outlet stores swarming with people. All these distractions can easily lead us to miss a reality that exists under the surface.
Homeless men and women begging for food and money, drug addicts, the garbage in alleyways, police attentively scanning the area for any possible crime and those things that are even hidden from all our of our senses, like the inner brokenness or happiness of the people who fall into our sight. These are all things that lie under the surface of regular sight.