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The posts that follow all deal with the highs and lows of Ministry and ministry related topics. They follow my PRIME Experience in Minford Ohio and will hopefully continue afterwards.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Be Thou My Vision Cause.... I'm Blind

Now those of you who know me don't get alarmed by the title, my vision is still going strong for now and if it is God's will I would keep the vision that I currently have. For those of you who don't know let me fill you in on a little secret.

I AM GOING BLIND.

Here's the scoop.

In first grade I go to the nurse for a mandatory eye check. I fail that test and surprise, I get my first visit to the family eye doctor. At that time he thought it was lazy eye, gave me glasses, and said to come back in a year. I do and my eye sight is a little worse and I get a new prescription and am told to come back in a year.

It is at this meeting that he takes a look at my retinas, or the back part of the eye that transmit the picture to the brain. After doing so, he tells my parents that my retina is splitting, but wants to get a specialist to look at it. That specialist sends me to Kellogg Eye Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan to get an official diagnosis.

My parents schedule the date with Kellogg and I get a day off of school. They do a whole bunch of tests that tested colors, side vision, and then hooked me up to what I can best call a strobe light in which I wasn't allowed to blink. The doctors confirmed what the other two thought and finally gave it a name.

Juvenile X-linked Retinoschesis, such a high tech word that even spell check says it's wrong. In every day language let me explain meaning and what it does. Juvenile: diagnosed when young, X-linked: carried on the x chromosome making women carriers and men the receivers, Retinoschesis: Retina splitting. The way it works imagine a layered cake with out the frosting, then imagine inserting several syringes  filled with frosting and squeezing. There you have it except the cake is the retina and the frosting is blood causing what looks like a wagon wheel on the back of your eye. This is causing the layers of tissue in the retina to separate form the outside going in.

Oh, and did I mention that it will continue to do so until either a cure is found, or I go legally blind, which means that what a person with 20/20 vision can see at 200 feet, I won't be able to see until I am 20 feet away from it. which puts driving out of the question. My brother, who has the same thing has reached the point where he can't pass the vision portion of the test to get the permit.

At this point in time God has graced me with good enough vision that I able to drive once I learn how. However, here in Minford, I don't think I would feel safe even riding a bike due to the curves and the hills.

Now to relate it to what i am doing down here. There is a term in getting others to help you in any situation you first have to have a vision of what you want something to look like. Then others can see what you are doing and "catch" the vision and make it their own. I feel that I have trouble conveying my vision to others or at least they catch it for a little while then lose it or nullify it. I hope over the next few months I can work on this a little more and over time get to a point that I can cast a vision that is long lasting.

This is where that old hymn "Be Thou My Vision" comes into play. Whenever I hear that song there is something that I grab to. Not only do I need Him to be the ultimate vision caster for my life, but there will come a day when I may lose my physical vision as well.

There are days when I feel that my family and I are the only ones out there who are dealing with this. I don't want to admit that I am going blind. In fact most of the time I can blend in with the rest of the world and hide the impairment. There have been times when I can't see the whiteboard at college and have to ask the professor to use a different marker or change the Powerpoint colors or font and thankfully my classmates have understood and at times made puns when it has to happen when I'm not there.

I thank God that he has allowed me to have my vision for as long as I have had it. If by some strange reason you have stumbled upon this blog post and you have Retnioschesis, know that you are not alone in this world. Don't let it get in the way of your dreams. You can do everything you wanted to do before, you just have to find a different way to do it. If you have not found God yet, I pray that you do and that he will provide the vision for both of us.

1 Timothy 4:12
Don't let other's look down on you because you are young (or blind, or anything else). Set an example for the other believers in speech, in conduct, in love and in purity.

Be Thou My Vision" Lyrics 
by Ascend the Hill | from the album Take The World, But Give Me Jesus

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise,
Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, put first in my heart,
High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

Oh, God, be my everything, be my delight
Be, Jesus, my glory My soul's satisfied
Oh, God, be my everything, be my delight
Be, Jesus, my glory My soul's satisfied
My Jesus, you satisfy
My Jesus, you satisfy

High King of Heaven, my victory won,
May I reach Heaven's joys, bright Heaven's Sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.

Oh, God, be my everything, be my delight
Be, Jesus, my glory My soul's satisfied

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