The eye is the lamp of the body

I think I have a more real sense of what Jesus meant when he said,

The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! ~ Matthew 6:22-23

This is how it happened:

When I woke up on Monday, it felt like I had something in my eye. I found an eyelash in my eye (instead of preventing things from falling into my eye) and proceeded to remove it. But I still felt like there was something in my eye! I looked around carefully but couldn’t feel anything. I hoped it would work it’s way out, but it just seemed to get worse. Every now and then I couldn’t hold my eye open. It would start watering and close; and every time I closed or opened my eye, it hurt.

By Monday night, my eye was all read and my mom thought I had pink eye 🙁 So, Tuesday morning, I went to the doctor who took a look at my eye and said that I had a scratch on my cornea – a corneal ulcer, which is apparently not a good thing. The doctor gave me some antibiotic eye drops saying I would feel more than 50% better the next day. I’m glad to hear this. The rest of Tuesday I cannot really do anything because I can’t keep my eyes open for very long. So this means I can’t go to work (because I can’t drive with closed eyes 🙂 ), I can’t work from home (because that would mean looking at a computer screen), and I can’t really do much else except sit around with my eyes closed.
Well, Wednesday morning comes around and I feel pretty much exactly the same as the day before. Mom insists that I should see an eye doctor. That’s fine with me. So she drives me to the hospital to see an eye doctor. Once we get in to see him (rather, him to see me–my eyes are closed 😉 ), he looks at my eye, shines bright lights into it, drips drops of liquid into it, and generally does things that make my eye want to close. Oh well. He concludes that my cornea is very scratched up. It’s not long before he turns up my eye-lid and lo, and behold, there is a “foreign body” under there! A piece of dirt or a leaf or something, that he pulls out and my eye feels significantly better! He tells me to keep putting the antibiotic drops in and generally rest my eye to let it heal.

So, my eye is much better, but it’s still scratched and watering and basically wants to stay closed. I spend a lot of the day not doing much (not going to work, again!). I can do somethings and manage to more easily hold one eye open, so I do some work on the computer and such.

Today I’m doing A LOT better and most of the redness is gone. I’m very thankful for my eyes. I don’t think I really noticed before just how much i depend on my eyes to accomplish most of my daily routines and work. When I couldn’t use my eye, my body was certainly “full of darkness”! I have a better fell for what Jesus meant in Matthew 6:22-23.