Making out small print on the sides of medicine bottles is becoming a chore for me. In just the last few months, I’ve caught myself doing the “middle age arm dance” as I move objects closer to me and further away, trying to find that point where I can actually focus on them. At 43 years old, presbyopia is beginning to have its way with my eyes. I’m still fine with the newspaper, hymnal, and other things I read on a regular basis, but the small print on medicine bottles is a doozy.
Because I also have an astigmatism in both eyes that is not corrected by my contacts and because that is worsening in my right eye, I wasn’t sure whether my problem was presbyopia or the astigmatism. On a run to Wal-Mart last night, I decided to grab a pair of +1.00 diopter reading glasses and see if they would take care of most of my blurriness on small objects. I then grabbed a medicine bottle and turned to its fine print. Sure enough, it was as though the font size on the bottle doubled. It was clear as day.
I went ahead and invested about eight bucks in a cheap pair of reading glasses. When I got home, I told my wife, Nadia, about my little experiment. (Truth be told, she needs them, too!) We laughed a bit about how we are at a stage in life we had thought of as being “old” what seems like only a few years back.
Later in the evening, it struck me. What an injustice! What an unfair world this is!! Here I was wearing +1.00 diopter reading glasses over -6.00 and-6.50 diopter contacts for my myopia (nearsightedness). It doesn’t take any math genius to know that +1.00 + -6.00 ought to be -5.00. In other words, shouldn’t it be that as presbyopia begins to set in for me, my nearsightedness gets better and I never need those annoying little reading glasses. Instead of worrying about moving up to +2.50 or 3.00 diopter reading glasses over the next few years, shouldn’t I be looking forward to my nearsightedness getting steadily better over the next decade? But no, that is not to be the case for me. Instead, I may well reach the point over the next ten years where I am up to 10 diopters of correction between the positive and negative correction needs I’ll have in the lenses I’m carrying around.
But this is where it really gets good, isn’t it? What a pathetic little “injustice” to get worked up about, right? I mean, how many people in the world today would think of wanting to add positive and negative diopters together to get improving myopia when they have such easy and inexpensive (relative to their salaries) access to corrective lenses? The slightly larger injustice is that there are so many people worldwide who don’t have access to or can’t afford corrective lenses of any sort. Larger than that is the number of people who suffer from easily preventable forms of blindness—people whose vision can never again be restored but whose vision could have easily been protected.
Even greater are all kinds of injustices caused by corrupt, inept, or tyrannical governments. Or what about the injustices caused by a sometimes cruelly competitive marketplace that can lift up one region, country, or product, only to destroy it a short time later? What about children being raised by adults whose lives are in one form of chaos or another? What about war or drought-ravished regions where death becomes endemic? What about people imprisoned by the racial, ethnic, or gender-based discrimination of others? What about hard-working folks whose contributions to the common good are counteracted by the drag caused by selfish or lazy people who stand in the way of progress?
I have a pair of reading glasses now. I’ll probably have multiple pairs to leave in different places within a short period of time. But I can see, and for that I thank God. May I enjoy seeing the smiles on my kids’ faces, the beauty of the world around me, and the ideas put on a page in print. May I learn to be better at offering thanks to God for these good things and so many more. May I not be distracted by renaming minor annoyances as “injustices.” May I learn to see the truly unjust things around me and in me. And may I be humble and committed enough for God to use me to address the true injustices in our world.
Grace & Peace,
Dan
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