Two Eyes and Dads

“I am not ashamed of the good news . . .” Romans 1:16

In the fourth grade kids called me, “Four eyes.” Taunts and other words shamed me, but that was decades ago. I didn’t undergo Lasik and PRK surgery on my eyes because I was ashamed of being seen in glasses.

“PRK permanently changes the shape of the cornea...” the first page of the eye’s surgeon’s consent form informed me. Before I turned each page my pen initialed and set the date once read, noting each risk that may come to my left eye. I had already signed the Lasik consent forms for my easy right eye. In a laser precise minute each fuzzy perceptor will be cut to high definition. There are no guarantees.There is every hope that my sight through eyeglasses will cease. But there is that risk my eyesight may fail in either eye.Funny, yours truly worry-wart, doesn’t fret the risks. My Heavenly Father gave me an earthly father to ready me for this time.

“Gals (pronounced with a hard g and els)!” he called my five sisters and I. Around six o’clock on Saturday he’d shout and flip the reel-to reel tape player to blast fine Glenn Miller swing. He had to wake us up of course, as it was morning. Mom was resting after a night nurse shift. We’d find Daddy in the kitchen cooking up food for breakfast and chicken for the weekend drive. This was before McDonalds dotted the highways and byways. And since Mommy couldn’t drive he was our chauffeur steering a hefty station wagon.

Daddy drove us to stores. He drove us to church. I remember day trips around the City by the Bay, trips to new houses subdivisions, and trips to orchards ripe for the picking. I cringed over summer trips back and forth to the Windy City where Mom and he began our family of gels.

Once he drove his friends on a long distance business trip to Arizona. There in a desert ditch, trooper found his friends and then found Daddy between the wheel and the windshield, alive by God’s grace.

The windshield tore half of his rugged face and half of his vision. Despite the prosthetic eye and the scar that reattached his cheek to his face, handsome Daddy still had half his face to smile and dimple. When he took us on a last stroll downtown before that last night I was with him, I was not ashamed to walk beside him. Though he had not shaved, nor was he in his typical white dress shirt with cuff links.

I knew my daddy’s love for me. If he could manage to live with one seeing eye, then I can too.

I expect I will, in a few months, see clearly through both eyes. I more eagerly wait to see with newer, perfected eyes when I get to heaven, where the Heavenly Father will embrace me and grant me the joy of walking and eating with my Daddy again.

Though celebrities and pundits may mock my faith, I will publicly walk with my Father and be labeled as his girl in Jesus.

For His perfect love drives me where I need to be.