See Face to Face

Doctor E had instructed me to read the chart, peered at the surface of my eye, and declared my measurements four months after a third PRK adjustment. August 2012 I finally attained what for decades had eluded me: 20-20 far vision in my left eye.

PRK is Photorefractive Keratectomy, a tongue twister name for a blink of a surgery on a 5 to 9 millimeter cornea. Because my eye was so severely myopic the doctor could not perform LASIK surgery they did on my right eye.

Under LASIK, the protective outer layer of my eye was lifted like a flap to allow the laser to correct the cornea. Awake I was told to fix on a pinprick of light, as precisely directed laser light corrected the shape of my cornea. The flap layer became a natural bandage over the altered cornea. When the team lifts you from the table. Vision instantly sharpens.

With PRK the excimer laser sculpted away the thickness of my cornea that made the world beyond my nose a blur. How much did he thin the thickness? I didn’t ask him. I did read that in PRK the excimer laser beam removes one to three hair strand thickness from the corneal cell layer. A contact lens became my bandage for my cornea.

When the eye doctor tells you to come back to him one week later, two to three weeks later, one month later, and two months later, a patient needs to have the patience of Job for healing. It’s been a cautious, four-year process, and my left eye has been under the laser’s burn thrice. I was awake watching each time.

I can drive without eyeglasses. I walk around the neighborhood without eyeglasses. Now I can wear sweet, cheap Hollywood sunglasses! Hallelujah! Bless you Jesus! Happy Dancing!

Others may not be so willing to let a doctor laser sculpture their eyes, let undergo a surgery, wide awake through each one. But I let Dr. E do it three times.

A gifted eye surgeon Dr. E answered all our questions He assured me that he would heal me.I trusted him each time he told me what to do as he cut me with his laser. By mutual faith he became a friend and spiritual brother for MBH and I. Besides I knew the only wise God directed him.

A proverb says a man makes his plans, but God directs his steps. His directions, the world may toss off as rigid and binding, not trés chic, current, or evolved. When will He stop the suffering? Why won’t healing or happiness come? Many just want to swear nasty in His Son’s name, Jesus Christ. Intriguing how folks around the globe never use Buddha or Gaia’s or Thor’s name in vain.

Do you bless the name of Jesus?  By faith Jesus became not only my friend and brother. Jesus is my assurance, the final Answer to life’s problems. He died for wounding sins. He died to heal. He rose to prepare a perfect place for us to thrive in joy without end, seeing God face to face, no glasses needed.

The Patient Pace of Perfect Vision: 

20/20 Finale

Today starts September. Hints of fall showed up as wee pumpkins in the coastal patches we viewed on a recent visit with family in Northern California. Some called the timing of this trip serendipity. But when I stepped into the rental car and my sister called to beg me to take mom to the doctor that very afternoon, timing was divine. My mother is in good hands and health. And it’s well past time to blog now that MBH,my beloved husband, Bud, and I are back in the Deep South.

Colleagues of MBH warned that our family would find Georgia's August days unbearably hot and  humid. Triple-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, they claimed, would melt us. A handful of days may have edged 100 degrees, but nothing like those in jungle heat. Through sun-tinted eyeglasses I squinted into the empty sky over the village, searching for shady clouds to gather against the steep foothills of the Himalayan range. Villagers looked the monsoons to feed water pots, rice fields, and gardens, to rinse away greasy sweat from every pore and hair follicle, to lift the claustrophobic pressure of humidity that sapped energy.

For a few weeks the Deep Southern summer seemed just as oppressive as in Southern Nepal. I thank God for the inventive minds that created air conditioners and electricity to run them. Still, our second August Deep South seems sweeter and cooler than those hot season months on the northern India “Terai” or plains. Recently our thermometer has dipped into daytime highs of eighties, even seventies! MBH is faithful to keep our lawn green with sprinklers, but God has turned on sky sprinklers almost every other day.

I praise my Maker for another blessing. My eye doctor recently measured 20/20 vision in my surgically corrected, far distance eye, huzzah! Or perhaps the Jewish doctor might say, “Blessed be the name of the L_rd!” Sans glasses, worn since I was nine, my Lasik and PRK Lasek eyes now delight over lush landscapes. Rusty dry lawns and fresh cotton fields grow lush green against the red clay. Deciduous trees dress like a Southern belle in full-leaf regalia. Flowers that had withered in early August now stand to blush petals. Human brows may be furrowed but at least we don’t have to mop them of sweat.

Unless one is in Los Angeles, where on this 2009 September day, triple digit temperatures blast from fires consuming mountainsides and homes. Pray God’s protection for the firefighters. Pray safety for the LA families affected. Appeal to God for the approaching Baja California hurricane to soften and hasten to quench the flames. Not only can God send a Jewish doctor to heal my sight, God sent his One and Only Jewish Son into the flames of Doom and up from the dead to rescue and save many. Even you.

Let Him give you 20/20 perfect vision by faith.

For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son for you. Amen

Blindsided, Part 2 of 3: Submissions

Dawn slipped through the bedroom blinds to sprinkle onto my eyelids at the appointed ordaining, all too soon for my willing.

When I finally awoke, I had a headache and a late breakfast. Of course Buddy came to the rescue after I asked. He served me a cup of water and half of a caffeinated tablet. If I took the whole tablet, my eyelids would close and my head tilt off, proof that I could take Ritalin for my whirling dervishes.

My head stopped pounding while I nursed my melancholy baby of a mood.
I prayed and paced. No, I begged. I begged, as always, for my kids who did not receive job news or contacts the previous week, this week.

Surgical recovery was my excuse for not submitting manuscripts since Thanksgiving when Doc E first corrected my eyes. The left dominant eye just would not focus beyond 20-40. Nevertheless, I had not submitted any good manuscripts since the previous year’s Thanksgiving when my beloved lost his job.

In this merry, merry month, the books and checks have arrived for my 2007 submissions for A Cup of Comfort Devotional for Mothers and Daughters and A Cup of Comfort for Parents with Special Needs. These printed pieces quietly prompt me to tell you fellow writers or those yet to be published, “Keep on, keeping on. Write, then submit what you write.”
For you without good jobs, the encouragement is the same: “Keep on, keeping on.”

Like Buddy does with his Abilities Discovered counselor, he submits. In dashing dress shoes, pants, and casual button down shirt, Buddy smiles as he submits resumes all over town.

“Hi, how are you?” he’ll respond in greeting. Bud is challenged by direct questions. He knows how to work through his blind spots, to grin a dashing smile as he turns to his counselor for her to answer. Even if he’s turned down, he continues to smile and submit.

I turn to my own Counselor, but discover it’s me, myself, I who must finish the queries. I must keyboard to submit and also submit to the One who gives me the fuzzy faith to overcome the frown of rejection with the smile of trust.

Ty Buddington Tale of Wonders
Part two, Taste of Homeland

Beloved hubby returned from a business trip to the very spot the family once called "sweet home." The kids and their mom confessed jealously. Yet, this mom realized it wasn't the time to revisit that homeland, where life tasted like corn on the cob, banana splits, chili over spaghetti, and chocolate-peanut butter Buckeye Blitz ice cream.
Where is the homeland of"la dolce vita" ? For the Israelites and Moses, the sweet life wasn't tethered to a prior geographic mooring. The sweet life in the US of A ought not tie to a dream home,what with foreclosures and reports of torched mansions in Californian enclaves.

On weekends Ty Buddington and Dad still carpenter the organizer for a closet, the space a Nepali family of eight could mud dung slather to make their bedroom.


Every day Mom awakes from an arena of a master suite. She drifts to the mirror to apply eye drops and determine how far she can stand to perceive her face. Pre PRK and Lasik surgery, without glasses to focus she stood two inches (5 cm) from the mirror. Now one foot (30 cm) away, she beholds the face that hid behind eyeglasses. Ah, there's that wide dimpled smile, tanned skin, two hollowed cheeks beneath high cheekbones, the DNA imprints from her late Daddy.

She now gets the challenge her daughter Maria faced since birth: eyes that work independently of each other. In the struggle to process thoughts Mom and her Maria try to ground their shaky perceptions. Together they do a morning study in the Book that is also a mirror. Through that mirror a Carpenter chisels to reveal the holy imprints of the Father they belong to forever.

For the oncoming months, the halos of corneal repair may blur what Mom beholds. Still each day brings a clearer picture of her Father's world.

A week to Thanksgiving and a month to Christmas! Though snow blankets up north, in the Deep South the maple leaves flame and roses still bloom. And Ty and Dad will be in sync and active, tooling, maybe tandem biking. Soon the two pals will tandem-cook apple pies and cookie bars.

Can you sniff the cinnamon . . . the chocolate, too? Want that taste of home?

It's beginning to be a lot like heaven.
"Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is [anyone] who takes refuge in him." (Psalm 34:8, niv)

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.