Dilated

I got my eyes dilated during a recent trip to the eye doctor.  On my way out they asked if I wanted some eye shades.  I politely declined.  And then I opened the door.  Wow.  It felt like someone had hit me in the face with a hammer.  I went back for the shades.

Dilating is a fancy optical term for messing with your eyes so the maximum amount of light gets in.  On sunny days (like that one), your pupils naturally contract.  Unless the doctor put drops in your eyes.  Then the floodgates are opened.

It made me think, can there be such a thing as too much light in a John 8:12 sort of way?  Can Jesus be too overwhelming?  Certainly He is for those who have come to love the darkness (John 3:19-20).  But I mean for the children of light.  Can we be exposed to so much concentrated Jesus that we are forced to filter some of him out?

Maybe it’s an Ecclesiastes 7:16 sort of thing.  I’ll admit, I’ve always struggled with how we should not be “excessively righteous.”  How could that be?  I’ve more or less settled on the idea that immersing ourselves completely in Jesus puts us at risk of losing touch with the world entirely.  Losing touch with sin is quite another thing; we wholeheartedly encourage that.  But we are left in the world for a reason — to be salt (Matthew 5:13).  We need to know how to make Jesus apply in a lost and dying world.

Granted, “too much Jesus” is a nice problem to have, and a rare one.  But we can’t blind ourselves to our role in Satan’s world.