“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Matthew 6:22-23, ESV)
One of our Links Players in Tucson and I were talking on the phone recently, and he told me about a friend who hit a good golf shot with the very first swing she ever took.
Good eyes then affect not only the way we see the world, but the way we behave in it.He didn’t expect that, of course, because it happens so rarely. In addition to the natural difficulty, he said she was wearing a long dress, further hampering her ability to turn and swing. But hit it she did, and although he said it didn’t go far, it was solid.
What she brought to the game was something many of us don’t: excellent eye-hand coordination. My friend said he thought you were either born with that or born without it, because he couldn’t think of anyone who ever taught it.
That was an excellent observation, and I had to admit that I couldn’t think of any golf lessons that focused (pun intended) on eye-hand coordination.
I have seen art lessons on the topic, though, because artists must have excellent coordination between their eyes and their hands. And I believe that in both art and golf you first have to learn to see, then you have to learn to put your hand (or your brush or your club) in the right place with the right stroke and the right weight.
Just as artists can practice this skill, so can golfers, and we would be better for it. One simple way you might do that is by bouncing a ball on the face of a sand wedge. You may never be Wesley Bryan, but maybe you can get up to fifty bounces in a row, and that’s good.
And of course we should learn to see more than the ball. We should also see the target, and even see the path that connects the two.
How does that apply to our spiritual lives? In much the same way that we either take for granted or ignore the role of our eyes in playing golf, we pay too little attention to the role of our eyes in life. How much have we practiced, or even thought of, eye-spirit coordination? Jesus said that if we keep our eyes healthy (look with both the right attention and the right intention), then we will be filled with light. Look at the wrong things or with the wrong intention, and darkness is the result.
Interestingly, Jesus’ words in Matthew 6 are set in the context of how we perceive money. Indeed, a Jewish idiom for a generous person portrayed one’s having “a good eye.” Good eyes, then, affect not only the way we see the world, but the way we behave in it, according to the healthy vision God gives us.
All of us should practice seeing rightly so we will be full of light. It is much better to live in light than in darkness. Seeing a golf shot before it happens can help your score, but having clarity of the inward eye can change your life forever.
—
Lewis Greer
September 13, 2017
Copyright 2017 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.