Emancipation Proclamation

Isn’t it ironic that sometimes it takes a blind person to help us see our own distorted vision?

Do you see anything?, Jesus asks.

Weeeellll, yea… kind of… says the man.  Actually, to be honest with you, Jesus, we might have a little problem here.... Because... I do see people… except they don’t look like people at all.  They look more like the Ents…It's freaky.

Good job, Jesus…, mutters the blind man's friend sounding a lot like my fourteen year old. How’s this for an epic fail miracle?

I knew it was a bad idea all along, groans the other, I-told-you-so friend. You should have listened to me…

There is an unpalatable mixture of disappointment, pressure and the now-WHAT?

But the blind man seems to be delightfully oblivious, completely unconcerned about Jesus’ miracle working reputation.  

He has nothing to lose, no reputation to guard – his own or Jesus’.

So, he gets to be disarmingly honest.

Like that kid from the story Emperor’s New Clothes.  Everybody else was too preoccupied protecting the Emperor’s, and by proxy their own exposed behind. Everybody but the little boy – or a little girl, for it could have been a girl, for that matter – had something to lose, something to guard.

Ah the strange idiosyncrasies of adult world!

But, our blind man, perhaps because of his very blindness, was stripped off of all commonly engaged playacting, free to speak the simple truth as he saw it.

His honest statement became an emancipation proclamation of sort for all the still half-blind folks, like you and me.  

His statement forever liberating us from the tyranny of pretense, freeing us to admit that we are not there yet.

We are not as far along as we so desperately want you to believe...

We don't have it as together as we work so hard to appear... 

We haven’t arrived.