Can True Love Be Blind?

I was walking the halls of a church in another town recently, when a man ran into me and knocked me off balance. I whipped around to see an elderly gentleman wearing dark sunglasses who was being led around by the arm of his wife. I knew he must be blind. Jim was a gifted athlete growing up, and in the late 1960s, he was about to be recruited to play professional baseball. Unfortunately, like many young men during that era, his country asked him to place his dreams aside. He was drafted by the army to fight in the Vietnam War.

Jim agreed.

Jim was trained.

Jim deployed to the battlefield.

In the midst of a heated firefight, a bomb exploded a few feet from him inflicting terrible wounds. When he awoke in a foreign hospital, he was informed that the blast had stolen his eyesight and most of his hearing. But hope still found its way into Jim's troubled life.

As a compassionate nurse cared for his wound, they became fast friends and eventually fell in love. After the war, they married. She stuck by her marriage vows—caring for him, loving him, and reading him stacks of textbooks to help him earn two PhDs.

Nearly four decades later, she leaders her soldier around by the hand and Jim can’t talk about his darling nurse without being gripped by emotion.

“I love my wife,” Jim says, “even though I’ve never seen her.”

That day, I was knocked back by the living embodiment of 1 Peter 1:8:

“Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and even though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.”

Following Jesus is often filled with doubt, anxiety, and dispassion. We strain to grasp our Savior, but touch only the hem of His robe. We squint to see Him, but catch only a glimpse of His back. We call out to Him, and only hear the faintest echoes of his voice. Or perhaps nothing at all.

And yet we choose to love Him still. To believe though blind.

This is a special kind of love, I think. And when we engage in it, we all become Jims—led around by the arm of One we’ve not yet seen, but one day will.

Editor's Note: The image above was quoted from here.