Magic Eye

Back when I was in sixth grade or so, my Uncle Jon purchased the coolest poster I’d ever seen.  It was one of those colorful patterned pictures from the company, Magic Eye, which resembled 1970s psychedelic wallpaper, or the TV when I pressed my nose right up against the screen.  It was the mid-90s and Magic Eye pictures were pretty popular at the time—right up there with Ty Beanie Babies and sports-themed Starter jackets. 

I’d already had a black and teal San Jose Sharks Starter jacket and even a decent collection of Beanie Babies—but this was my first time seeing—or even hearing of—a Magic Eye image. 

My mom and two of my sisters had first seen it when they’d stopped by Uncle Jon’s for a visit one afternoon while they’d been out running errands.  When they returned home, they couldn’t stop raving about the poster.  They said that if you looked at it in just the right way, a shark would suddenly “pop out” at you.  Being an adventurous kid who’d wanted her San Jose Sharks Starter jacket solely for its dorsal-finned, hockey stick-snapping symbol, this business about a shark popping out of my uncle’s wall caught my attention. 

So the next time my mom went back to visit Uncle Jon, I went with, too.  My mom, Uncle Jon, and my sisters all led me back to the bedroom with the mysterious poster.  And there it was, framed behind shiny glass on the wall—a coffee-table-sized rectangle of burgundy, burnt orange, and brown. 

It reminded me of a swirling mass of magma.  It was thrilling standing there in my uncle’s neat and tidy room, staring into a red lake of lava, knowing that at any second a shark could spring out of the molten rocks and attack me.  But then seconds turned to minutes, and one by one, everyone else around me started saying things like, “Whoa!” and “There it is!  I see it now!” and, perhaps most annoyingly, “Once you finally see it, doesn’t it seem so funny how you couldn’t see it before?”

Haha.  Real funny.  The trippy, disorienting paper was starting to look more like a muddled mess of puke than a bubbling volcanic spill.  I shifted my feet and scrutinized the flat, marble-like design for the camouflaged carnivore, but I simply couldn’t see it.  It was like trying to make out constellations, or the animals my friends said they could see in the clouds. 

“Maybe you’re not looking at it the right way,” my mom offered.  “It might help if you crossed your eyes.”

So I crossed my eyes, feeling stupid.

“Want me to point at it?” one of my sisters chirped from my periphery, running into my field of vision, index finger poised as she approached the poster.

“No!” I snapped, swatting her arm. 

“Try looking at the glare from the light fixture,” my uncle suggested.  “I’ve noticed that it helps sometimes if you focus on something else.”

I stared cross-eyed at the crescent-moon glare, willing the shark to emerge from the purling pukey print, looking cuckoo like the main character in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, who claimed to see a woman creeping around on all fours behind the patterned wallpaper of her upstairs bedroom.

…Only I had the opposite problem, because I still couldn’t see anything, and everyone else could.  It took a couple more fruitless visits to Uncle Jon’s before the stars finally aligned and bam!—out popped my shark. 

Reaching a hand out towards the biggest fish I’d ever seen mounted on my fisherman uncle’s wall, I chuckled, “It’s so funny how I couldn’t see it before.”

***

For me, comprehending spiritual truth can sometimes feel a lot like looking at a Magic Eye picture book.  One day, I may be looking at a certain passage of Scripture the same way I’ve been looking at it for years, and then the next—bam!­­— a new revelation pops out and it’s like I’m suddenly reading the thing in 3D.  The author of Hebrews wasn’t kidding when he said that “the word of God is alive and active” (4:12).        

Magic Eye prints also make me think of Jesus’s parables, and how, on one level, they’re stories about seeds and lost sheep and lampstands, but on a deeper, more refined level, they’re stories about people’s souls and God’s great compassion and the importance of living unashamedly for His eternal glory and the good of those around us (as well as other things I undoubtedly have yet to grasp).

In Romans 11:33, the apostle Paul exclaims, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable His judgments, and His paths beyond tracing out!”  Paul understood and revered the mind-boggling complexity of God’s infinite wisdom and knowledge.  As did King Solomon, who penned, “Choose my instruction instead of silver, knowledge rather than choice gold, for wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her” (Proverbs 8:10-11).  And he truly lived out those words, because when God appeared to him in a dream early on in his rule, he asked not for material wealth, but for a wise, discerning heart to help him govern gracefully.

I have this thing with hearts.  I don’t know if it’s because my mom always dotted the “i” in my name with one, or because a tiny, perfectly-shaped white one coincidentally appeared in the palm of my green handprint one day while my sisters and I were making a wall hanging for our grandma, or simply because I used to get told I had a heart-shaped face like my mom, but I’ve always felt like I’ve had this personal connection to the symbol of a heart.    

...Which is why I’ve always liked drawing them.  One time, I drew a heart in a frying pan with my friend, Anne’s face on it.  It also had glasses and a single ringlet of frizz coming out of either side of its double-bubbled “head” to represent Anne’s infamous face-framing frizzies.  And last, but not least, I’d drawn a word bubble northeast of the heart with my friend’s favorite phrase scrawled haphazardly inside: “You make my heart sizzle!”

That silly old illustration came back to visit me this past February in a construction paper Valentine’s Day card that Anne decided to send me out of the blue.  On the left side of the open card, Anne’s rendition of the familiar, frizzy, sizzling heart reclined happily in a piping-hot frying pan.  The words “you make my heart sizzle” stretched out festively beneath the happy heart in sparkling blue gel pen like a pretty party banner.  And on the right side of the incredibly creative card, out popped a new friend—a smiling, fanged, googly-eyed heart with pipe cleaner arms.  Anne had attached it to the card by means of a pink paper accordion she’d crafted herself. 

The heart that jumped out at me didn’t exactly make my own heart jump out of my chest in utter bewilderment, but it did give me a really good laugh.  I laughed especially hard at the ridiculous phrases Anne had scribbled around the heart:  “Don’t you ROLL your eyes at me!”, “Be mine!”, “My love is forever,” and my personal favorite, “Let me enfold you in my loving pipe cleaners.”  The feature of my friend’s card that I liked best of all, however, was the plastic pair of craft store googly eyes that were capped with thick, black permanent marker eyebrows.  They seemed to match the heart’s screwball personality (as well as my friend’s) quite well. 

Now, that crazy-eyed heart in my kitchen junk drawer (not because it’s junk, but because it always gives me easy access to a good laugh) reminds me of one of my most-loved passages in Scripture:  “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know Him better.  I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in His holy people, and His incomparably great power for us who believe” (Ephesians 1:17-19a, emphasis added).

It’s what inspired that song I used to sing so passionately in youth group meetings—“Open the Eyes of My Heart,” by Paul Baloche.  “Open the eyes of my heart, Lord,” I’d sing.  “Open the eyes of my heart.”  And then, the lines that really got my heart pounding—“I want to see You.  I want to see You.”

I loved any worship song about pressing deeper into intimacy with God—songs about hearing His voice, touching Him, and knowing Him more and more.

There’s this story in the Gospel of Mark about Jesus healing a blind man in stages.  After taking the man out of the village of Bethsaida, Jesus spits on His hands and touches him, asking, “Do you see anything?”  The man looks up and says that he can see people, but that they look like something out of The Lord of the Rings triology, because they resemble walking trees.  Then one last time, Jesus put His hands on the man’s eyes, and he can suddenly see everything clearly (Mark 8:22-25). 

Oftentimes, I think that’s how it is when we seek to push deeper into knowing God and His truth.  Just like my experience with the Magic Eye poster, we initially see something new, something interesting—something exciting, even—but it’s more or less two dimensional.  And we can choose to be content with that and continue appreciating that piece of personal revelation for its beauty at that base level, but I think that God desires for us to keep following Him further.  I think He wants to keep improving our vision in stages, like He did with the blind man, because He loves surprising us and delighting us and allowing us to savor every second of our sweet journey alongside Him.

There is this beautiful line of a psalm that says, “Deep calls to deep in the roar of Your waterfalls” (Psalm 42:7a).  I’ve heard it interpreted as the depths of God’s eternal Being calling to the depths of our individual beings, continually longing for us to come into closer and closer communion with Him.    

I think God desires for each of us to know Him on the deepest level possible—not to overburden us, but because He loves communing with us—but I think that a lot of times, we don’t care or even think to ask Him to reveal Himself.  He lays the answer out clearly for us in Scripture with verses like, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7) and “You do not have because you do not ask God” (James 4:2b). 

His revelation might not happen in the timing we expect, and it might even take on a completely different contour than the one we’ve been envisioning, but once it springs forth from the background , I bet it’ll boggle our minds that we couldn’t see it before. 

 

“For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears…For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:9-10,12).

All Scripture references have been taken from the New International Version of the Bible.