This morning I kept swatting at a pesky gnat that would not go away until I realized it was just another floater. Usually light reflects back from your retina through the transparent vitreous humor. With age, the vitreous humor (aka eyeball jelly) can begin to solidify into tiny little chunks that cast a shadow forward, making it seem that spots are floating out in front of, not inside, your eyeball.
However, trauma can cause floaters too—surgeries followed by complications followed by treatment for the complications, in my case hundreds of lasers zaps. Pieces of the retina come loose and float in the humor casting the same shadows as the less ominous floaters. Now that one eye has a “shallow detached retina” which not even some of the best doctors in the world want to try to fix until it completely detaches, too much exertion can cause that small detachment to tug yet more pieces of retina loose.
Yet at one point there was one good thing about floaters. I could easily gauge my eye pressure with them. Normally there is no way to know that your pressure is increasing until it is almost too late. By the time your vision has clouded over, your head is aching, and your innards are heaving themselves inside out, it is a real emergency.
It’s not supposed to work that way, but for me, at least in the early stages of this eye crisis, it proved an early warning system: If a floater stayed for days, I needed to make an appointment immediately. Floaters can make me dizzy and a little nauseated, besides being just plain annoying, but the warning was worth it. Imagine if I had not gone in the third day I had the same floater in exactly the same place. Normal pressure is roughly 10-18, without medication. When I got to the eye clinic the pressure in that eye was 65, even with heavy medication. I had no idea except for that persistent floater.
I think spiritual floaters are the same way. I hear people berating themselves because they wrestle with a certain problem. You know what? At least they know the problem is there. Too many times we ignore the “floaters” and go right along thinking we are just fine. That little spot isn’t important; it certainly won’t cost me my soul. Won’t it? If I see it there and don’t even try to fix it, doesn’t that make me a willful sinner? And if I don’t even recognize it when it is there, isn’t that even more dangerous?
Yes, floaters are aggravating. But in the past they gave me a way to know what I needed to do and when I needed to do it. I knew better than to ignore them. I still have floaters, but they don’t work like that any longer, and I really wish they did.
Do you see any floaters in your spiritual life? Keep an eye on them. Get help when you need it. If “struggling” is where you are, be glad your conscience is still sensitive and be grateful for God’s grace working in your life. It’s the ones who aren’t struggling who need to worry.
And everyone who strives in the games exercises self-control in all things. Now they do it to receive a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, as not uncertainly; so fight I as not beating the air; but I buffet my body daily and bring it into bondage lest by any means after I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected, 1 Cor 9:25-27.
Dene Ward
However, trauma can cause floaters too—surgeries followed by complications followed by treatment for the complications, in my case hundreds of lasers zaps. Pieces of the retina come loose and float in the humor casting the same shadows as the less ominous floaters. Now that one eye has a “shallow detached retina” which not even some of the best doctors in the world want to try to fix until it completely detaches, too much exertion can cause that small detachment to tug yet more pieces of retina loose.
Yet at one point there was one good thing about floaters. I could easily gauge my eye pressure with them. Normally there is no way to know that your pressure is increasing until it is almost too late. By the time your vision has clouded over, your head is aching, and your innards are heaving themselves inside out, it is a real emergency.
It’s not supposed to work that way, but for me, at least in the early stages of this eye crisis, it proved an early warning system: If a floater stayed for days, I needed to make an appointment immediately. Floaters can make me dizzy and a little nauseated, besides being just plain annoying, but the warning was worth it. Imagine if I had not gone in the third day I had the same floater in exactly the same place. Normal pressure is roughly 10-18, without medication. When I got to the eye clinic the pressure in that eye was 65, even with heavy medication. I had no idea except for that persistent floater.
I think spiritual floaters are the same way. I hear people berating themselves because they wrestle with a certain problem. You know what? At least they know the problem is there. Too many times we ignore the “floaters” and go right along thinking we are just fine. That little spot isn’t important; it certainly won’t cost me my soul. Won’t it? If I see it there and don’t even try to fix it, doesn’t that make me a willful sinner? And if I don’t even recognize it when it is there, isn’t that even more dangerous?
Yes, floaters are aggravating. But in the past they gave me a way to know what I needed to do and when I needed to do it. I knew better than to ignore them. I still have floaters, but they don’t work like that any longer, and I really wish they did.
Do you see any floaters in your spiritual life? Keep an eye on them. Get help when you need it. If “struggling” is where you are, be glad your conscience is still sensitive and be grateful for God’s grace working in your life. It’s the ones who aren’t struggling who need to worry.
And everyone who strives in the games exercises self-control in all things. Now they do it to receive a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, as not uncertainly; so fight I as not beating the air; but I buffet my body daily and bring it into bondage lest by any means after I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected, 1 Cor 9:25-27.
Dene Ward
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