On Saturday something most surprising happened. It was
sunny. Sunny enough to wear my sunglasses. I didn’t wear my glasses however, because
it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be sunny enough for me to need them.
Truth is I forgot I even had them. But it did start me think about how great
sunglasses are, and in particular, how great my sunglasses are. When it’s too
bright, too much light comes into our eyes and it becomes difficult to see –
ironic huh? But Sunglasses stop some of the light getting to our eyes so that we
can see more clearly. Genius! Simple but effective. Or are they? Whilst these
kind of sunglasses help in bright conditions, they don’t do anything to help
prevent glare from reflective surfaces. That’s why my sunglasses are so great!
(Yes I know I’m starting to sound like a sunglasses salesman, but stick with me…)
The problem is that the light which passes through simple
sunglasses like these remain incoherent. Uh huh, that’s right. Incoherent
light. That’s a thing. I bet you wish I was being a little bit more coherent
right now. Okay then, if you insist, let me grab my metaphorical geek lab coat
and explain. When we see stuff, we can see it because light travels from it to
our eyes. But that light doesn’t travel in a straight line, oh no, that would
be far too simple! It travels in wiggly lines (that some boring people like to
refer to as waves). Presumably it travels in wiggly lines because it’s following
satnav, I don’t know. So instead of going in a straight line it also wiggles
left and right. At least some of it does. Some of it wiggles up and down. And
all of the rest of it wiggles at a variety of angles in-between the two. This
angle of the light’s wiggle is known as its polarisation.
Any object that we can see has lots of light traveling from
it to our eyes. All of the light coming from an object in normal sunlight will
have loads of different polarisations – that is to say that although all the
light will be travelling in the same direction, the wiggles will all be doing
different things and it’s this which causes glare. What’s so amazing about my
sunglasses is that they’re polarised, which means they act like a pair of
bouncers at a very high end night club for rays of light, and only allow light
whose wiggles are in a particular direction to pass through. As a consequence they
reduce glare and allow me to see more clearly.
Sometimes life feels like it’s too bright and like all of
the wiggles are pointing in different directions. There seems to be so much
going on and there are so many voices speaking at the same time that I struggle
to really see what’s happening clearly. Sometimes it’s hard to know what I
should be doing or what I should believe. Sometimes I wish I had a pair of
polarised lenses for life to make it all easier to understand. And as I thought
about this for a while, I realised that I do, although not as visually obvious
nor as easy to explain (yes that was the easy explanation). In the Bible, God
promises that He gives His Spirit to all who choose to follow Him. And that His
Spirit will help guide us when things get cloudy (or in this analogy sunny). I
guess the truth is that too often it doesn’t occur to me that I need it or even
worse I even forget that I have it, but life sure looks better when I’m wearing
my Holy Spirit Sunglasses!
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