Parable of the Contact Lenses

For the past several summers, I have worked as an optometric technician at my dad's office. One of my responsibilities there is to teach people how to wear contacts. This is actually something I really enjoy. People tend to get really excited the first time they get their contacts in and they can finally see without glasses. :)

Most people who come in have never seen someone get trained for contact lenses. Their experience with contacts involves watching people pop them in and out of their eyes, easy as pie. What they don't realize is that it takes a lot of practice to get to that point. A lot of my trainees expect to be able to get their contacts in on their first try, or even their second. But it takes that majority of trainees quite a few tries before they get the contacts in. That is NORMAL. We usually block off an hour for contact lenses trainings. Some lucky few do get their contacts in on their first try, but most take longer-anywhere from a few minutes to an hour to a few hours. No matter how fast they learn, most trainees are convinced they are the slowest contact trainees ever. They apologize over and over again for being so slow. Some of them get frustrated that they can't learn faster. What they don't realize is that they are doing fine-in fact, they are doing better than they think! Since they don't have experience with contact lense trainings, they can't see their experience in the proper light. I can. I do these things all the time. But when I reassure trainees that they are doing great, they don't always believe me. Sometimes they think I am just being nice.

Here's the other thing: it really doesn't matter how long it takes them to learn. Take a person who learned in five minutes and a person who learned in three hours and compare them one or two months down the road. You probably won't be able to tell which was which. It doesn't matter how long it takes to get the process down, it just matters that you keep trying and keep practicing until you can do it. Your end results will be the same.

I was stressing out recently about something I've been going through lately, something that requires me to do some growing and stretching. I've been frustrated at times, trying to get it down. But my experience training people to wear contacts came into my mind. I realized that in much of life, we are treading new ground for ourselves. Sometimes we haven't seen anyone else ever do this before, and we wonder how we are doing compared to others. Maybe we have seen others go through similar situations before, and we judge ourselves by how well we are doing in relation to their experiences.

But that is not how God judges. He knows that we all learn at different speeds. He knows that each situation is different, and He knows EVERY detail of everything that we go through. God does not judge us in relation to each other, He judges us with infinite mercy in relation to how well we are improving and growing for ourselves. He knows that with His help and with His grace, we can conquer all challenges before us. We can master the things we seek to study and learn. We need to have patience with ourselves, because God has patience with us. And from His perspective, we are likely doing better than we think. We just need to keep trying and keep doing our best. If we do, then we can become what we need to become.