(This is from my dear friend, Hal Shrewsbury. And given that the world needs to know how practical is an understanding of God and man in our daily lives, it's a privilege for me to have this testimony on my blog this morning.)
Eye Examinations at the Naval Academy
In my senior year at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, many of my classmates were concerned about their eye exams because of the 20/20 requirements for naval aviation, and many were doing various eye exercises because their eyesight had deteriorated from four years of studying.
I didn't think much about it untilI met the photographer of "From Bow to Boston", a book carried in the Christian Science Reading Room in those days, who attended the Annapolis church and was then blind. I knew I had to free myself from fear and decided to do some prayerful work, since I had always wanted to fly for the Navy. I looked up the definition of "Eyes" in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy -- "Spiritual discernment--not material, but mental" and then looked up "Spirit"..."Divine substance; Mind; divine Principle; all that is good; God; that only which is perfect, everlasting, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinite."
I reasoned that seeing good had nothing to do with physical eyes, but was a divinely mental quality which I could never lose,and that there were many people with perfect eyesight who were miserable with what they were seeing physically. Furthermore, my photographer friend would pose us in his studio and take pictures even though he was blind. He was expressing "spiritual discernment" even without his eyesight. Since I firmly believed in exercising since I was on the gymnastics team at the Acaedemy, I felt I could "exercise" my spiritual vision by seeing all the good I could before the eye exams which were a week away. I can't recall a more wonderful week while there, or since.
While standing in line waiting for the eye exam, I felt fear that the doctors would find something wrong since I had stayed up late the night before studing with a dim light after "lights out" had sounded. I immediately countered this suggestion with the thought that the doctors were doing their highest sense of love to insure future pilots would be physically qualified and that only divine Love, God was with me in that line. When I read the charts, my eyesight exceeded the 20/20 requirements and I flew airplanes off and on aircraft carriers as well as performing the demanding visual requirements of air-to-air refueling for 20 years without the use of glasses.
This experience has blessed me in many ways since, and I know that as God's man, we can never be deprived of the only vision that is really important: that of spiritual discernment, the ability to see good.
