If you like logical thinkers, then you’ll like the man we meet in John 9, who had been born blind. Here he is, the recipient of a life-changing miracle — being suddenly given the gift of sight — and instead of dancing in the streets or whooping it up, he uses his healing as an occasion to make a logical decision about what his next move should be. And what he decides is to become a follower of Jesus.
Two miracles
Actually, he was the recipient of two miracles, for according to the story, he not only received his sight, but also was immediately able to start moving around as if he’d been seeing all his life. Remember that he had been born blind. He’d had absolutely no experience with living as a seeing person. As commentator Scott Hoezee puts it, “not only had Jesus fixed his optic hardware but must also have installed the necessary mental software which allowed the man to make sense of the information coming through his eyes.”1
The fact is, most blind people who have their sight restored surgically cannot immediately begin to move through the environment the way normally sighted persons do. The formerly blind need time and experience to develop depth perception, reaction to colors and brightness and so on. It’s not uncommon for people who have gained their sight to reach for things and miss, or bump into walls because they have no experience with judging distances visually. Some even continue to use their white canes for a while until they adjust to having sight. What’s more, they don’t necessarily recognize what things are. They know, for example, what a salt shaker feels like and even what it smells like, but they don’t know what it looks like. The first time they see one, som
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