A friend of ours tells the story of a little child who had been born blind, an only child who was the apple of his mother's eye. The two were constant companions and in the summertime the mother, who sought to make her eyes the windows into the senses and soul of her unfortunate son, would take him out into the fields and talk to him about their color, and the blue sky, and the multi-tinted wild flowers all about them. But the lad, because he had never seen color, could not picture what it is.
"What is color, Mummy?" he would ask. "Can you smell color?"
"No," the child's mother would reply, and then she would try to describe it to one who had never known anything but blackness.
"Can you feel it, or taste it, or hear it?" the boy would ask.
"No, you can do none of those things, dear," she would answer slowly. "Color is-well, it's just color." She had to give up trying to explain color to her boy.
One day a wonderful thing happened! A surgeon was found who said that he believed that he could give sight to the lad. In due course a series of operations was performed. After a long siege, during which time his eyes were completely bandaged, and another period when they were removed layer by layer gradually, the boy was able, at length, to distinguish light from accustomed darkness, and finally he received perfect vision.
That very day, in the springtime, mother and son walked in the garden of their home, and for the first time the child saw the blue of the heavens, the glory of the flowers, and the wondrous restful greens of the trees and grass. In ecstasy the youngster turned to his mother and looking into her face, cried out, "0 Mummy, why didn't you tell me it was all so beautiful?"
If only we could explain to a sin-darkened world the loveliness and beauty of Christ, the joy of salvation and life in Him, and how changed everything becomes when He dwells in the heart! For things are different from what they once were, when we belong to Him and He is ours. This change has been beautifully expressed in a stanza of a well-loved hymn:
Heaven above is softer blue,
Earth around is sweeter green!
Something lives in every hue
Christless eyes have never seen.
Birds with gladder songs o'erflow,
Flowers with deeper beauty shine,
Since I know, as now I know,
I am His and He is mine.