Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness.  Luke 11:34

I’ve long since forgotten the youth’s first name (his surname was Bard) but I’ll never forget that he was the boy with the glass eye. When he first arrived at the school, many of his peers teased him about the eye. He was sometimes called “glassy” or “socket” and probably a host of other nicknames. But their teasing quickly dissipated for he wasn’t easily offended and his ready smile and winsome ways soon gathered a good circle of friends around him. He was also much sought after to participate in pranks. His friends would persuade him to take his eye out and leave it on the teacher’s table or they’d get him to walk up to one of the girls and give her the vacant socket stare!

But the event I will never forget was when his rugby team was competing in a tense and even game against another school and he lost his eye in a maul. I was the referee, so I stopped the game, explained the situation to the other team, and within seconds the rivalry was forgotten as thirty young men scoured the pitch on their hands and knees. It was a comical sight but eventually the eye was found, washed, and replaced in the socket. But the incident had left the opposition a little reticent to tackle him for fear of knocking his eye out again. Thus it came as no surprise when Bard dived over the goal line for the winning try!

Now you probably don’t have a glass eye that needs your attention but you do need to watch your eye. For your “eye is the lamp of your body” and “when your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light.  But when they are bad, your body also is full of darkness” Luke 11:34. So “if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out” for “it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell” Mark 9:47.