“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!" Matthew 6:22-23
My Grandmother Palmer was a beautiful woman. Her beauty came from how she carried herself and from the ways she listened to others with loving kindness. Her inner beauty was enhanced after she went to heaven because her story has been often spoken of by her children. When she was 4 years old she and the other children were jumping off the hayloft into the hay filled wagon below them inside the barn.
When it was Grandmother's turn to jump she misjudged her target and landed on her head. When her Mother came running it was thought that she was dead. But she breathed and so they carefully moved her inside and waited. When she awoke it was decided that she would stay with an older couple they knew and rest in a dark room until she recovered. It's remarkable that they knew what to do for her head injury but it was over a year before she returned to her family.
Grandmother was never the same after that injury but she hid it well and was quite successful in making others feel more important in her company. The story of her fall was not mentioned again until her Mother told it to my Mother many years later. Grampa was a Preacher and as a Preacher's wife my Grandmother was asked to do speaking engagements. Each time she found ways to wiggled out of them.
I loved my Grandmother as she was a quiet woman and I noticed her soft and kind eyes. I tried to make my eyes look like her beautiful eyes. She once told me that you could tell a lot from someone else's eyes and for me Grandmother's eyes were the lamp of her body. She taught us to shut our eyes during the turbulent Western movie shootout scenes when my little sister and I went to the movies with her. Grandmother taught us to be careful what we let our eyes see.
As Jesus says, "...if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light..." the people of His day marveled. They quickly understood that He was speaking about what we choose to look at with our eyes. Jesus says that we can have unhealthy eyes if we look at the unholy or corrupting. Jesus is telling us to guard His Light within us with our eyes.