My senses have steadily begun to fail me with the progression of my dementia. In addition, the dementia has brought to light paranoias that my younger mind wouldn’t have even worried about. My tastes have also changed. They have become duller, and my tongue also has changed in its ability to feel things. As a result, only things with strong flavors, coupled with the right textures, appeal to me. Fruit and vegetables, things I loved in the past, no longer appeal to me, and it angers me when my wife tries to slip them onto my meal plate. As a result, I visually inspect everything she gives me, always suspicious that she is trying to hide something that I don’t want to eat…

My wife made some delicious cookies the other day. She gave me one with my supper. It was kind of dark in the kitchen, so it passed my visual inspection, and it was DELICIOUS! Soft, moist, full of chocolaty goodness… Some friends then stopped over, and leaving the rest of the cookies cooling in the dining room, she went outside for a while. Meanwhile I found the cooling cookies. Again, it was kind of dark in the dining room, and I remembered how delicious those cookies were so I began helping myself. I lost track of how many I ate, but my wife said it was at least five! Well, why not? She wasn’t there to tell me not to!

The next day my wife had the audacity to put a cookie on my plate that had green pieces sticking out of it! She was once again at it, trying to hide zucchini in my food and giving it to me under the auspice of a “cookie”! You can believe that this “zucchini” cookie didn’t make it to my mouth! It didn’t pass my visual inspection, I turned my nose up at it, and said in my broken speech and very negative tone of voice, “Nope! NOT a good one!”

I wonder why my wife looked at me so funny? Why did she say that I liked them the day before? THAT, with THOSE tell-tale green pieces, would have NEVER passed my visual inspection! If it’s true that I ate them and declared them good, it is ONLY because my eyes didn’t see the way they should have!

Living by sight. It’s something we all do. We’re programmed this way. We believe what our eyes tell us, even if our eyes don’t see the truth! Jesus, on the other hand, asks us to, “…live by faith and not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7 NIV). In fact, “…faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1 NIV). So faith is completely opposite to sight! Faith is our guarantee that what we don’t see will come to pass!

Not an easy thing for any of us! Yet those cookies were delicious as long as I didn’t see the zucchini hiding in them… Did my visual inspection actually rob me of something delicious?

And could it be that our insistence to focus on the circumstances around us, on the logic that life teaches us, on the things that we can see, does that also rob us of the better things in life?

Many times, I’ve asked God for help, only to worry when I couldn’t see Him working. Before moving to our smaller home, our former house had sat on the market for months. We prayed for it to sell, but nothing happened. Just before leaving Canada for the winter, my wife suggested we look at houses to buy in case ours sold while we were away. I hesitated. Why fall in love with a home we could never afford? I was certain God wouldn’t sell ours.

In the end, God did sell our home. He sold it within two weeks of our departure from Canada. Because my wife had insisted that we look at homes before we left, the perfect home for us was still available, and we were able to purchase it without returning home. God had it all, in His time. How much stress I could have saved myself if I had just chosen to walk by faith and not by sight…

Maybe I should try those cookies again …

Naw! They have zucchini in them! How could THAT be good???

Inspired by Rob Chaffart
Director, Answers2Prayer Ministries