We are all the same it seems / Behind the eyes / Broken promises and dreams / Our good disguise –Amy Grant, from the song "Turn This World Around" on her "Behind the Eyes" album
You'll rarely catch me outside without my shades on during the daytime—especially when I'm driving. I have several pair of sunglasses (all of which I lose or a regular basis, but they sort of reappear in cycles). I prefer them to be extremely dark and I always buy the ones that curve all that way around your face—sort of the anti-John Lennon look.
The sun bothers my eyes to the point of me needing to squint if I'm not wearing sunglasses. But I've noticed something about wearing sunglasses. It's easy to look detached from society when wearing such dark sunglasses because people can't see your eyes. I don't know who the first person was to say that eyes are the window to the soul, but I think they were on to something.
The prophet Jeremiah is often referred to as the "weeping prophet." Jeremiah 13:16-17 says, "Give glory to the LORD your God before he brings darkness, before your feet stumble on the twilight mountains, and while you look for light he turns it into gloom and makes it deep darkness. But if you will not listen, my soul will weep in secret for your pride; my eyes will weep bitterly and run down with tears, because the LORD's flock has been taken captive."
Jeremiah said his soul would weep in secret, but did you notice the connection between his soul and his eyes? If his soul hurts, his eyes would manifest his pain. I don't know if Jeremiah was as good as most people are at hiding their pain (I suspect that he wasn't), but I do know that our eyes, no matter how much we try to hide pain, often reveal our soul's condition.
And—as Amy Grant's song that I quoted above says—behind the eyes, we're all the same. We've all experienced broken promises and dreams. We're all trying to push on, when at times, it hardly seems worth the fight. We're all overwhelmed sometimes. And in the process, we often try to hide our pain behind a poker stare, or sometimes even with a happy face—but our eyes eventually give us away.
