When I answered him with a no he said to me, "You have to try it! It's AMAZING. I sat down to look at it and when I first glanced at the pages I thought, This isn't going to be anything special. But I kept staring, and I just fixated my vision on it, and all of a sudden it was as if someone flipped a switch! And I could see this AMAZING 3D image! And I could move my eyes all around the page without the image going away! It's truly AMAZING."
I stopped dead in my tracks and thought to myself, Sounds like what I was exclaiming when I finally understood Christ's love. "Okay, let me try it," I made him get up and he turned the page to his favorite one: a bunch of roses.
I stared at it for a long time and was frustrated when I didn't immediately see a 3D image. "I don't have my contacts in, I won't see it," I used as an excuse. "No, you will, just keep trying," my dad urged me. So I stared for a little longer, bringing the book close to my nose and then far away, trying my hardest not to blink, trying my hardest to keep it under the kitchen light. I was growing extremely frustrated. "I see it kind of looks 3D.... I guess I see it? It's not that interesting though." But my dad said, "No, Lyss. You will KNOW when you see it. You'll just KNOW. I don't want to tell you what it is. You have to see it for yourself. Just keep looking, I promise." I breathed a sigh of frustration and kept looking, determine to find whatever my dad had found.
All of a sudden the middle roses came out of the page and took on the shape of a heart. It wasn't blurry, either. There was a DISTINCT 3D heart image that did not go away. I looked all around the page, jetting my eyes from corner to corner, and the heart remained in tact. It was amazing. And it all happened in a millisecond. I didn't even really notice the heart come out, it was just not there one second and there the next. I didn't do anything special with my eyes, either. I just kept staring, kept pressing on, and finally the book did the work for my eyes, my brain didn't have to work to see an image. IT. JUST. HAPPENED.
That is exactly what it was like to finally see Christ. I finally reached a point where I believed that the Gospel was true and I believed what everyone had told me about Jesus. And I spent a semester determined to understand it all myself. I spent a semester with my nose in the Bible, reading through John, Romans, Philippians, and 1 John. And I was sort of seeing it (sort of seeing the book take on a 3D look) and I had decided to devote my life to Jesus (and looking at this book), but my heart still didn't really understand what was so great about it (I didn't see the 3D image). I didn't know what I was looking for, but I knew that I still hadn't found it yet. And then while at Passion 2010 it was like one second my heart didn't understand and the next my entire soul understood the Gospel. It wasn't anything anyone said or anything I did. It was solely the moment when God decided to fill me with the Holy Spirit (the book did the work on its own), like He just flipped a switch in my heart. All of a sudden I could feel Christ in every part of my being and I just knew that THIS was what I had been searching for.
And ever since I have never been the same. I can move my eyes all around the page and still all I see is the prominence of that 3D image. All you have to do is make a commitment to want to search for Christ and begin to read the Gospel and pray. And before you know it God will do all the work. He will break your walls down and you will see Him in all His glory. And you won't even believe that there was a time when you couldn't see it.
I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something I made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. -- Galatians 1:11-12
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