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Healing the Eyes of the Heart: An Excerpt from Discipling the Diseased Imagination
I went to college in Chicago, and during my second year, I became interested in a woman. One night, we went on a walk—what we called a DTR (“define the relationship”) walk—by Lake Michigan. Impressed by her beauty, I decided to take a risk and compliment her bright green eyes. As we walked, I rehearsed various poetic ways of doing this, but as we faced each other, I opted for the direct approach: “You have beautiful green eyes.” Her reaction was not what I expected. She tilted her head, confused, as if I had told a joke that missed the mark. The awkwardness was palpable. After a beat or two, she mercifully broke the silence: “My eyes are brown.”
She forgave me and later married me anyway (thanks be to God). But something my wife learned about me that evening is that I have deuteranomaly, more popularly known as red-green color blindness. I’d known this about myself for a long time, having consistently failed the dot eye exams when I was young. When I went away to college, I was worried enough about it that I had my older sister make me a chart that matched my shirts to my ties. And yet, in that moment, nothing seemed clearer to me than the color of her eyes. Could I really be mistaken about something so important, something that seemed so plain to me?
All of us see the world in a way that is far more limited than we like to admit. I often think of the counsel in the book of Proverbs: “Do not be wise in your own eyes” (Prov. 3:7). The biblical writers often talk about vision in this metaphorical way. They say you have eyes in your head, but you also have the eyes of your heart. Recall the way that Paul prays for the Ephesians: “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe” (Eph. 1:18–19).
We may think doing as we see fit sounds like freedom. But to the biblical writers this is a delusion: What we desire is what is destroying us.
Eyes of your heart is a complex metaphor. For the biblical writers, the heart is more than a physical organ that beats; it thinks, feels, remembers, desires, discerns, and chooses. The heart represents the control center for our whole life, what makes us tick. To say that a heart has eyes implies a sort of seeing that goes beyond our intuitions, beyond the way things seem. Knowing how the human heart is prone to wander, Solomon prayed for a wise and discerning heart, one able “to distinguish between right and wrong” (1 Kings 3:9). We are similarly enjoined to guard our hearts “with all diligence,” for everything we do flows from it (Prov. 4:23 KJV).
The problem is that from the first pages of our story, we have failed to guard our hearts and have instead become wise in our own eyes. Scripture tells the story of the human spiral of sin, in which turning away from the wisdom of God leads to doing whatever seems right in our own eyes (Judg. 21:25). We may think doing as we see fit sounds like freedom. But to the biblical writers this is a delusion: What we desire is what is destroying us.
Scripture shows how a life without limits leads to spiritual slavery, life at the mercy of misdirected desires. This is the diagnosis Jesus offers in his most famous sermon: “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matt. 6:22–23). Our imaginative ailment goes far beyond a simple misperception, unlike my red-green color blindness. Our hearts can be deceived, trained to cling to things that kill.
The prophetic diagnosis is idolatry: We have given our allegiance to things that cannot bring us to life, and so our hearts have become calloused, leading us to close our eyes. We now feel like we are really on our own, that we belong to ourselves, that we alone should decide what we should be doing. We build systems and machines that reflect our desire for mastery and control and then begin to resemble the things we have built. The final result, on both an individual and a societal level, is a diseased imagination. We cannot imagine how life could be substantively different from how it is now or how God could be transformatively present. All we can imagine is more of the same.
The scriptural prescription for idolatry is to turn from our idols and worship the living God (1 Thess. 1:9). But the powers that hold sway make it difficult to turn. Paul tells the Corinthians that the dragon—“the god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4)—has a tight grip on human hearts. Enchanted by evil, we need the strongest spell that can be found to set us free. Apart from divine intervention, no leap of imagination is possible.
But Christians believe that a leap of imagination is possible because God has already leaped across the chasm toward us. As Paul continues telling the Corinthians, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).
What heals the eyes of the heart, ultimately, is an encounter with holiness—or better, many encounters with holiness over the course of a life, many spirited spells to disenchant our dragon-sickness. Such encounters will not always be pleasant; holiness disrupts as it disenchants. That we are not “undone” owes only to the atoning love that meets us in the encounter (Isa. 6:5 KJV). Resisting evil’s enchantment can occur only as we continually open our hearts to something outside ourselves: God’s gift. Glad receptivity matters more than raw creativity, because imagining an alternative world is less like a courageous achievement and more like falling in love. When we fall in love, the mere presence of the one we love reconfigures the world, what matters, and what is worthy of our attention.
Though imaginative healing is a gift, it requires work, exercise, and discipline. But it is important to remember that healing the imagination begins with responding to what God has already done, not with coming up with something new. The food for which our imagination hungers has already been offered to us in Christ. Here is the work and world made possible by Jesus: Take, eat, remember, and believe.
...it is important to remember that healing the imagination begins with responding to what God has already done, not with coming up with something new.
This also means that if anyone finds themselves imagining an alternative world, searching for a better city, or longing for a better country (Heb. 11:10–16), it must be because God has first moved to instill that hunger in their heart. As Aslan tells Jill in The Silver Chair, “You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you.”[1] Lewis points to this hope further when making his well-known argument from desire: “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. . . . If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”[2]
To believe that there is food—“true bread from heaven” (John 6:32)—that can satisfy our imagination’s deepest hunger is the theological virtue of hope. Christians believe that a day is coming when we will find that other world we have been seeking, not because we have escaped this one but because the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ (Rev. 11:15). Our hope is that one day things will truly be on earth as it is in heaven. Faith, finally, will be sight.
Christian faith is an imaginative tradition, a shared way of encountering the world in light of God’s Word. In the Scriptures we are heartened to hear the voices of pilgrims who are further along on the path, who offer us their companionship, challenge, and comfort. More significantly, when we read and listen to the Scriptures, we hear the voice of our elder brother Jesus and the voice of our loving Father. We may feel as if we have been left in the dark, but the steady voice of the Spirit in the pages of Scripture assures us that we are not alone and that there is always a step forward that we can take in obedience and trust. As we petition God for the things we need, we also pray to surrender to his will.
But the hope of those who live in the dark is not in their own resourcefulness or responsiveness. It is in God’s loving pursuit. There’s a line from the sixteenth-century Belgic Confession that expresses this beautifully: “We believe that our good God . . . seeing that Adam and Eve had plunged themselves in this manner into both physical and spiritual death and made themselves completely miserable, set out to find them, though they, trembling all over, were fleeing from God.”[3]
God sets out to find us. My great hope is that in the midst of my own self-absorption, Scripture will continually tell me the good news about Someone Else, who makes atonement for my evil and clothes me in his beauty. I hear the announcement that he died for my sins, rose again from the dead, and now reigns as Lord, setting me free from the horror of being eternally wrapped up in myself. This gospel has the power to melt hearts of stone, to break hearts open with beauty, to tune hearts to sing his praise.
Content taken from Discipling the Diseased Imagination by Justin Ariel Bailey, ©2026. Used by permission of Baker Academic.
