A Prayer for the Eyes Themselves

Turn my eyes away from looking at worthless things. Revive me in your ways. (Psalm 119:37, WEB)

The psalmist prays, turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in your ways. What moves me here is that he asks God to do the turning. He does not say I will keep my eyes from worthless things, as if it were entirely a matter of his own strength and grip. He knows his eyes have a will of their own, that they drift toward what they should not see almost before he decides anything, and so he prays for help with the turning itself.

That is an honest prayer for men like us, who have felt the eyes move on their own, drawn to the image across the room or the thumbnail on the screen faster than thought, faster than any decision we could get in front of it. There is a moment before the will even engages, and that moment is where a lot of us feel most powerless. The psalmist seems to know that moment. He does not pretend to a control he does not have. He asks for help at exactly the level where the trouble lives.

You can ask God for help there too, with the reflex, with the pull, with the involuntary drift you cannot seem to master alone no matter how many times you resolve to. This is not a lesser or less spiritual prayer. It is the prayer of a man who has stopped overestimating himself and started asking for what he actually needs.

And notice what he asks for in the same breath, life in God's ways. He is asking to be filled with something better, because eyes turned from the worthless still need somewhere good to rest, or they will only drift back. Emptiness does not hold. A man kept from one thing and given nothing in its place is a man waiting to fall again. Pray his prayer as your own tonight, in your own words, and mean both halves of it, the turning away and the filling up.