Lessons from an Ocularist

"Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life.' " John 14:6

Two weeks after Taylor was born, we added John Kennedy to our list of "groupies." He was and still is Taylor's ocularist. When we went to see him for the first time, Mike, Taylor, and I, my mom, and Mike's dad all dressed up for this all-important doctor's visit.

When we got there, we realized, John is definitely NOT a doctor, he is 100% talented artist. We left his office with Taylor's first set of conformers. Those conformers were plastic "things" that had "handles" about 1 1/2 inches long sticking out of Taylor's eye socket area. Those conformers opened up the space in Tay's eye socket and helped grow her forehead and skull area which is shaped by a baby's eye development in utero, specifically the first trimester. To get them in, we laid Taylor on the floor of his carpeted office and forced the plastics into the slits that were supposed to be eyes.

It was a year and a half of conformers and questions that ranged from, "What did you do to your baby's eyes?" to ,"My, what long eyelashes your daughter has!" which we'd get when visiting the convalescent hospital Mike's grandmother was in at the time. After that long time of growing and building Taylor's eye socket area and facial structure, it was time to graduate to prosthetic eyes.

The day Taylor graduated from conformers to prosthetics was the completed picture of the little girl I knew she was from the start. Seeing a “completed” picture on the outside with her prosthetics mirrored the completed image I had always envisioned as her mom. It reminded me a couple of years later of how God created us with "holes" that can only be filled by Him. Just like Taylor’s “holes” were only completed with perfectly fitting prosthetic eyes, God created us with a need and desire that truly can only be fitted with the grace and salvation of a relationship with His Son. Often times we try to make other things, relationships, ideas, volunteering, anything good or bad fit that gap. God sees His children complete, just as I saw Taylor complete, when He becomes our Lord and Savior.