Deacon Paul Nghia Pham

LEARNING TO SEE DIFFERENTLY

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light.” — Matthew 6:22

There was once a man whose wealth could purchase almost anything—almost.

He owned vast properties, employed countless servants, and commanded the attention of experts wherever he went. Yet for all his riches, he lived with a torment no money could soothe. A sharp, unrelenting pain burned behind his eyes, robbing him of rest and peace. Day after day, the ache returned with greater force.

He consulted physicians by the dozen. Specialists examined him, prescribed medications, administered injections, and offered confident assurances. He followed every instruction faithfully. He swallowed pills, endured procedures, and waited for relief.

None came.

At last, when hope was thinning, someone suggested calling a monk known for treating such suffering. The man agreed—not because he trusted monks more than medicine, but because desperation had made him willing to try anything.

The monk listened quietly as the man described his pain. He asked few questions. He examined nothing. When he finally spoke, his prescription was simple—and strange.

“For a time,” the monk said, “you must look only at the color green. Let your eyes rest on nothing else.”

The wealthy man was puzzled. Green? No medicines? No procedures? But pain has a way of softening pride. He agreed.

Immediately, he summoned painters from across the region. Barrels of green paint were purchased. Walls were coated. Furniture transformed. Curtains replaced. Pots, pillars, doors—even trees within view were painted green. The man spared no expense. If green was the cure, then green would surround him completely.

For days, his world became a single color.

When the monk returned to check on him, something remarkable happened. The servants, seeing the monk approach dressed in red, panicked. Before he could enter the house, they rushed forward with buckets of green paint and poured it over him, terrified that their master might glimpse another color and suffer again.

When the monk heard what had happened, he laughed.

“My friend,” he said gently, “if only you had purchased a pair of green spectacles—worth just a few coins—you could have spared yourself all this trouble. You cannot paint the world green. But you can change how you see it.”

The laughter faded into silence, and the truth settled heavily in the room.

The man had tried to heal his pain by reshaping everything outside himself. He believed that if the world changed enough, his suffering would disappear. And yet, the solution had never been in repainting walls or remaking trees. It was in adjusting his own vision.

This is not merely a story about eyesight. It is a story about how human beings respond to discomfort.

When something inside us hurts—fear, resentment, disappointment, anxiety—we often attempt the same strategy. We try to repaint the world.

We want people to change.
We want circumstances to bend.
We want life to become quieter, kinder, more predictable.

We expend enormous energy managing the external—controlling environments, rearranging relationships, demanding outcomes—believing that peace will finally arrive once the world conforms to our expectations.

But the monk’s wisdom exposes a deeper truth: inner pain cannot be cured by external control.

We cannot paint the world green.

Jesus spoke directly to this reality when He said that the eye is the lamp of the body. What we see—and how we see—determines what fills us. The same world can feel oppressive or luminous depending on the vision we bring to it.

Two people can live in identical circumstances and experience entirely different lives.

One sees threat everywhere.
Another sees opportunity.
One sees offense.
Another sees mercy.
One sees loss.
Another sees grace.

The difference is not the world. It is the lens.

The wealthy man had all the power to reshape his surroundings, yet none to quiet his pain until he learned where the true work needed to be done. His fortune allowed him to repaint everything except himself.

We do the same, though with subtler brushes.

We repaint conversations to justify resentment.
We repaint memories to preserve bitterness.
We repaint motives to protect our pride.

And still the ache remains.

This does not mean the world is not broken. It is. There are real injustices, real wounds, real hardships that cannot be dismissed with positive thinking. But healing does not begin by forcing reality to bend to our will. It begins by allowing God to reshape our perception.

Changing vision is not denial. It is discernment.

It is learning to see beyond what irritates us to what instructs us.
Beyond what wounds us to what forms us.
Beyond what we cannot control to what we can surrender.

A pair of green spectacles is small, humble, almost laughably simple. That is what makes the lesson so unsettling. We prefer grand solutions. We want dramatic fixes. We want the world repainted.

But transformation often arrives quietly.

In prayer that reframes a problem.
In gratitude that interrupts complaint.
In humility that softens anger.

The man learned—perhaps too late—that peace is rarely achieved by rearranging the outside world. It is cultivated by tending the inner one.

When vision changes, the same world looks different.
When the heart changes, the same circumstances feel lighter.
When perspective shifts, pain loses its power to dominate.

We cannot control the colors of the world around us. But we can choose the lens through which we look.

And when we allow God to adjust that lens—to cleanse it, steady it, enlighten it—we discover something freeing:

the world does not need to change for peace to begin.
We do.

It is foolish to spend a lifetime repainting walls when a change of vision would suffice. The wiser path is harder but holier: to shape ourselves first.

For when the eyes are healed,
the soul finds rest—
even in a world that remains unfinished.