Just call me four eyes

When I was little, I would say that I'm allergic to mosquito bites and cigarette smoke. I made that presumption based on the golf ball size of my mosquito bites, and the way that my lungs felt broken after a whiff of smoke. 

Now that I've got a few years of wisdom under my belt, I can see that I am, in fact, not allergic to mosquito bites or cigarette smoke. I just seem to have been blessed with blood that tastes as sweet as pina colada to mosquitos, and just about everyone and their mother is "allergic" to cigarette smoke. 

So what am I allergic to, you ask? Well, nothing really. Except apparently the contact brand that I've been using for the last five or so years. Yupp, turns out my eyes have decided to go all "ah heyyll no" to Acuvue contacts. (But I love your guys' ad campaign, really do). 

So what does this mean for me? It means I'm wearing these bad boys for the next couple of weeks as my eyes ease up on the temper tantrum:

Being restricted to my glasses really gets me thinking. You see, I've been your good old four eyes since wayy back in first grade, when my teacher ratted on me to my parents. Apparently it's not good to be squinting all the time. Psh, what did she know? 

So off we went to the eye doctor, and I can distinctly remember walking out of the office with my spankin' new pair of glasses, and looking around the parking lot. The blue in the sky! The green in the trees! It wasn't all blurring together. And just as God said "let there be light!", bam! Amy had sight again. 

And you would think that's a good thing, right? Wrong. Maybe it was nice to see clearly again, but it also introduced me to a whooole new element of self consciousness. My teacher had to remind me multiple times to wear my glasses, because I was willing to take the blurry blackboard (do kids even have those these days?), over the embarrassment of the glasses. 

Looking back, I can't even remember where that embarrassment came from. I highly doubt anyone actually told me that glasses made me ugly, and yet, that's how I felt. I carried that with me allll the way until my parents finally let me get contacts in 7th grade. And it was a happy day, let me tell you. 

Over the years, I got way more eye infections than I'd like to admit for overwearing my contacts. (And you wonder how I got an eye allergy...). This especially started happening in college, when late nights of studying (and other activites) would lead to the brilliant idea of sleeping in my contacts. And so, I would be forced to wear my glasses as my eyes would heal. 

Lo' and behold, I would actually get compliments on them. And it was right about then that I realized how ridiculous the self consciousness that I had been carrying for years was. The Lord has even further emphasized this to me, as I realize that my beauty doesn't come from appearance, or fashion, or fitness, or contacts versus glasses. My beauty comes from my Creator in Heaven. 

I remember one time being diagnosed with an eye infection, and looking straight at my eye doctor and saying "but I don't have glasses to wear." And I really didn't! I had left them in San Diego because that's how seldom I wore them. 

I'm thankful that now, I not only have a pair of glasses that I love (thanks, Firmoo!), but I can rock them realizing that glasses or no glasses, I am Amy Reed, daughter of the King of kings. 

And you are altogether beautiful, darling! Beautiful in every way.