At Youth on Wednesday night, we recently engaged in the story found in Mark 10:46-52 that shares the account of a blind man receiving sight from Jesus. In order to better prepare ourselves to step inside and understand the story, we thought that a little exercise might be in order.
Let’s experience blindness, if but for a short while, and worship.
We got about 100 blindfolds ready and after we played a game, had the students spread out in the room and place a blindfold over their eyes (there were assurances that no one would be harmed while wearing a blindfold!). We turned out the lights so there would be no light seepage through the cloth blindfold over everyone’s eyes.
This is something that I have wanted to experience for some time, so I blindfolded myself along with the rest of the group.
We had three elements to this experience:
- A sensory experience of not being able to see.
- Meditating on a reading of a couple of Psalms.
- Singing 3 verses to the song “Amazing Grace.”
I spent the first 3 minutes going through our average day: asking questions and thinking about what it would be like to not be able to see during these daily tasks. Everything from getting out of bed, to eating food, to walking through school, to not be able to see what people look like or even what you look like. Lots of ways we take our sight for granted and we don’t think about it until it is gone.
Then our youth coordinator, who was the only one in the room without a blindfold on, read through a few Psalms while the rest of us meditated on the words that were shared. After the reading, we sang “Amazing Grace.”
We ended the time by corporately taking off our blindfolds at the same time. However before we did, I asked the students to imagine what it would be like to have not been able to see for their whole life up until this point. This entire experience took about 10 minutes, so we all had had the blindfold on for a while. We counted to three and then we all removed our blindfolds.
I know a 10 minute experience doesn’t equate to a lifetime of blindness. However, those 10 minutes gave us all a collective, albeit brief, understanding of what it might feel like to be continuously blind. And it helped us all to better relate to the fervency of the blind man who asked Jesus to “have mercy on him” (Mark 10:47-48).
