A few years ago while I was in New York on business, I happened in to an antiquarian book show at the 7th Regiment Armory on Park Avenue and 67th. It was a rainy spring afternoon, and I’d taken a long stroll down Park looking for nothing in particular. What I found was a little bit of heaven in an unexpected place.

Books for me are something of a vice – and a great hall full of them was sensory overload. I bought an early (but not first) edition of C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, and lingered over outrageously priced, mint-condition copies of the Dick and Jane books I learned to read from in kindergarten.

In one of the last vendor’s stalls before the exit, a fat brown spine with gold engraving caught my eye. It read The Travel Lessons on the Life of Jesus. As I pulled it from the shelf, I saw that it wasn’t a book at all – but a case about three inches deep, filled with an odd collection of 35 sepia colored cards depicting places like the Valley of Kidron, and Cana in Galilee.

Each card had what looked like two identical photographs on it, placed side by side. On the back was a description of the scene printed in six different languages. It was like an antique travel log through the Holy Land, and I adored it. The shop-minder explained that these sets were common in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, and he may have even told me what they were called, but I don’t remember that. I just remember being giddy over my quirky find, and paying a slightly ridiculous price for the privilege of taking it home.

I didn’t get the “full picture” of my pictures until a month or so ago, when, at an antique barn in central Texas, I found an odd little item called a stereoscope. It looked like an eye mask with a Pinocchio-like wooden extension, and the seller said that it was used to view “stereographs” – double photographic prints mounted on cardboard in such a way that they produced a 3-dimensional image when placed in the extension of the scope.

Oprah would have called it an “aha!” moment.

The stereographic view of my old cards was something entirely beyond what I’d previously known. And the stereograph and my “Jesus cards” were made for each other, even though I’d found them thousands of miles and nearly three years apart.

Does God ever allow you to connect the dots between two seemingly unrelated things, finally understanding them both as if for the first time?

Isn’t that kind of stereo view of life the best?

“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe.” (Ephesians 1:18-19)

© Leigh McLeroy 2003