Early Saturday morning, working at my computer, I suddenly became aware of a new floater or two in my right eye. Since I’ve lived with floaters all my adult life, I knew what this was, but also know what a distraction they can be until you adjust to their ever-presence. These are like black strings hanging on the right lens of my glasses, or sometimes like a water bug skittering across the surface of a pond. Not painful, just distracting.

I googled “eye floaters” and learned they are normal and to be expected as we age. My wife is rubbing that in. (“Poor thing–he’s getting older like everyone else!” No mercy around here.)

In time, our brains adjust to the point that we won’t notice the floaters. They will still be there, presumably, although one of the internet sources indicated they sometimes diminish.

The brain is a magnificent organ. It filters out the trivial and mundane and alerts the mind to the odd and unusual, anything out of the ordinary so we’re able to function in a world where stimuli fly at us from all directions every minute of the day. This is a protection against overloading the nervous system, for which we thank our Designer and Creator.

This process of culling out the commonplace allows the person living by a railroad track to rarely hear the train go by. It enables animal workers to function in and around horrendous odors.

Evangelist Bill Glass asked a friend at the Fort Worth stockyards how he stood the smell. He said, “What smell?”

I asked a resident of Mobile the same question about the paper mills near his city. He said, “You don’t notice it after a while. It smells like money.”

This is why your teenager is able to study with his music blaring, but he cannot function while listening to yours. It’s different and his brain has not learned to filter it out.

You’ve noticed how you can drive to work, the same route you’ve taken hundreds of times, and when you arrive, you remember nothing of what you saw along the way. You were awake, you’re confident you drove safely, so why, you wonder, do you recall nothing of what you saw. The answer is that your brain filters out the commonplace and draws your attention only to the unusual. Had a dog run into the street in front of your car or had a circus been setting up at the park, you would have remembered that.

But there’s a downside to this wonderful trait of our brains.

We end up filtering out and taking for granted the people nearest us, those who mean the most to us, the ones we count on in the deepest way. They’re always there, so our minds are freed to go on to other things.

We filter out the needs around us that we see every day. You drive past that shanty or broken down house trailer so often that eventually it becomes part of the scenery. The thought that someone might actually live there and need a neighbor or a friend never enters your mind.

This helps us understand the case of Bartimaeus, the blind beggar of Jericho.

He sat there on the side of the road as one enters the city from the north, his tin cup in his hand, the dirty rags barely covering his body, and eventually became part of the landscape. Citizens and theologians walked in and out of the city gate, discussing issues of the day, happenings across the Roman Empire, and prophecies of the Bible, without so much as a glance in his direction. That’s how he learned the most astounding news of his lifetime: a man called Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, He was alive at that moment, and God’s hand was upon Him.

He learned that Jesus had been through Jericho several times before, en route to or from Jerusalem, and that He was known to heal the sick and even raise the dead. From the talk, Bartimaeus learned of Old Testament prophecies about the coming Messiah, that He would be called the Son of David, that He was the embodiment of God’s love. How much more he overheard and understood, we can only surmise.

So, Bartimaeus came to a decision: the next time Jesus came to Jericho, he would give Him an opportunity to heal his blind eyes.

And so, he sat there, day after day, part of the scenery, one feature in the landscape, ignored by almost all who came and went. And then one day, his brain was nudged out of its stupor by sounds and vibrations out of the ordinary. A crowd was walking past Bartimaeus into the city. Something big was up.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he called into the air. “Someone! Anyone–who’s passing this way? What is this crowd?”

Finally, someone answered, “It’s Jesus of Nazareth, old man. He’s headed this way.”

A shiver ran over him. The moment he had longed for and dreamed of. He struggled to his feet.

“Jesus! Jesus!” he called. “Jesus! Son of David! Have mercy on me!”

When you’re blind, you don’t know whether the person you’re calling is standing next to you or a mile away, so he didn’t want to take a chance. He called out at the top of his lungs.

“Jesus! Jesus! Over here! Have mercy!”

“Mister, would you hold it down? We’re trying to have a dignified welcome for our distinguished guest, and you’re creating a scene. Okay?” The voice belonged to some city official or another.

“JESUS! JESUS! SON OF DAVID! OVER HERE, PLEASE, LORD! HAVE MERCY ON ME, JESUS!”

Well, that got everyone’s attention. Other people in the crowd asked him to hold it down and one or two suggested arresting him. But the more they shushed him, the louder Bartimaeus cried. He would not be put off. He would meet Jesus.

When the Lord came within earshot, He heard the man’s cries.

“What is that?”

“Oh, Lord,” someone said, “we have this blind beggar who’s hollering for your attention. I’m sorry. I know you must get that all the time and how fatiguing it must be.”

“Bring him to me,” Jesus said.

And that’s how it happened. That’s how the blind beggar of Jericho left his darkness and his rags on the road outside town and became a productive citizen. That’s how the spiritually sensitive of that town–assuming there were some–got the lesson of their lives about not ignoring the “potted plants” in their village.

Bartimaeus later looked back on that day and gave thanks a thousand times that he had not been foolish, the way so many are today, and put off meeting Jesus. He could so easily have said, “He’s still young, He’s been here numerous times before, He’ll be back. I can meet Him at my own convenience some future day.”

He had no way of knowing at the moment that this was Jesus’ final trip through Jericho, that this was his last opportunity to meet the Messiah. Wow, he thought to himself, that was a close call.

“Dear Lord, please override this canceling-out-feature of my brain anytime there is a commonplace need around me which I have ignored because of its familiarity. It may be the person in my own family who needs my witness, a family on my way into work who need my friendship, someone in my office who needs my prayers. Amen.”

(They tell me you know you’re a preacher if, hearing of a new physical ailment, the first thing that occurs to you is a sermon illustration you can get from it.)