Not long ago this dude stuck a sharp knife in my left eye.

It gets even weirder. A few days later, he did the same thing to my right eye! But the most bizarre part is that I paid him to do it!

It all started when I began having a little trouble seeing. You know, such as mistaking a deer crossing the road for a lunar landing module. You have to admit that there’s a pretty striking resemblance.

“I wish NASA would choose a different spot to practice landing those things,” I told my wife as I swerved around the thing.

“Deer . . . deer!” she kept stuttering. I like it when Diana calls me pet names like that, even if it is during a highway emergency.

Then things got even more colorful. I started seeing halos around streetlights at night! At first the show was in black and white, but before long this stunning visual effect involved every color associated with Roy G. Biv.

“It’s actually kind of cheap entertainment,” I told the eye doctor when I finally concluded that I might have a vision issue that needed to be addressed.

“The way I see it (optometrists like to use those kinds of puns), you have a couple of choices. We can do surgery on your eyes or you can spend the rest of your life in prison for having run down an entire Girl Scout troop as they skipped merrily along the sidewalk selling mint cookies door to door.”

“What are you saying?” I pressed the good doctor.

“I’m saying that if you don’t have the surgery, you will be glad that you still see rainbow halos around lights, because in prison you will need all the cheap entertainment you can get.”

The first of the two needed surgeries was scheduled to take place a couple of weeks later.

“Just pop this pill, and you’ll be in kind of a twilight zone during the surgery,” a man told me when I arrived at the surgery center. I hoped that he worked there.

“Now, Randy, this will take only about 20 minutes,” said my jovial-natured eye surgeon, whose name, ironically, is Dr. Stern. With that, he switched on a microscopic vacuum cleaner and began sucking out part of my eyeball. You think I am kidding, but I am not. It was beyond eerie to be watching all this from the inside.

Sure enough, about 20 minutes later, I was wheeled into the recovery area. By early the next morning my previously foggy eyesight was 20/20. The same thing happened to my second eye two weeks later! It was very expensive to have portions of my eyeballs sucked out of my head, but it was worth it.

Still, even though I can now see things many miles away with great clarity, without reading glasses I cannot see anything clearly within the first two feet closest to my face.

That’s how it can be in life sometimes; we tend to be able to spot defects “out there” in others that we don’t see in ourselves. The Bible puts it this way: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3). That’s big! Jesus is telling us that the place to focus our spiritual energies first and foremost is on our own heart.

So I don’t wear glasses anymore when I’m driving, although I sort of miss all the aerospace activity that used to take place in the middle of Maryland route 66. Still, deer are kind of interesting in their own way.