Perspective

Yesterday afternoon,
my Lanny Love and I
spent a couple hours in deep,
theological conversation.
I won't go into the details of our discussion
for it is too intimate and personal to share publicly,
even with you, my therapist readers.
It had to do with God, growing, learning.


If you are a regular reader,
you know that I experienced a frustration a while back
and made the statement that I was tired of learning
and just wanted to "be" for a minute.
That feeling has persisted over the weeks
despite the fact that I have continued to feel
that God has me in a growth spurt.

Now don't get me wrong!
I want to grow!
I want to be all that God asks and expects of me!
But I feel weary of being put in my place.
And I think that may be what the Lord is trying to get across to me.

I don't have to wear myself out
trying to learn what He is trying to teach me!
He will teach it to me in His own time and His own way.
And my frenzied search to correct what is wrong with me,
my constant quest to discover how to better myself,
my time and energy spent trying to learn where I have failed,
wastes my time - and His!

You may also remember my revelation a few weeks ago that

I am a gift!

But in my realization of that,
I have continued to seek out the faultiness

of the gift

God

has given 

to my Lanny Love
and the others in my life.

Oh, I have faults all right.
We all do.
But, despite what I have believed about myself
for all the years of my life,
I am not a disappointment to God.
And while I have certainly disappointed people,
I am not, at my root, a disappointment.
This is hard for me to swallow.

This morning, our preacher talked about our perceptions
and how who we are, our life experiences,
color how we view things.
Three people, sitting next to each other, watching a play,
will have completely different views of what is going on around them.
One, a drama teacher, will notice the lack of enunciation in a spoken line,
the misplacement of a prop,
the poor interpretation of a scene,
and will think it a wasted evening.
The next, a lawyer,
will notice the lack of railing on the stairway prop,
the missing declaration from the author
of the book upon which the play was adapted,
to use the story,
and he will miss the entire first act thinking about the possible lawsuits.
The third person, an accountant,
is busily counting seats and multiplying in his head
the number of seats by the ticket cost,
the number of program sales by the cost of the book,
and speculating the cost of the theater rental.
He thinks the evening's performance highly successful.
Perspective.

[Loosely translated from

Allan Stanglin,Preaching Minsister

 Central Church of Christ]

Well, how we view
God,
others,
and ourselves,
comes from our perspectives as well.
Where and how we grew up.
What we were taught about God.
What we experienced from our parents and others who love us.
What we experienced from those who didn't love us.
How we experienced school and church.
All these experiences, regardless of how far past, affect our perspectives today.
And none of us can fully understand the perspective of others.
I can sympathize with my sister Rhonda, my friend Nan, and my Uncle Paul
all of whom have lost children whom they have nurtured and cherished for years.
But I do not understand the depth and breadth of their grief.
For I have not experienced it.
They can sympathize with me and with my Lanny Love and others who have been widowed.
But they cannot understand the depth and breadth of our grief.
For they have not experienced it.
A child raised in the United States of America,
even the poorest of children,
cannot understand the depth and breadth of poverty in third-world countries.
A child raised to adulthood by good, kind, loving parents,
cannot understand the lasting affects of a child raised in abuse and neglect.
And that person cannot understand that the friend raised in goodness
also has issues that must be dealt with.
Perspective.

So, my view of God, myself, and others
is based upon my life's experiences.
From the moment of birth through my current breath,
who I am is built upon not only what God built into me,
but upon the environment in which I have lived.
And yours is too.

Well, that's about enough to chew on for today.
Stayed tuned for where this is taking me.

Now may God Himself, 

the God of peace, 

make you pure, 

belonging only to Him. 

May your whole self - 

spirit, soul, and body - 

be kept safe and without fault 

when our Lord Jesus comes. 

You can trust the One who colls you 

to do that for you. 

                                                       ~~ I Thessalonians 5:21-24 NCV ~~