| | Gaining Perspective
Perspective……an interesting concept
isn’t it? It is so easy to lose
perspective in life. As we go through
this life it is not difficult to get so wrapped up in our own lives that we
miss the needs of hurting people around us.
It happened to me on my drive home yesterday; let me tell you the
story.
I left my office
for the 4 mile drive home and I was in my typical rush. We were planning on going out after dinner to
watch some of our teens play in a softball game and I was running a bit
late. Normally when I go across South Florida Avenue,
I make it a point to shift gears and think about my wife Ruth and her needs and
break out of the “Pastoral” mindset. I
was ruminating over some ministry issues as I came up to my “perspective
changing” intersection, and then I saw it, a back up all the way to the
light….not totally abnormal, but now I would be late and it would push all of
our plans back. To be honest with you, I
was a bit bent out of shape; convinced that this was a satanic attack on my
schedule! We crawled along for 20
minutes with only 2-3 cars making through each cycle of the traffic lights on Lake Miriam
at Cleveland Heights.
I haven’t had my blood pressure taken in 10 years, but I am sure it was
relatively high by now. And then it
happened, the perspective change. Along
the side of the road ahead I saw that there had been an accident, and I saw a
young gal crying as she looked at her new little car which now resembled a
crumpled up pancake. I then notice the
older couple, huddled together as the wife was being comforted by her husband,
he had already been bandaged up around the head. “O.K. Lord” I thought, “I get it; all I was
thinking about was my little world, my little plans and my little life. There is a world out here of hurting people who
need Jesus, please instill in me YOUR perspective of the world.”
Has something
like that ever happened to you? I am not
saying that God had that accident happen to straighten out my perspective, but
I am saying that the Lord allows us to providentially come across circumstances
daily that are meant to shake us out of our tiny, self-consumed perspective of
life on to his global view of a world without hope. Let us continually seek to see this world as
Jesus sees it, then we will have a true and an accurate..…. perspective.
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