Perspective

I often wonder why I can't keep perspective.  Perspective is a funny and fleeting thing.  It comes from the Latin perspicere which means "to see through."  And isn't that it?  Perspective is seeing through things, seeing things the right way, seeing the bigger picture.

Last night, we had a near disaster in the house.  I've been working tirelessly on a Christmas present project for a loved one.  I mean, for like 2-3 weeks, every day.  It's something that I've had to paint several times and has taken pain-staking detail and many coats and touch-ups to get just right.  I'm almost done.  Last night, a can of paint (by my own fault) spilled on an important piece of the project.  In fact, it was the section that I'd worked the longest on.  Now, it was covered in white semi-gloss paint.  I rushed to the sink, got out all the old towels from the laundry room and started wiping it off, trying to get as little paint on my best jeans and my new sweater and the carpet and the kitchen floor.  I held back the profanity in my mind as I was trying to clean up the mess hurriedly before the paint dried.  I finally got all the paint off, then stripped down to my skivvies, scrubbed the paint spots on my jeans and sweater, rubbed a little Shout stain remover on them and threw them in the wash on stain cycle. 

After the madness, as I stood there in my boxers in the laundry room, my wife and I finally cracked up.  We had averted disaster.  That word, disaster, carries more weight these days doesn't it?  My jeans and sweater look like new.  The project looks just like it did before the spill, and no paint got on the carpet or floor.  I told Emily, "I hate I wasted a quart of good white paint, but there's a lot worse things in the world to be upset about, aren't there?"  Even a messed up project or my best jeans ruined wouldn't have really been a disaster.  Disaster has been permanently redefined for all of us (or it at least ought to be).

The people in New Jersey and New York that watched Hurricane Sandy rip through their cities...they know disaster.  The people of Newtown, Connecticut...they know disaster.  Those events give us perspective, and I hope I can keep it.  The things that my boys do that get on my nerves haven't gotten on my nerves that much this week, the things that would have made me grit my teeth haven't really upset me, and the little annoying things about life haven't been so annoying -- because I've got perspective.

And that's the problem with America.  We don't have perspective.  Tragedies enlighten us for a few weeks, then we lose perspective again.  Until we change our perspective, our families, communities, country and world will not change.  We have to choose to see the bigger picture, we have to choose to not be annoyed by trivial things, and we have to choose to see people as God sees them.

That's really it.  We need God's perspective.  Tragedy transforms us for the short-term to see people as they are -- image-bearers of Almighty God.  If we can bottle that kind of perspective up, it would change the world.  If we could decide not to get upset over spilled paint, we will transform our lives and families.  The Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:12, "We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us."  That's perspective.  When we are most in tune with God's Spirit, we are keenly aware of all the blessings we have and the annoying details of life don't seem to bother us as much.  And life is better...because that's how God intended us to be.  Let us keep and hold on to the perspective that we've all had the last six days.