Perspective

It’s the kind of morning I dread. The kind where you are supposed to be somewhere you are not. This happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I looked at the clock at 7:10 a.m. contemplating whether I should get up and spend a few minutes with Jesus before my girls wake-up or head back to sleep praying for a few more moments of rest. As I turned over in my bed my cell phone vibrated. My supervisor texted me.

“Are you on your way? You are on the schedule for this morning.”

Panic. I cannot stand being late let alone not being even remotely close to being where I did not even know I was supposed to be. I threw off the covers and started texting back as Maggie’s sleepy swagger rounds the corner from her room into ours. My Maggie is a creature of routine. She expects her mornings to be as she always has them. If not, give her ample warning.

“Quick, Maggie, we have to get to school. I have to be at work. Hurry.”

Her tears were immediate and she dashed back to her room, hiding under her covers. “This is not how my morning was supposed to go,” she wailed.

Thirty minutes later she was at school. It turned out that the schedule was wrong and I was not late, so I stopped for drive-thru coffee before heading to work anyway. While I slowed my heart and mind down on the drive I realized how often we view life in the same way Maggie viewed her morning. “This isn’t how my story (life) was supposed to go.”

We run from disappointment instead of allowing ourselves to find perspective in the midst of it.

Phillip Yancy in his book Prayer talks about perspective. We are small in comparison to the Milky Way which is small in comparison to the believed size of the universe. Job, the guy who went through more than his share of trials, never got answers from God. God reminded him instead of His vastness and His authority over all things.

“God needs no reminding of the nature of reality, but I do.” Yancy writes. He also talks of Paul who preached a similar message in Athens in Acts 17:24-28.

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needs anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your poets have said, ‘We are his offsprings’.”

I believe passionately that God cares infinitely more for us that we could possibly care about every aspect of our own lives. He has not only done the necessary act to allow us to seek and to find him, but has lavished his mercies upon us morning after morning. He will continue to do so. We are not only creations, but we are made in his likeness. We are his offsprings and he desires us to seek him, to find him for he is not far from us.

So, my story may not be the way it was “supposed to go”, but in the midst of the disappointment and the smallness of who I am, I have a God who is bigger than I am. I have a God who wants me to seek Him and to find Him. He is not far from me. He cares more deeply about everything than my smallness can comprehend.

I believe that for you, too.

Lamentations 3:22-23 | John 3:16 | Genesis 1:27

-ST