July 1, 2002
DOWN HOME:
Perspective can distort reality
___Perspective changes perception.
___I remember my professor talking about that idea the first day I sat in a philosophy class in college. He used a book to make his point.
___If you see the book head-on from a distance, you might think it's a flat, two-dimensional object. If you see it from the slightest angle, however, you can recognize it has depth and three dimensions. And if you actually pick it up and read it, you encounter a new perspective--multi-dimensional depths of meaning for which the book was written.
___That lecture must have been a good one, since I still remember it 25 years later. And the book was good too. It demonstrated how to integrate faith and thought and belief with the practical experiences of day-to-day living. It offere
d me a perspective that enriched my life.
___I thought about perspective the other day when I drove past "the hill."
___"The hill" is located on a road I almost never travel by car. But I run past there at least once every week. Actually, I run up one side and down the other, and then I turn around and head back home, retracing my up-and-down steps.
___In my mind--particularly on days when I'm tired or my legs are sore or I didn't wait long enough after dinner before I started my run--"the hill" is Mount Everest. Or at least Pike's Peak. I huff and puff up one side by promising myself I'll enjoy coasting down the other.
___But when I drove past that street and looked at "the hill" from the vantage point of my car, I realized it isn't all that steep or high. More like a molehill than a mountain. Before I started running on that street, I would've told you it was perfectly flat, but you couldn't tell that to my legs.
___Perception can be tricky. When I was a young child, I witnessed a ferocious fight between two large dogs. For years, I thought I was lying on the ground, and the dogs had fought on top of me. Only as an adult, when I mentioned it, did Mother explain I was about three or four feet away from the fight. It so traumatized me that it shaped my perception.
___About that same time, our family had a friend named Lu. I thought she was very tall. When we met again 30 years later, I was shocked to see a tiny woman, barely 5 feet tall. When you're a kid and stand 3 feet tall, 5 feet is gigantic.
___Sometimes, our perceptions capture our awareness as well as our understanding. We have a hard time seeing what is for what we think it to be. And like "the hill," life's challenges often aren't as steep as we imagine them.
___It's summer--time for vacations, or at least holidays and long weekends. May we all have occasion to get some distance from the hectic pace of our day-to-day lives. And may God grant us perspective to perceive our world--and our place in it--as God sees it and us.
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