The perspective I speak of is one that transcends the limit of humanity, a perspective grasped only lightly and with great effort by wielding such powerful tools as imagination but bound by the steadfast promises of His Word. This perspective is most easily attained during the most momentous times of our lives: when those we love get engaged, when we graduate from school, with the passing of a loved one.. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the vast majority of our life is spent in the mundane.
Too much of my time these past couple years has been spent feeling like this:
I've heard more these past couple years from my friends and family that I sigh a lot than I have the entire rest of my life. Why do I sigh? Sometimes I sigh with the regretful weight of pondering the misactions of my past. Sometimes I sigh when my expectations for something have been dashed. But those are the good sighs - those are the times that sighing provides some level of catharsis; it's the minimal catharsis we feel when we are sad but not sad enough to break into tears but when one tear will finally manage to push past the limits of our eyes almost as if this visible proof affirmed our right to be sad. No, my sighs belong in another category.
When we walk aimlessly for a while; when we catch ourselves in the act of having started to do something only to realize we don't know why we are doing it; when we've been starved for long enough from affirmation derived from true perspective - we sigh an empty sigh. These past couple years, there's been too much of that. Perspective.
So how do we maintain perspective? I think the key is in acknowledging the relevance of perspective in all we do. Some of the most useless Christianity out there is the Christianity of those who worship God in thanks for His cross only to return to a life devoid of relevance to the cross. We've all been there. I've both given and received the useless Christianity of talking in concern for a struggling brother or sister knowing full well that that concern stops well short of lifting that "loved one" in prayer. Christ's love is not evident, not relevant. And one of the reasons that relevance, and consequently, perspective, eludes us is because we've created our own means of explaining our lives. We've assigned our own math equations that provide the foundation and motivation for the direction of our lives, and so perspective, relevance - these things leave us. We sigh.
Thomas said to him, "Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?" -John 14:5
