Perspective

Many years ago I heard a short story, “There was a small bird that had fallen from its nest and was out in the cold on the ground. It chirped and chirped until finally a cow saw the small bird and took pity on it and dump a warm cow pie on him to keep him warm. The bird kept on chirping until a wolf heard him and came to his aid. The wolf saw the bird and pulled him out of the cow pie, cleaned him off and the little bird was very happy until the wolf ate him.”

The moral of the story is, when you feel that people are dumping on you doesn’t necessarily mean they’re trying to hurt you and when someone comes along to help you out doesn’t necessarily mean they are trying to help you, but destroy you. Also, when you’re up to your neck in cow dung, keep you mouth shut.

I know that most of you have heard this old story, but I thought it was good to prove my point. Many times we feel that life is unfair and dumps all over us. Even when we look at one circumstance we deduce we are here for no other reason than to suffer.

How many times have our children thought we were being unfair to them when we had their best interest at heart and we were just trying to help them and protect them? Still we heard the tantrums and threats even though we knew we were doing what was best. Teens enjoy your life now because this is the smartest you’re ever going to be. As you get older and wiser you’ll come to the realization you are not as clever as you thought you were.

I can almost hear you parents now agreeing, yeah…yeah, even though it hasn’t been that long since you believed the same thing. In fact, how many times have you attempted to tell God the best way to handle your life because you thought you knew more than He did? Oh, you may not say it out loud, but it has been in the back of your thoughts.

It doesn’t take long if you look around and see there is always someone in a worse position than you. I do not intend to minimize your suffering and that’s not my intent. I’m encouraging you to not become focused on you, but to take a moment to look around. We are all in this together.

Because of our past we develop our own perspective of life and those around us.Our goal should be to overcome our perspective and start looking at life from God’s point of view. In other words, looking through His eyes and see the truth. Many think your problems and struggles are too great for God to handle…”You’re Doomed” It’s time to get some new perspective.

The photo above was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, more than 4 billion miles in the distance. Having completed its primary mission, Voyager at that time was on its way out of the Solar System, on a trajectory of approximately 32 degrees above the plane of the Solar System. Ground Control issued commands for the distant space craft to turn around and, looking back, take photos of each of the planets it had visited. From Voyager's vast distance, the Earth was captured as an infinitesimal point of light (between the two white tick marks), actually smaller than a single pixel of the photo.

Here are a few remarks made by Dr. Carl Sagan I found very interesting.

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." Carl Sagan

The real question is, do you serve a BIG GOD or do you have one in your pocket you pull out only in times of need or greed. We serve a BIG GOD that created the Pale Blue Dot and the entire universe. This is the perspective we need. Even if we live to be 100 years old that is only a grain of sand compared to eternity. Do you know where you’ll spend eternity?

It doesn’t matter how much we accumulate while we’re here because we’re going to leave it all behind. Many years ago I heard the only thing you can take to heaven with you is your children and hopefully some of your friends and strangers.

When I look at that Pale Blue Dot I can’t help but wonder why God created you and me. He didn’t ever need us, but He wanted us and that’s saying even more. Many of us go to mechanics and use certain plumbers or doctors because of their reputations. There are many of these people out there to serve us, but we choose those we want. There is a much greater blessing of being chosen than being needed.

Once you get a real glimpse of God everything starts falling into the right perspective.