Getting perspective in life is really helpful.
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My drone is a helpful educator for gaining perspective and I hope you will see why in a few more moments of reading.
Humanly speaking, perspective helps you to understand where others are coming from, but if we are to love others and show empathy, we need to get ourselves into perspective.
I am not sure any of us have a right perspective when it comes to self. Our view of self is not necessarily the view others have of us, nor God’s view for that matter. Our view and the view of others can be wrong, but God’s is not.
Some people have too high a view of themselves while others have one that is too low. One is seen as arrogant and proud while the other is considered weak. Perspective can have one feel more important than others or inadequate compared to others. One claims elite status while another feel supressed.
Perspective can have you think you are more deserving than others or less deserving, more important or less important. One claims entitlement while the other feels unworthy.
Getting a right perspective on self can only happen when you get perspective on your Maker...
Getting self out of perspective leaves you open to all kinds of evil: allowing yourself to be the victim of another’s evil or worse, making others victims of your own narcissistic evil. Getting a right perspective on self can change everything: humbling the arrogant, building up the lowly, removing class distinctions and silencing complaints of entitlement while protecting you from becoming someone else’s victim or victimiser.
Getting a right perspective on self can only happen when you get perspective on your Maker and His purpose for your life.
My drone has offered me a number lessons about life but there is one that I never tire of being reminded of and it is all about perspective. It begins with take-off and ascent.
I turn the camera towards me and my surroundings and then move the drone upwards and away. The picture registers on the iPhone that contains so much to make me feel important about myself. As the picture takes in more with every metre travelled, I, who once was the focus, become smaller and smaller until almost undefinable, indeed a spec and to the untrained eye even invisible.
On the ground, I can step on ants without knowing they even exist but from the drone I am reduced to nothing more than an ant myself. And to the vision of the vastness of the cosmos I am even less.
That offers some perspective when the pipsqueak human defies the God who made it all. It is almost laughable to think that rebellion against God will end well for us. Indeed it hasn’t already, from any perspective you look.
As I watch myself get smaller, I remember the God who made it all and has the vision to see me more fully than I even see myself.
Not treated or ignored like an ant, I reflect on how extraordinary it was for God to enter our world in the person of Jesus Christ offering God’s perspective on us all. Sinful? Yes! Deserving of nothing? Yes. Loved by an infinitely great God? Absolutely. Redeemed and forgiven by a saviour? Totally.
That’s perspective. We are creatures, small, sinful and undeserving, but we have the Creator’s loving attention and saving forgiveness. And that is a perspective meant to bring us all together humbled where necessary, lifted where down and together exceedingly thankful.
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