looking through me

Tag: faith

September 14, 2014

depth perception

I have this depth perception issue. Namely a lack of it.

Things look a little . . . flat. When I’m approaching a red light, it’s almost impossible for me to tell which lane has fewer cars. It’s become a game to try to figure out the shorter lane. More times than not I’m completely wrong—I’m not even close.

But I’ve learned to adapt. I use stationary objects and relative size of known entities to calculate position. I spend a little extra mental energy doing what others do without conscious effort, but it works.

I think I might have a bigger depth perception issue though. I perceive my relationship with God based on my relative position to others. I compare myself to them or try to come up with a formula for their proximity to God and where that places me. I miss the point entirely.

I miss that God isn’t evaluating me based on my relationship to anyone but Himself.

It’s a dangerous game to factor distances based on others; there are no stationary people in relationship to God. Each is in constant motion drawing nearer to or drifting farther from Him. The sense of scale is skewed.

I veer into other people’s lanes when I start plotting my route based on moving, fallible targets. I abandon the course marked out for me. I start jockeying for position, keeping tabs on others, creating detailed equations to justify myself. It’s not the path He designed.

And when I’m measuring the length of the lines in the great cloud of witnesses it means my eyes are no longer fixed on Jesus—the only true reference point.

No amount of astigmatism or myopia is to blame for my lack of spiritual depth perception. I don’t need to see in greater dimensions; I need to steady my gaze on the unchanging Focal Point.

 

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September 7, 2014

new balance

I’m emerging from a cocooning season. It’s been a long season, and—not surprisingly—it’s a slow emergence. What I’m processing now is an insight gleaned from the safety and solitude of my cocoon: my sense of balance was skewed.

I thought in boxes. So that’s how I understood balance. I needed to arrange the boxes with the fewest gaps and the most ergonomic shape so they wouldn’t fall. It was a perpetual cross of Tetris and Jenga. Fit this here. Pull that out there. Flip and move. Don’t let it tip. Family, work, friends, church, “free” time . . . maybe God could slip in the in-between spaces that formed when I didn’t rotate and slide deftly enough.

Shockingly I was perpetually unbalanced—I wasn’t very good at my own game.

I knew “achieving balance” wasn’t God’s rhetoric. He’s big picture, holistic, not compartmentalized. But I couldn’t visualize holistic in my frenetic, scattered world, and I struggled to find solid examples within the church.

I started to dissect my understanding of balance and holism. If I threw away my boxes, if I banished the image of Tetris pieces falling willy-nilly onto Lady Justice’s scales, what did that leave? I still had all the same categories, but now they were uncontained. I had a swirling conglomeration of roles, relationships and responsibilities. I had chaos.

But what if my scale was a top? If God was the stem—the axis—and I was the body encircling the stem, then I could stay upright. Balance came not from compartmentalizing but from accurately orienting myself toward the motion of God. All facets of me could move at once in the same direction by His energy, not mine.

Truth be told, my tendency is still to lean out, to fight the pull toward God. I’m too adept at fragmentary thinking, and a fragmented top doesn’t spin very well or very long. But it’s an image that’s allowing intentionality as I un-cocoon.

It’s putting a new spin on balancing life in God instead of balancing life and God.

 

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