Perspective.

The state of one's ideas. The facts known to one.

I have been thinking recently about this idea of one's perspective. It has been on my mind for a few weeks, and was hit with a quite humorous example tonight while eating with some friends. I was at a downtown restaurant called Godsy's, eating with some members of the Titanic cast and our director and assistant director (whom I had run into earlier in the afternoon at the theater while turning in my scripts).

We had already ordered and just a few minutes later a waiter (who was not ours) brought our table an appetizer. He held it out for what seemed like minutes, with all of us sort of giving him the blank stare, until finally Wendeth (our A.D.)  piped up and said "Um, that's not ours?" He apologized and left with the dish. We then all looked at each other and started laughing so hard! Kristi said 'I thought I wasn't paying attention when someone ordered earlier' and I said 'I just thought they were giving it to us for free!'. Wendeth preceded to point out how you can tell the perspectives in life we must all own that make us think 3 completely different things about the very same exact situation.

Kristi (our director) is a very busy woman and has admitted to me before that when she talks to people, quite frequently her mind is wondering to the 10 other places she should be instead, where other people are waiting on her for something as well. So her perspective in the situation with the appetizer was to assume that she had simply not been paying attention to what was going on because her mind was elsewhere.

My perspective differed from that one in that I assumed someone was giving us free food. First of all, I am ALWAYS somewhere wishing that someone would give me free food. So this was not a far stretch. Secondly, I knew our waitress very well and thought she might be treating us to a free dish. And third of all, my brain is always trying to find the good in people and the situations that I am in. This is the only way I keep form sinking into pits of depression seeing so much sadness and evil in the world. I like to see the positive, the light, and where God is moving in situations. So I sat at that table ready to praise me some Jesus for free food whether it came from the bus boy or dropped down from Heaven itself!

Wendeth is more of a realist. I don't know her extremely well but I know she is intelligent and calls it like she sees it. I have not typically known her to hold back her opinion on a matter or to come at an issue with unrealistic goals for the ending product. So when the food was revealed to the table out of nowhere, she not only was the first and only person to chime in and claim the truth in that it was not ours, but she also probably processed the logistics in her head before she did so--knowing that she heard everyone order and nobody ordered that dish, that people in reality don't typically send over free food to tables (that only happens in movies), and that by the look on our clueless faces none of us were going to say anything.

It's funny how our personalities, our experiences, and our situations shape our perspectives or 'what we see and know to be true'. If you sat a group of 20 kindergartners in a room and spread them out into a big circle, then dropped a 500 plus pound elephant in the room and told them to draw what they saw, there would be many pictures of elephants....but none would (or should) look the same. The kid at the head of the elephant would really only see the head and not much more past that. The kid at the butt would never see the elephant's head, sadly his picture would be a couple of big elephant buttcheeks! How might we change the outcome of the drawing? Well....we could place a smaller elephant in the middle of the room. But if the elephant represents our problems then most often those are not things we can control by making bigger or smaller (at least not willingly). So, to get a more accurate drawing of the elephant we have to back the children up, significantly far away from it so that they can gain a different perspective. The kid who only saw the trunk might now also see the ears and the eyes and front two legs, maybe even some belly hanging on the sides. The kid at the butt would see the back and tail and back legs and maybe sides or even back of the ears or head.

Some perspectives are harder to change. Sometimes it isn't as easy as backing up from the elephant. Sometimes it requires changing our mentality. And our mentality is most often shaped by our experiences in our past and how we respond to those experiences.

I used to be a very very angry person. I had no idea I was like this, but I was. At the core of my being was anger. I would lash out at those I loved, I was disrespectful and very mean. This issue seemed to get worse with time, but I had no one in my life calling me out and telling me I was like this. Then I met a guy who really dissected this behavior.He invested in me and my past experiences to understand what was going on beneath the surface. He knew that my actions were not only detrimental to those around me but to myself as well. So in moments where I was disrespectful to him, or would completely lash out during a disagreement he would call me out. Of course, being called out by those we love the absolute most in this world is NOT fun at ALL! But when I felt the anger and the darkness start lifting off of me and on it's way out of my life, I was so relieved to discover that we can indeed change our behavior. By being just as repetitive in undoing them as we are to develop them, our worst habits can indeed change. I am so thankful for this guy pointing out in me the things I was too angry to see. (And I am sure that all of the relationships in my life since him also thank him too! Ya'll--I am talking HORRIBLY MEAN AND ANGRY PERSON! If you are anyone but my friend Shane or my sister you might not believe I was this way once, but I assure you-before Jesus, I was all kinds of cray cray! haha)

So the Lord has shown me today that perspective matters. He is connecting the dots for me in understanding that perspective can change---with the Holy Spirit. I can't pretend to own a perspective I simply do not have. But the Holy Spirit makes me compassionate for those that I don't understand and advises me to continuously be a person who hopefully is only impacting the people I encounter in positive ways. I want nothing more than to be a builder of people and not someone who breaks others. And God really hit me over the head today with making sure that I am intentional about ALWAYS making sure that what I say and do is building, not breaking. Because we don't always know the perspectives that others share. BUT-the perspective that DOES matter, is truth. And that comes only from the Lord.

I seek and hope to continue to get to know Him on a more intimate level so that I can stand firm in the truths that belong to me because of Him. Only then do our perspectives change to look a lot less like what we see and more like what He wants us to see.

In Him,
Meg