A Different Perspective on Castles

When my son was about three years old, we put him down for a nap. While he was sleeping, my husband was working hard in the back yard building a piece of furniture. When my son woke up, I said to him, “Come here Sean. Look what Daddy made.”

Photo By: Daniel X. O’Neil

My son’s eyes grew wide with excitement and he practically shouted “It’s a castle!” Both my husband and I looked at each other and laughed.

“No Sean, it’s not a castle. It’s a bookshelf.” I gently corrected him.

With absolutely no change in expression, he exclaimed with the same enthusiasm, “It’s a bookshelf!” Clearly his excitement over the creation was not in what it was, but because his daddy had built it. This thing, this bookshelf, or castle, or whatever was amazing.

What’s Your Perspective?

One definition of the word perspective is “subjective evaluation of relative significance; a point of view”. This is the definition we are most familiar with. It’s how we live our lives and we quite often share our point of view. We often think that our “perspective” is the definitive answer to what is happening around us, and through our point of view, we decide whether something is good or bad, significant or insignificant. Our point of view becomes our source of truth.

The problem with that idea, of course, is that we are not the source of truth and rarely do we have enough facts to perceive whether something is valuable, significant, important or of God. So when someone loses their job, our view may be that it’s a bad thing. A decision to take a missions trip when finances are shaky may appear unwise. A family’s decision to suddenly pack up and move somewhere unfamiliar sounds ridiculous.

As we look at things from our own perspective. It is the idea of placing a quarter a short distance from your eye and looking at the sun. Which is larger? From our “perspective” the quarter is larger and more significant.

Interestingly enough another definition for perspective is “the ability to perceive things in their actual interrelations or comparative important.” In trying to understand what we are walking through, we need to have a view that shows us the actual importance of what it is that it going on. We need to understand what is going on and then be excited and amazed by the incredible things God is creating.

Easier said than done, I know. It’s been almost a year since we moved in with another family from our church. Financially we were in a very difficult place and without a lot of options. They generously opened their home to us so that we could live in a place without worry, especially while my husband, Gerry, was in Africa. However, their invitation was greater than that; it extended to whatever period of time we needed in order to become financially stable.

I struggled with the very thought of moving into someone else’s house. We had always been the ones with the home open to those who needed a place to stay. What kind of stewards were we to end up without a home? What kind of protectors were we to Elli, our little girl, to end up almost homeless? The only answer I could think of was that we were failures.

The Gift of Perspective

Photo By: Howard Dickins

But God‘s plan was completely different than what I thought was right and good. Shortly after we moved in, the pastor’s wife came to me and said “I have a word for you from God.” I could barely look at her as she started to speak. “God says this is a gift.  It’s a gift.”

I looked at her with tears in my eyes and honestly replied, “It doesn’t feel like a gift.”

“I know,” she said. “But God says it is, so you need to hold on to that. Trust Him. Believe that it’s true.” And she was absolutely right. This has been an amazing gift. Safety, security, a place of stability and love, and all the cats Elli could want or need. I don’t always perceive it as such, but this is because I don’t always see things rightly. My emotions, my desires, my thoughts are not always aligned with the Giver of good gifts.

We need to look up to the Son and recognize that whatever it is we hold close, what we keep right in front of our face is not as good or as big or as significant as the plans He has for us. So I pray for you and for me that God would give us the ability to perceive things in the correct perspective, in the right comparative importance. I pray that we would know God and trust that His plans for us are good and that they are not to harm us but to bring us a hope and a future. That whatever He is creating in and through us is amazing and we can celebrate whether they are castles or bookshelves, because He created them for us.