A Matter of Perspective

Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings. (Psalm 17:8) ~ Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast. I will cry unto God most high; unto God that performeth all things for me. He shall send from heaven, and save me from the reproach of him that would swallow me up. Selah. God shall send forth his mercy and his truth. (Psalm 57:1-3)

All of us have seen a situation on TV or in a movie where one character can see something ahead that another character cannot. Usually the character who can’t see the danger gets upset with the one who can because they don’t understand their actions or why they might have said what they did. When we as viewers also have the perspective of seeing what’s going on, we want to tell the character who is unaware yet, “Just wait, buddy; don’t get upset at him. You can’t see what he sees.”

Very often that is exactly the situation we find ourselves in when things happen in our life that frustrate us or we don’t understand. Sometimes things don’t make sense to us and we wonder, “Lord, what are You doing? Why is this happening?” We may know intellectually that God knows everything and He knows what’s best for us, but the day-to-day application is sometimes difficult for our frail nature. My dad summed it up so well one time when he said it’s almost as if when we go to bed at night all of the lessons of faith we learned during the day are somehow “reset” during the night and we have to start all over the next day. Hopefully we don’t quite lose everything we learned. 🙂 But often it is true that we forget too easily what God has taught us. We seem to think that even though He has proven to be faithful as He said He would be, this new trial is a little worse; more challenging.

When it seems as if God has allowed us to be knocked down by circumstances, we must trust His plan. He knows the end from the beginning. He has unlimited sight into our future. So why are we fretful when our sight is limited to right-here-and-now? We can’t even see one minute into the future. Jeremiah 32:17 says, “Ah Lord God! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee.”

No matter what we face, we can have full confidence in the love of our Savior. We can have complete peace in the all-knowing, all-wise God Who created everything and Who cares about every detail of our life. Everything He does is for our good and for His glory. That is the perspective we can rest in!

*modified from an 8-27-12 Facebook post