Patches of crispy white snow still cling to the shadowy places on the north side of our house. 

Those strange little spots – incongruous when the sun is shining warm and bright – are the only remaining evidence that last week’s Big Storm ever happened. Elsewhere, the traces are wholly erased.

But I remember vividly the sensation of watching from my window while the birds, which congregate around the feeder in our back garden, labored under sleet. 

I can close my eyes and see the cruel beauty of the vitex tree bent over with the weight of the ice that glazed each and every branch and twig… when the sun occasionally peeped through, it set that crystalline sculpture ablaze with fiery lights – proving to me (again) that God’s artistry exceeds anything human minds can devise.

Snow and Ice

My deep pleasure in the Big Storm of last week could not be more different than the dismay which last year’s Snowmaggedon produced. 

Isn’t that weird? 

Both weather events featured stark beauty of the most exquisite and exceptional (at least for Texas) sort; both afforded us days off from school and office; both invited the lingering-by-the-fire-with-tea conditions that thrill my soul.

Given all those common elements, why the disparate reaction? 

One word: electricity. 

Last week, the lights stayed on… and the heater stayed on… no pipes froze… there were no epic floods at home or at church. 

All the buckets of water Mark had filled “just in case” we had to turn off our supply at the main, again, are still standing (full) in the garage.

My take away from this concerns perspective. 

Snow and ice always look fiercely, brilliantly gorgeous; but my ability to perceive them as such depends on whether I am regarding them from a place of warmth and safety – or not.

In fact, everything about the way I interpret visual data is affected by my specific, personal perspective.

Military Deployment

Here’s another angle on this radical difference that the beholder’s perspective makes in perceiving what is beheld: 

A photo in the newspaper a few days ago, of American troops boarding a plane bound for Eastern Europe. 

My response – a spurt of tears and a prayer for the families those soldiers are leaving behind, families whose acute worry will stretch out for who-knows-how-long – was rooted in my own experience of being the daughter, the wife, and the mother of veterans. 

In contrast, Mark’s response to the photo was less sadness and more anger. Through tight lips, he delivered a grim prognosis of tactical challenges ahead for them, then a blistering critique of leadership gaffes that had led to this crisis. His response was rooted in his own experience, not as an at-home worrier but as a deployed warrior. 

Same photo; completely different reactions. 

Perspective.

Proverbs 18:2

We’ve all had a crash course in the ways that people’s differing perspectives can create contentious divisions. No matter what the hot topic question du jour – from the moral rightness of competing in an Olympics held by a totalitarian state, to the definition of “equitable” when drawing electoral maps, just as two recent examples – a difference of perspective can quickly devolve into a brawl. 

The thing being beheld looks totally different to those doing the beholding, and this difference of perspective becomes a line in the sand of explosive difference.

The Jesus Difference

Jesus talked about perspective from a unique perspective – as God. 

Jesus walked around in a human body, in the company of people whose flawed humanity was perpetually on display, but His God-perspective preserved peace in all but a few situations of potential conflict. 

Jesus explained the holy priority of seeing things God’s way in the Sermon on the Mount. He said:

“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:22 – 23)

Interestingly, Jesus seems to indicate that perspective is not a matter of personal experience or opinion. Rather, perspective is a matter of light vs. darkness – of health vs. disease.

The eye – that through which we behold, the medium of our perception – is, according to Jesus, a “lamp.” The light of a healthy eye will fill the body with light; the darkness of an unhealthy eye will fill the body with darkness. 

These labels have cosmic consequences for Christians, because Jesus Himself is “the Light of the world.” To see with eyes that are light-filled and light-filling is to see, quite literally, through Jesus’s eyes.

Conversely, the darkness to which Jesus refers in cautionary tones clearly references His enemy – the one whom Milton calls “the Prince of darkness.”

Scripture consistently describes the change of perspective that comes with salvation in similar terms of light-and-darkness. 

For example, Paul explains that God’s design is “to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God…” (Acts 26:18) 

He amplifies this image by explaining elsewhere, “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12)

The sobering implication of these teachings is that my perspective can only be the right perspective if it is illumined by Christ’s perspective. 

I cannot be “right” without His light. 

And when I am wrong, I become – however unwittingly or unwillingly – an agent of darkness. 

Perhaps most important for a born-scrapper like me to own for myself: when I become a Christian I surrender my right to pick my battles. Surrendered fully to the Prince of Peace, I am obligated to model my behavior on His. And Jesus never wasted breath on a stupid argument.

Battles worth fighting

I do not mean to imply that Jesus waffled or compromised. He didn’t. Ever. 

But Jesus never wavering did not translate to Jesus always fighting. 

His perspective prioritized people, always, and only opted for conflict when conflict was needed to bless people.

(It’s worth noting that almost all Jesus’s chosen conflicts were with folks who considered themselves “religious authorities” – not with the prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, and generic sinners who followed Him around. That’s something for us to keep in mind when we are feeling smug in our “holier than thou” principles. Ahem.)

Seeing Light, Being Light

There’s an old Amy Grant song called “My Father’s Eyes”. Listen to it on YouTube; it’s a great praise ballad. 

The chorus applies here, because it speaks to re-aligning our perspective with Jesus’s so that our eyes see as His do, empowering us to shine the Light that He shines:

“Eyes that find the good in things

When good is not around

Eyes that find the source of help

When help just can’t be found

Eyes full of compassion

Seeing every pain

Knowing what you’re going through

And feeling it the same…

Just like my Father’s eyes.”

Peace as Perspective

Storms are going to come (and sometimes the power WILL go out). 

Wars are going to come (and sometimes it will be MY loved ones getting on the plane). 

Conflict and trouble and illness and grief are guaranteed conditions of living on planet earth.

But seeing these truths through the Light of Jesus’s perspective drains them of their destructive power. Because if I surrender fully to Jesus, it’s not my experience that defines my perspective – it’s His. 

Jesus’s experience is wholly about my rescue and my redemption and my safe-forever-with-Him reality. Jesus’s experience supersedes my experience – Jesus’s perspective outlasts anything else that lays claim to my perspective – Jesus’s reality IS my reality. 

Ann Voskamp says that “All fear is just the belief that God’s love ends.” I agree, and I would add that wrong perspective is anything seen through my own eyes rather than God’s. 

So perhaps the key to proper perspective is the key to most of living in the center of God’s will: 

Remembering that God’s love never ends; remembering that Jesus’s Light should illumine all my seeing; remembering that peace is not the absence of potential conflict but the choice to rest in Truth. 

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(Romans 8:38 – 39)