A Bigger Perspective

light Have you ever looked out an airplane window at night?

I flew across most of the U.S. last night and received a glimpse of daily life from a different perspective.

At one point I noticed a small cluster of lights, obviously a small town isolated in a sea of blackness. I thought about the people in that town. Each light represented an individual life focused on its own pain, joy, struggle, and triumph. I imagined conversations and arguments, urgent tasks and quiet evenings.

I wondered if any of the lights represented a person in turmoil. Was someone contemplating a divorce, wondering how they’d pay the mortgage, or grieving a loss? Did a parent worry about a child’s illness or unfortunate choices?

I wondered whether someone in the cluster of flickering lights searched for God, longed for His presence in a season of despair. Did someone slump on weary knees whispering a desperate plea for relief or cry out in anger to a seemingly absent God?

As that small collection of lights receded, another appeared on the horizon. I felt the temptation to dismiss the petty squabbles and pains, to somehow call for a broader perspective from which our daily trials seem trivial and insignificant. I wanted to tell them to step back, see their small dots of concern in the context of a larger picture. I wished I could show them that everything’s okay, the world still moves along, and frankly that their isolated little light really isn’t such a big deal.

Then I wondered about God’s perspective. If those tiny individual lights seem trivial from a few thousand feet, how inconsequential must they appear to the One who holds all of it in the palm of His hand? While I see a few dozen miles from my window, He sees the entire universe and all of time at once. He watches from a truly eternal perspective I cannot even imagine.

In His eyes, my light is a blink in time. I’m here, and then I’m gone. Why would He care about my self-centered, momentary worries? The cluster of lights that’s so important to me is a single flash of absolutely no consequence.

I’m grateful that God doesn’t see it like that.

He doesn’t sit above and watch dismissively as we place our struggles at the center of the universe. He doesn’t hover above in His celestial private jet and scoff at our flickering spots of light. He doesn’t dismiss our individual trials as temporary and unimportant in the grand eternal plan of the kingdom.

Instead, He lands the plane. He climbs from the glory of heaven and walks with us. He hears every cry, feels every hurt, comforts every desperate soul. Even the dimmest, most isolated light matters to Him so much that He sacrificed His Son to redeem it.

God does ask us to take a bigger view and try to see from a broader perspective. Jesus continually instructed His followers to think in terms of His kingdom and live in a manner that transcends daily, worldly concerns. He knew that our human lives are a small blip on the eternal radar.

We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey. Steven Covey

He also knows that we can’t do it. We can’t see it from His point of view. Even when we try, our biases, limitations, experiences, and desires get in the way. He understands that our tiny cluster of lights is the center of our universe, even when we don’t want it to be.

So He lands the plane and walks beside us. He trades the spotlight of heaven for the dim light of a human life. And, even more, He does what we cannot. He lives as a man with eternal perspective, a man who truly understands that His true calling is service and obedience. He pays the price we can never pay.

We can never see our lights from His point of view, but we can know that He understands. We can know that He sees and cares intimately about every one of our lights. And we can know that His desire is for that light to shine brightly and eternally.

I’ve tried to hide my own light. I’ve wandered in darkness so intense that I was sure not even God could see me. I’ve been certain that my light didn’t matter to God or to anyone else.

Through all of that pain, He refused to give up on me. Jesus walked beside me in that darkness and carried me over some especially rough spots. He wept with me, hurt with me, and loved me when I wasn’t very lovable.

Your light matters in an intensely personal way to God.

My friend Dick Foth was once asked to explain the Christian message in simple terms. He said: