It’s time for us to reset our sense of perspective. Perspective, literally, is when nearby objects seem larger to us than those that are far away. I demonstrated perspective to my granddaughter recently by holding up my thumb and asking her to compare its size with some cars in the distance. We both knew, of course, that the cars were bigger than my thumb, even though from our point of view my thumb seemed larger. One of great advances of the Renaissance was the use of perspective in art. Before then, artists portrayed everything as the same size, regardless of how far away they were.
Many things in
our lives appear to be bigger and more consequential than they really are,
simply because they happen to be what’s right in front of us. An everyday household chore may seem to be
more important than our relationship with a distant friend, because we see the
sink full of dirty dishes but the friend is only somewhere in the back of our
mind. It is good, of course, to have a
tidy kitchen. But friends are more
important than plates and bowls. We know
that, but somehow we struggle to find the time to make the phone call or send
the email.
As we travel
through this month of October, the upcoming election is going to loom bigger
and bigger in our lives. As rancorous
and divisive as the political battlefield has become, it’s hard to imagine how
things could get worse, but that very well may happen. Already, political disagreements have caused
tensions in families and have strained once-close relationships. Angry interactions can no longer even be
considered to be debates, because no one listens to anyone who doesn’t already
agree with them. All we seem interested
in doing is yelling at people from “the other side.”
Perspective. Cars are bigger than thumbs. Friendships are more important than dirty
dishes. And people are more important
than politics. This is not just my
opinion: this is what our Lord Jesus himself demonstrated in his atoning death. Christ died for people. In doing so, he not only revealed the
incalculable preciousness of each person, but he increased our value by raising
us up to be the children of God. Psalm
49:7-8 tells us “No one can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom
for them – the ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough.” What had not yet been revealed to the
psalmist is that there is only one payment that is ever enough for a person’s
life; 1 Peter 1:18-19 proclaims “It was not with perishable things such as
silver or gold that you were redeemed … but with the precious blood of Christ.” Nothing on the face of the earth in the minds
of people could ever compare to that.
Christ died for
people. He did not die for institutions
or ideologies, for politics or positions of power, for countries or constitutions. As important as each of these may seem to us,
they cannot compare to the value of each person’s soul. Your life, and the life of that person whom
God wants you to touch with his grace and love, matters more than all the
kingdoms of the earth or all the wealth of Wall Street. I encourage you to keep this perspective in
mind as we draw closer to November 3.
