Birds Eye View

 

Sailing has often given me parallels to life. There are soft blue days of sailing with cotton candy sunsets. It's the perfect amount of wind hitting your sails at just the right point, steady and not gusty, that gives you the smoothest movement over the water. Like life, this happens randomly and at great intervals.

There will more often be rough passages. Or passages that have every type of weather in it. You can experience all kinds of weather within an hour or less out on the water. It's just a fact of our natural world. Our Creator God made it so.

Recently I was watching one of the many sailing channels my husband and I enjoy together. This particular family had just anchored after a hard three day and night passage. They had experience sea sickness and extreme waves the whole passage, a sensation that you can imagine feels to be like inside a washing machine.

As they dropped anchor and put the drone into the skies, it became clear to them that it was worth every bit of rough seas. The bird's eye view of the islands, palm trees, and sandy beaches erased the memory of the passage.

As I soaked in the virtual sun and the blue of the sky, the turquoise of the sea, and the feel of sand underfoot, I realized how very trivial my problems(passages)of my life truly are. 

How about for the burdens on your heart that you can't quit praying about? I'm not talking about false heavy burdens of guilt and shame or condemnation. No, I'm acknowledging the heart strings that pull heavily for those you love and care about down to the things that you know little about but know that God does know about, like the war in Ukraine, for example, these kinds of burdens are good for remembering God's care and view. Thy Kingdom come, they will be done...

And for the more ongoing battles of living in a house with parents who have been children brought up in different houses and homes of parents who also used to be children and have brought with them, quite innocently, the sins of their fathers. This is what we bring to our homes whether we want to admit it or not. Thank God for Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit to keep making us and changing us. And the bird's eye view. Or maybe it's the same thing as grace and forgiveness, but it is the truth of what works in a family unit. You can't define a family member by their momentary snarky attitude. Even if the momentary snarky attitude leaches into next week, having the bird's eye view helps with looking at the current problem with grace and forgiveness. And giving it time to ripen and age with not just your human remedies but God's way and time.

There are going to be differing opinions in our homes and churches. We will have times of not being able to reach into other's perspectives. We won't always be able to understand why some of our most favorite people behave the way they do or think the way they do. It doesn't make us wrong or right, dumb or wise. We can all claim the name of Jesus and still have these battles of the brain and heart, but if we can look at our differences with a bird's eye view, we will be able to see the good parts we have in each other too. 

I believe this is a better way to navigate the passages of life. Instead of attempting to understand better why we have the problems we have, or how we can change how people think about things, we need to pull back from what we believe the problem or opinion in question to be and see things from a different perspective.