Perspective

What do you think of when you see this word?

Those of us who are artistically inclined probably think about various drawing methods, or photography styles – one definition taken from Google, relating to this definition of perspective describes it as, “the art of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other”.

Those of us who perhaps have less leaning towards art and drawing may more readily associate perspective with a person’s attitude towards, or way of looking at/regarding something – our point of view.

To take this meaning of perspective a little further, Google dictionary defines it as a “true understanding of the relative importance of things; a sense of proportion”.

We’re all familiar with this concept, we all have our own attitude towards things, as well as our own points of view. These attitudes and points of view vary significantly from person to person, they can be impacted by many things like age, gender, culture, environment, and where we live – just to name a few.

While most people these days don’t seem to have any shortage of points of view, opinions and attitude; what we might sometimes lack is the second part of the definition we looked at earlier – “true understanding of the relative importance of things; a sense of proportion”.

We can have a tendency to catastrophise our own issues, to become heavily invested in and intently focused on only the things that directly impact on us and our families – that’s only natural, but it’s prudent to try to maintain a degree of perspective. 

Why?

Because regardless of what we’re going through, there are always others who are also doing it tough, and then there are those who are worse off than we are.

In Philippians the Bible says, “Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.” (Philippians 2:4, NLT) 

If we can make the effort to find out what difficulties others are having, it might just help to make our own issues seem a little less overwhelming and hopefully even a bit more manageable.  

How much better would the world be, if more of us could take this advice and be a little less self centred and more caring towards others?

The Bible has great advice for all sorts of issues - from the very smallest, all the way through to providing hope for our troubled planet!

Don’t just read this and do nothing - get hold of a Bible and check it out for yourself!!