Perspective

You might want to drag out your atlas.

We just got back from going out to supper. We left East Haddam, drove through a town called Haddam, another named Chester, and finally stopped in Deep River to eat. Now for all my friends and family in Texas, I know you are thinking, "Why did they go all that way just for supper?" If you were to leave Amarillo and drive through three other towns before stopping for supper, you would be really hungry and you may need to get gas before you could start home. Don't worry about us though, we only drove about six miles to find some pizza.

Perspective--apparent relation between visible objects as to position, distance, etc.

Just to help you huge-minded Texans get a mental picture, or a proper perspective--you can fit about four, count them, 4 states of Connecticut into JUST the PANHANDLE of Texas. The reason we drove through three towns before stopping to eat? We had to go that far to find a restaurant with a parking lot large enough to park our one-ton truck! I kid you not!

Well, maybe. There is one parking lot in East Haddam that is large enough for our truck, but we have eaten there already and we wanted to try a new place. Still we ended up parking in the lot of a grocery store and walking to the pizza place. But you know we didn't have to walk far. If we had walked very far, we would have ended up in another town! This is a tiny little state with tiny little towns which have tiny little streets and tiny little parking lots, and they are connected by tiny little winding, hilly roads. (Paved? Yes, but not wide enough for me to want to call them highways.)

There is no "out in the country." Every town borders another town but many houses along the connecting highways obviously have acreage so you have the feel of being in the country. The other day we were driving down a street that was the dividing line between towns. The school of one town was across the street of the city offices of another town. Crazy!!! And we are not talking one big city and it burbs either.

I'm not being critical of this tiny little place at all. The scenery is beautiful and the temperatures are pleasant. We are glad to be working and we are always happy to see new places. It is just hard to shrink my thinking enough to get a grasp of my surroundings.

On our way here from Minnesota, we spent one night somewhere in Pennsylvania. We talked with a lady that lived in that area. She asked us where we were from, and we tried to explain that we live in Texas but had come from Minnesota. She remarked that she had "gone out west once." She said, "When I got to Ohio, I had to turn around and come back to the real world."

When we were out of her range of hearing we laughed so hard. If Ohio is "out west" then we must have come from a whole 'nother country! Oh wait! We are from Texas, so I guess we did!!

All this makes me think about how our perspective shapes our opinion and beliefs.
Another definition of perspective--mental view of the relative importance of things.

How easy it is to become the center of our own tiny universe. The importance of the things and the people around us is relative to their position or distance from us. Humm. I'm guilty too many times. Sometimes I get so caught up in my own busyness, worries, or whatever, that I lose the big picture.

Thank goodness God's got the right perspective. Thank goodness that He has no problem understanding the "smallness" of Connecticut, the "bigness" of Texas, and the vast reality of eternity! To help me keep a good view of the importance of people and things in this world, I think I'll keep God at the center of my universe and my atlas close by.