Piecing the Puzzle Together - Excerpt

 

Look at Life as a Multi-Story Building

The wonderful thing about life is that it is very simple. Although we may suffer hardships and endure tough times, if we all take a moment to reflect, life for the most part isn’t very hard to understand. We can look at the parables of Jesus and see how He routinely used very basic illustrations about farms, family situations, and various things to convey practical messages about life to His disciples. I will follow along that same path and illustrate a very valuable perspective with respect to a multi-story building and our human point-of-view.

There is a fifty story building with people on all floors. The people on the first floor can look out of the window and see the parking lot, the people walking across the street, and the neighboring buildings. Their perspective is limited to a close proximity of the building. Conversely, the people on the fiftieth floor can look out over top of those buildings and trees and see over into the next city, and witness commerce being conducted from afar. For these people, the perspective or viewpoint is different and more expansive than that of the people on the first floor. Does this mean that the people on the fiftieth floor are better or more intelligent than the people on the first floor, or vice versa? No, only their perspectives are different.

When you have a different perspective, your mind can see more possibilities, opportunities, and things from a different angle. Some people might say that your thought process is “outside of the box.” Think of perspective as a diamond: it is multi-faceted and each angle reflects the same light in a different way, and that is why you can see many different colors shimmering off of the same stone.

The people on the philosophical second floor of life will have a different mindset and experience as pertains to how they see out of the window. Maybe they have never been to college and don’t dress in the latest clothes, but they are a human being that needs to experience love, they need to eat, and they have wants and desires. Your perspective doesn’t reinforce or diminish your humanity, it simply locates your thinking; so the second floor people shouldn’t be treated as the scourge of society; nor should the people on the higher floors be given special treatment and consideration. A different perspective is just that, it’s different. It may or may not be better, but you judge the perspective on the insight that it provides.

For this purpose, we should never look down upon or praise people because of their classified status in life.

…for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. Luke 12:15(b)

Everyone has their proper place in society. Is there unfairness? Certainly, but we don’t have to feed into the ignorance of injustice and make excuses that perpetuate the wrongdoing. Appreciate the gifts and the visions of others; you might be surprised at what you can learn from other people’s educational background, life experiences or position. You maybe able to heed an impending warning or learn how to avoid some of the mistakes they made. But if we close our minds to one another because of a societal status, or someone’s address, education, or socio-economic classification then we limit ourselves.