Perspective is not everything but it is something important.

I am in the midst of an easier stretch in my life.  That doesn’t mean I am free from challenge.  As I reflect, I realize it means that some of the challenges of other seasons definitely are absent but also, I am doing better at putting present challenges in their rightful place in my thinking.

I had an epiphany of sorts recently as I considered some of those challenges – most of them begin and end in my mind.  How do I see people?  How do I interpret my circumstances? What do I believe about others?  What do I believe about myself?  This speaks to more than just perspective.  It reveals an overall orientation toward self and others and this world.  I have some work to do.

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Not all desire is good.  Good desire must be fed.

I have been taught that sin is the illegitimate response to a legitimate need, so I need to take a good look at what is being revealed in my responses; it will lead to the real desires that are good but have been distorted.  I followed this line of thinking for awhile and have discovered it is a subtle trap.  How can sin be merely the bad fruit of something that was good?  If a tree is good its fruit will be good also.  If a tree is bad, its fruit will be bad also.  Not all desire is good.  Some of it is just bad to the core and needs to be moved away from and replaced with what is good.

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The fear of hypocrisy is a deception that keeps us from doing good.

I was encouraging someone the other day to develop and feed a hunger for God’s word by simply reading it.  He knew that he should read it but didn’t want to and thought that reading it without wanting to would be hypocritical. Such deception was keeping him from doing a good thing. A man that has not eaten for awhile will stop being hungry for food. He has to learn to be hungry again, not by waiting to get hungry and wanting to eat but by eating even though he doesn’t want to. So it is with many things that are good. We will not hunger for what we do not choose to feed. There are many things we do because they are the right thing to do, not because we want to. We grow our hunger for good things by doing those good things even when we don’t want to.

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Whether something is good or bad cannot always be determined in the moment.

Friends of ours recently lost their business in a fire.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  It is indeed a loss, but there are some things that are good to lose!  How many of us have heard ourselves saying that some “awful” circumstance in the past turned out to be one of the best things that have ever happened to us?  I could write a long list of these.

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Closure is a myth and a hindrance to healing.

The best thing I have heard in a long time is that closure is a myth. The speaker proceeded to explain that closure is pursued with the idea of “getting over” some deep loss and getting on with life. Do we ever get over some of the greater losses or do we merely learn to live in light of them, putting them in their rightful place? She suggested that closure requires exactly that – closing that chapter of your life and moving on without it, almost as if it never happened. But that is not love. Whether that person is with you or not, you do not stop loving and because you do not stop loving you do not stop remembering and because you do not stop remembering you also cannot stop feeling the pain of loss. In fact, the only way to stop the pain is to stop remembering and loving. What you need is not closure but healing – the capacity to carry your losses well and in such a way that they enrich your life not hinder it. I agree.