Cropped out

A trip to Costco this morning to print off over 500 pictures from our Russian trip, and a few family photos as well. The friendly assistant showed me that I would need to check that nobody’s head was cropped off because the relative size was different (not sure I understand why...) So I was there for an hour making sure that what I thought was the pivotal point of each picture was, in fact, not cropped out.

Perception is a funny thing. While looking at a landscape, my eyes might be drawn to a beautiful sky while my companion’s might focus on unique rock formations or glorious trees. If we were both to photograph it, the lens of my camera would be pointed skywards while my companion’s would drop lower than that. 

Since Don took most of the pictures, I do hope that I haven’t messed up the compositions he thought he was artistically putting together.

It’s one thing to have different perceptions when gazing at scenery or churches or statues or whatever. Quite another thing to have different perspectives on life. Jesus is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, and so all true perspectives must line up with his perspective. Ephesians tells us that we believers are seated with Jesus beside the Father in heaven already, so we already share his perspective on the world. We don’t always appreciate that. We don’t always calibrate ourselves to the values and standards God sets; we don’t always nurture a relationship with the Father which enables us to share his viewpoint. More often than not our vision is narrowed by our own experiences and judgments, and we sacrifice the freedom God gives us to put on a wide-angled lens when we look at others and at the world around us.

I’ve been thinking about my own dad a lot this last week. I always do in November, with all the remembrance activities, because he fought in the Pacific with the US Marines. His perspective on war was different from mine, because his experiences coloured his vision, just like my experiences colour mine. He dismissed me as a pacifist once during a verbal exchange, and I wish now that I had had the presence of mind to reply that pacifist or not, I thought he was a hero. I never told him that.

The crop marks on Dad’s and my perspectives of life would have fallen in different places and each of us would have seen a different composition when we looked at the world together. But common to both would have been Jesus and a desire to make our heavenly Father proud.