Perspective

Fall is my favorite season. It always has been. It always will be. I love the colors. I love the way the morning is sharp with its cool but refreshing in its touch. I love pumpkins and pumpkin pie. I love NFL Sunday and flag football in the yard. Fall is an incredible, incomparable season. I would even humorously argue that Creation had to have taken place in the fall...it's that "good".

But do you ever notice how when the weather starts to turn cold at the end of summer, people sort of get sad as they take out their light jacket or put on their first sweater for the year? The cold seems extra bitter, the sky seems extra gloomy, and it seems as if the joy of sun and sand will soon be long behind us. We humans rarely seem to be content with what is in front of us. Cold itself is a foreign concept, and 60 degree weather feels like we might as well be stranded in the middle of the arctic.

Then something strange happens around April sometime (March, if we're lucky). A 60 degree day rolls in, and the whole world celebrates. People lay their coats in a pile and dance in the streets. Business men and women decide to eat lunch on the patio that day. People seem extra chipper, waving to each other and commenting to each other about the incredible change of fortune.

As I was walking to work this obvious fall morning, these thoughts were running through my head. I began to think about my faith, and how much of what Christianity and God have become to this world is a season taken out of context.

For those of us who grew up in the church (or had a bad experience there), God and faith are the fall season at the end of a gorgeous summer. We know we should value it, we remember a time when we appreciated it and clung to it with joy, but somehow it has taken on a bitterness, something that bites at us rather than awakens us, inspires us.

For those who have been anywhere but the church, have tried everything else and failed, for the alchoholic or drug-addict who found their freedom in Christ, for the gay man or woman who felt welcome in a church for the first time, or for a marriage on the rocks that finally found its unity in a triune God, He along with His church feel more like spring. After the cold, hard aches of an endless winter, the sun shines for the first time. The clouds roll away and a foreign warmth stuns our bodies with wonder.

God and faith are reacted to by the people of this world based on perspective. Perspective is this powerful, insurmountable object. Think of it as the ground on which we stand to see what there is to see, be it a valley or a mountain top. What we see and how we see it depends on where we stand to look. Many times, if not most of the time, the place we stand is the hand we're dealt. We're like Bear from the show "Man Vs. Wild", dropped in a random, remote location...expected to survive.

To a poor person, a mega church seems cold. To a rich person, a mega church feels warm, comfortable. To a person with loving parents and a good home, the idea of God as Father sounds intimate, reassurring. But like Donald Miller writes in his book Blue Like Jazz, the idea of God as Father sounds very unappealing to the kid whose dad walked out on him. To a Christian refugee in the middle of Sudan, the idea of "God Bless America" sounds more exclusive than inclusive, but to the marine clinging to his faith in the middle of a battlefield, he hopes those words ring true. To a white CEO in suburban America, the idea of serving the poor and selling away all of his positions seems very intrusive so he chooses to take it as metaphoric, but to the homeless man in the middle of a busy downtown Los Angeles street, he has seen very few Christians who are actually Christ-like. To the middle-aged married couple at a Baptist church who refers to a gay community as "hate the sin, love the sinner", they feel as though they are learning how to love in spite of, but to an isolated gay man in the back pew of that church, he wonders if he will ever find a friend in God or His people.

Perspective is what makes God and faith such a delicate and difficult thing to understand for many people in this world. If we're honest, even we who claim this faith have a hard time separating perspective from truth, opinion from God.

If we could simply see the world and those who are in it as the seasons that come and go and come again, we would start to understand that we all need to come to terms with our perspective, the past experiences (good and bad) that have shaped our view of God and our understanding of Who He is to a broken world.

Like I said, I like fall. But when winter comes, that's when I start to lose perspective. I'm always looking for spring, until I realize that I hate summer. God save us from our perspectives.