Cracked
Perspective
As I was driving into town the other day, I happened to turn
in a parking lot and the light of the sun was caught and reflected rather
brilliantly across the large crack in the front windshield of my old car. So brightly in fact, that it couldn't be
ignored and it caused me to change directions so that I could more clearly see
where I was going and didn't run into anything.
Now that crack in the windshield has been there for far longer
than I can even remember, and most of the time, I have been able to look past
the rather large imperfection and pretend it doesn't bother me or what I see as
I am driving about. But when the light
of that rising sun hit that long and jagged fault, pretending it wasn't there was out of the question.
As I pondered that event and how quickly my focus and frame of
reference had been altered by the reflection of the light, I couldn't help but
consider the implications of the lesson.
All of us are broken.
It’s a simple fact. Each and
every one of us is flawed, imperfect, and marred by the scars of life which,
like my old windshield, were either inflicted upon us by the trauma from an
outside source, or from not negotiating life’s jarring potholes carefully
enough. Either way, the result is a
damaged and cracked soul.
We humans are pretty good at doing two different things in
regards to these cracks in our personal windshields:
1. We pretend that these flaws either don’t exist, or
that they are small enough that they aren't an impediment to our ability to navigate
safely. So we just go on trying to ignore them, which leads to nothing but
eventual internal misery because we are living in falsehood.
OR
2.
We focus so closely and specifically upon our
faults and imperfections that we fail to look past them to see our true
potential. We become paralyzed by our flaws and
shortcomings and are unable to see what lies beyond.
In the case of example number 1 listed above (which I was
certainly doing with my own windshield), we can easily become immune to
recognizing our brokenness, and it takes the occasional brilliant illuminating
light of the “SON” to awaken in bright recognition which we cannot ignore. We can then recognize the
things that are wrong with our lives, and which cloud our vision and progress. His
light, although initially uncomfortable to our perception, is a blessing which
allows us to correct our course to a more appropriate path. The wonderful thing about recognizing our
flaws in His light, is that He can not only helps us change course, but is also
able to help fix our windshield completely so that the flaw no longer exists
(at least until the next of life’s potholes finds us once again).
In the second example, many times we tend to look far short of
the mark. We can easily become so
focused on our flaws and imperfections that they become all that we can
see. The problem with this
self-wallowing form of recognition is that we start to believe that we are
the crack, rather than the entire automobile heading toward a much larger
destination.
We are not just the crack in the windshield… No, we are
something much more intricate and divine than that! We are a divinely crafted being with so many
other moving parts of our lives, all of which work together to help us progress
down life’s road.
No matter which category we
may fall into, the Light of Christ can not only illuminate the things we have
wrong in our lives and show us how to fix them, but He helps us be able to
change directions, rearrange our perspective, and look beyond our current flaws
and realize that there is something much more important to be focused on in
regards to our eventual destination!
