Cracked Perspectives

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!