In a 2002 Episode of the television show the West Wing, writer, Aaron Sorkin creates a scenario with the fictional US president Bartlet playing chess with one of his aides. Their game is frequently interrupted by the need to monitor an unfolding international crisis. In a scene intentionally infused with double meaning, President Bartlet admonishes his aide to “Look at the whole board.” This proved to be good advice for chess and for the international crisis as well. Where you look determines what you see.
Perhaps it’s not an international crisis that’s interrupting your life focus right now, but chances are that something is drawing you away from fully living your faith in the confidence that God is with you and that he will see you through whatever it is that you are facing.
I was thinking about this earlier this week as I flew home from a funeral. My mother in law’s passing had gathered our family together to celebrate her life and to grieve our loss. The fragile nature of life and apprehension for the future flooded my mind as we sat on the tarmac waiting our plane’s turn to lift off the runway.
I’m not a great flyer. I used to feel tremendous anxiety during take-off. But I’ve learned to “lean into the experience.” I leaned forward and gazed out the airplane window, watching the airport, and then the entire city of Dallas recede into the background. At first, I focused on the diminishing skyscrapers and houses, but as we ascended above the clouds my perspective was captured by the metal tube that encased me and 180 others as we settled in for 4 hours of mandated “up close and personal” time.
The Dallas metropolitan area is home to 6.5 million people and estimates of the number of people flying somewhere over the earth at any given time are around one million. So, I wasn’t exactly isolated as I found myself located in the airport and the aircraft that lifted me above it. But as I glanced out the window of our plane, it struck me that my focus was too narrow. I was trying to put the mysteries of life into my tiny experience. If the universe is as large at the scientists tell us, then my attention to Dallas, or to my companions on the flight is miniscule. God sees something so much bigger. How would my thinking change if I lifted my vision to this larger perspective?
Visual Blinders- Seeing Beyond My Context
Researcher, Daniel Simons has constructed a well-known test of selective attention that asks the participants to count a specific interaction as it occurs in a video. If you’re not familiar with the test you might enjoy trying it here. As its title implies, the test measures selective attention. The most revealing outcome of the test is not so much what we see, but what we don’t see.
When we fix our eyes on the most demanding or the most distracting thing in our field of vision, we easily become blind to everything else. As I pondered life on a crowded Boeing 737, I asked for the grace to “look at the whole board.”
Visual Focus – Seeing Further Up and Further In
CS Lewis in the final book of his children’s series, the Chronicles of Narnia, describes the scene as his characters find themselves in a beautiful land that is hauntingly familiar and yet unknown. As they puzzle over what has happened, they remember that Aslan, the story’s Christ figure, admonished them to move “further up and further in”. As they journey onward, they find that everything they loved about their adventures in Narnia or their life in England was amplified in this new place they had reached after the Last Battle.
As our plane crossed the continent at 30,000 feet, I prayed for grace to see a fuller picture of life. I thought about the conflicts that overwhelm my life on earth and the anxiety that I often feel for my family. But I also remembered that through every challenge, God has faithfully worked for my good. That my parents and grandparents, like everyone, sometimes succeeded, and sometimes struggled, but that in the grace of God’s kingdom the best of their frail investments were compounded by the transforming power of Christ. I prayed that I would glimpse the beauty and goodness of my daily life and that my vision would lift to something even higher and further in.
Visual Clarity- Seeing Face to Face
Living Faith*Fully recognizes the eternal nature of our life today and forever. The apostle Paul wrote that “we know in part…but when perfection comes the imperfect disappears.” (I Corinthians 13:9-10) No matter the circumstances, I am always welcome to lift my eyes to see a bigger picture and contemplate God’s work beyond my narrowed horizon. And ultimately faith reminds me that a day comes when even that expanded vista moves beyond the confines of this world and takes in all of eternity.
Are the trials you face clouding your perception and diminishing your faith? Where you look determines what you see. Ask God for eyes to see “further up and further in.” And like the children in the story of Narnia, I believe we’ll find that what is to be revealed “face to face” will be both breathtaking and yet warmly familiar.