I live in this really beautiful place…for as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to live near the water. Now, I live in a place that puts me within 10-15 minutes of the ocean, and everywhere I go in and around town, I see marshes and water. Every day I have access to picture perfect sunrises and sunsets. As you may have noticed, I have a bit of a fascination with photographing those daily doses of God’s majesty:

Looking at all of these snapshots of God’s incredible creation, we are able to choose to see the stunning beauty, or we can choose to find what we perceive to be a flaw: “Gosh, that one picture would be just perfect if only that pole wasn’t sticking up in the middle and that tree on the left was more rounded…” OR, “Isn’t that picture just amazing, the way the blue sky  can be seen beyond the rays of the rising sun, especially with that boat dock and sailboat in the foreground and the palm trees adding character to the horizon?!” Same picture, two different perspectives. Both are perspectives of choice.

How often to we feel as though the people closest to us aren’t able to express their love and care for us in ways that make us feel certain and secure in the relationship? There will be many times in life when words and actions don’t line up, but we are not called to concern ourselves with that. In reality, we would only be concerning ourselves with our own chosen perspective. When we keep our focus on the wrong things, we will feel hurt or slighted or even unloved. That doesn’t make any of those things a result of truth…it just makes them the result of our perspective. By the same token, we can get tunnel vision about certain things, and lose sight of others. We don’t intend to get lost, but it happens, and most of the time we don’t even realize it until we see the toll it takes. Hindsight can be a blessing and a curse…

We often feel it’s our job to try and change the people we love. We feel we are somehow obligated to fix whatever we see as damaged or broken in them. However, that’s not our responsibility. We want them to behave in a way that makes sense to us, or in a way we can predict and count on, but we cannot place that as a condition of our love. The best thing we can do for the hurting and lost people in our lives is to pray for their healing, pray for guidance in supporting that healing, and being willing to love them as they are with no agenda or expectation. The thing is…we are ALL hurting, damaged, broken, and lost. What we need to offer those we love is what we pray others will offer us in return.