Limited Perspective

I've always had a bit of a hard line toward truth. You can't deal with what you don't acknowledge, right?

I'm the kind of person who will always tell you the truth, and rather bluntly, because neither one of us is getting anywhere if we don't acknowledge the reality that we're dealing with. This life cannot be made of smoke and mirrors; we have to see ourselves clearly. 

Yet Paul says we see but in the glass darkly - there's always something we're missing. 

And as I've come to find out, that something we're missing is often a nugget of truth. 

That's the thing, I think. I want to speak truth. Even to myself. I want to deal with the truth. I want to be working with the facts of a thing. But what I often fail to understand is how limited my perspective is, how narrow my vision. 

At a time in my life when I was younger and I was coming, I thought, to understand how the parts of my story were woven together, I found myself sitting across the table from a psychiatrist who had been tasked with assessing the real grip that I had on things, and when I read his report, I was offended. I had a number of good insights, he'd said, but overall, I was a person of limited perspective and not as much understanding as I thought that I had. 

What a jerk.

It's been a little over 20 years since that day, and those words still sting, but they have also become words that I say to myself quite often. Every time I start to feel a little more confident in what I think I know, in fact. Because he was right - I am a person of limited perspective. 

We all are.

And that little thing that we're missing, that thing that escapes nearly all of our perception for far too long, is the little nugget of truth that could set us free. 

It's the little nugget of truth that would devastate us if we knew it. That would break our soul into a thousand little pieces and just absolutely crush us, in all the best ways, of course. 

We are not prepared to deal with our own heartbreak, our own grief, our own brokenness, our own fallenness. We are not prepared to deal with the things that our lives hint at, but that we haven't taken the time to see yet. We kind of prefer the dark glass at some points because it protects us from the things that we couldn't handle if they were glaring back at us in brightest sunlight. 

Don't get me wrong - I still think we're better off facing the truth about ourselves. I still think we have a duty to be honest about our lives and to do our best to fill in the facts as best we know them. I still think that if we're not willing to at least try this, there's something wrong with us. And we ought to work on that. 

But I also understand that we're missing something. 

We're missing something true about ourselves that our finite minds cannot wrap themselves around, that our limited vision cannot see, that our tendency toward self-protection cannot fathom, and this truth that we're missing about ourselves is the thing that would - every time - bring us to our knees and humble us before the Lord who knit this mess together in our mother's womb in the first place. 

That's why we have such a visceral reaction to the truth that we don't yet know when we finally become aware of it. It's the thing that puts us in our proper place. It's the thing that takes us down a notch. It's the thing that makes us aware of all that we've been trying to avoid - 

Namely, that we are but finite creatures looking in a glass but darkly. 

And oh, how glorious the light when we finally do see it.