Happy Easter!
I miss looking at things from a big picture. I majored in Finance rather than Accounting because I love concepts and finding meaning in big things. As it turns out I also am really good with the details and being in the weeds. I find comfort in the nitty-gritty because there are results and it is more apparent when you actually finish something. As it turns out there is so much frustration with the big picture because there are so many ways to look at things. Because our view may be limited to one side, we come to believe our side is the “right” side, the only side, the most important side. We even believe that there are no other sides, because we don’t have access to the big picture. When we realize that there is so much more to see, we can either reject that and keep our old views or we can humble ourselves to start changing the way we are thinking to understand the whole view.
It is like the story of the three blind men that come up to the elephant and are asked to describe what they find. One, who has the elephants trunk, describes it like a snake. Another, who has the elephants leg, describes it like a tree trunk. The last one is at the elephants belly and describes it like a big leathery wall. None of them are wrong, but none of them are right either. They do not understand and, therefore, what they think is right is only partially right.
That, to me, is like our view of God. We all have developed our own view based on what we have had access to through family, church etc. There is so much more. We may have words for it, so when we discover more it gives meaning to those words, but inside our hearts and minds the view has expanded to include more depth and understanding.
As I sit and ponder Easter on my couch at home because stay-at-home orders forbid me to attend services in person, I wonder how much of my view of God is still not open to me. I have gone from having very firm views of the side of God that I held as being the “only truth” to intentionally challenging myself to see God from the other views to understand why people hold them. I have gone from being certain of what I know to being very uncertain that I know anything at all.
I don’t believe that we should all just find our own truth. I do believe that there are things more true than others. Children can believe they can fly, but as parents we don’ t let them jump out their window. There are laws that govern all of life, whether we believe or know about them are not. We should seek to understand those laws about God and the Universe so that we can find firm foundation in our lives; then seek inside and out to formulate our beliefs of however much of the big picture we’ve been given. Finally, we should be open to the idea that there is more yet to be revealed. None of the blind men explored the ears or head of the elephant. What have we yet to even discover about God?
The Mystical Type 