Gaining an Eternal Perspective

August 2, 2023

Sarah and I stopped at this small diner for lunch, and I was immediately interested in the container that held their tea. Who would have thought to put a straw into a pitcher of tea for someone to drink?

And who could drink a whole pitcher of tea?

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But as you can see from the actual photo below, it isn’t actually a pitcher as we usually think of pitchers. I cropped out the pitcher’s surroundings to give a different perspective.

Granted, it is a rather large glass (really plastic) for tea, but not much bigger than a large cup you might get somewhere else.

I found it interesting that Microsoft Word’s (Word) Alt Text function provides a description of an image for those who may be visually impaired. Word’s Alt Text for the image with just the tea pitcher in it read, “A close-up of a pitcher of liquid.”

Word’s Alt Text for the image with the pitcher along with its surroundings read, “A glass with ice and a straw.”

Even a piece of word processing software seemed to reach a different conclusion based on its perspective.

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2, NIV)

You and I need to be careful assessing our lives and the world around us based on our perspective. We often see things with a limited perspective. We know what’s happened in the past (at least what we’ve witnessed and what we’ve been told by reliable sources), but we don’t know everything.

We also know what is happening now. But, we sure don’t know what will happen past that. We might be able to rightly predict some things, but we never know for sure. As we all know, plans we may have for an hour from now can change drastically if an emergency comes up in the next few minutes.

Only God perfectly knows the past, present, and future. That’s why we need to place our full trust in Him. By doing this, we will gain an eternal perspective, rather than a worldly perspective. I like the way the writers at gotquestions.org put it. “An eternal perspective keeps us from chasing empty dreams and material gratification. It keeps us from wasting our years pursuing temporal things that we can’t take with us when we die. We gain an eternal perspective when we think of our lives as a 1000-foot rope with a black tip on one end: the rope symbolizes our existence; the black tip is our life on earth.”[1]

We’re going to spend way more time in eternity than we are on this earth. Wouldn’t it be wise to focus on gaining an eternal perspective?

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[1] https://www.gotquestions.org/eternal-perspective.html