Perspective….an all too elusive thing that can change everything.  Andy Andrews says, “In desperate times, much more than anything else, folks need perspective. For perspective brings calm. Calm leads to clear thinking. Clear thinking yields new ideas. And ideas produce the bloom…of an answer. Keep your head and heart clear. Perspective can just as easily be lost as it can be found.” Perspective….it can quietly creep up on you, or slap you in the face….When and how it comes is irrelevant…What matters is that you grab a hold of it and don’t let it go…

I was lying in our bed last night, thinking about how awful it was that we were dealing with so much sickness in our house…I was whining…moaning…and then it hit me…I glanced up at the t.v. and saw the waves…People’s livelihoods,  homes, possessions, lives….all washed away…in a blink….perspective…As I saw cars trying desperately to out-run the waves literally on their tails, my petty problems seemed to wash away….right along with the cars trying to drive to safety…As I thought of the fear and panic those people were experiencing at that moment, my complaints seemed self-centered…vain…small….I was dealing with a raindrop while an entire nation was facing the ocean…

We will all go through struggles, pains, trials, and are allowed to grieve our losses…In the last two years, we’ve lost a baby, our dog, half of our income, friends and loved ones, our financial freedom……We’re grieving…Life is hard and unexplainable things happen….Yet so often, we focus so much energy on worrying about tiny things…We bemoan problems that needn’t be problems…Our molehills are nearly always mountains…The toybox gets dumped out…We have to do an extra load of laundry…The cake gets burned…There isn’t enough money for eating out this month…TINY insignificant problems overwhelm and overtake us…robbing us of joy and the opportunity to embrace perspective…

We are allowed to grieve the big things…Feelings and emotions are okay, and certain things happen to us that we may never understand. However, as the small things in life come up that normally turn into big things…Stop. Breathe. Gain perspective. It’s just a raindrop….not the ocean…