Perspective

Lately I'm reminded frequently that my perspective is not God's perspective. In fact, I'm having trouble getting any perspective at all on my life at the moment.

I blame the media for some of my paranoia. I don’t know if I’m better off knowing all the terrible things going on in the world, or not. I’m starting to wonder how truly useful it is in your daily life to know the awful things taking place in the world at large.

I seem to spend all my time worrying over things I can’t do anything about, as if my worrying about them will somehow alleviate the problem or have an effect for the positive. I know this is silly, but it doesn’t make it go away.

I worry about climate change, earthquakes, illegal immigration (my mother was a legal immigrant and proud of it), the economy – including rising gasoline, food and energy prices, the plight of the honey bee, the genetic manipulation of our food sources, growing illiteracy among our schoolchildren, the cost of healthcare, declining water sources, corrupt governments, migrating birds and fish, and terrorism.

I worry about my Dad, who is quickly slipping away from us, a hapless victim of an ugly disease called Alzheimer’s. I used to joke about Alzheimer’s until I met it face to face and saw how truly terrible it is.

I worry about providing for my own retirement, in an age where banks are failing, stocks are up one day and down the next, and health care costs are soaring.

I worry about the young people I know. What kind of a world they are inheriting from us? It is full of deceit and immorality. I worry that they are not being taught anything useful in schools where teachers are too busy testing to teach and corrupt officials and administrators siphon off educational funds that never seem to reach the students. I worry that their role models have names like Brittany, Lindsay, Paris and Nicole, instead of Julia Ward Howe, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Eliza R. Snow, Abigail Adams or their own mothers and grandmothers.

I’m angered by recent t.v. commercials airing in California claiming that global warming is a “choice”. Mother Nature is a choice? Who writes these things? And, more importantly, who is benefitting financially from all this hysteria?

Let’s agree to be better stewards of the earth. Let’s be thoughtful in our choices. I’m onboard with that concept. But, seriously, is buying a weird light bulb or banning plastic going to do much good in the big picture? I doubt it, unless all the billions of people on the earth all get on the same page.

Don’t worry, I will do my part, like some obedient green lemming charging off a cliff into the increasingly polluted ocean, to be vigilant. I will recycle, reuse and, in the rhyme from another era of great change in the last century:

Use it up
Wear it out
Make it do
Or do without

Quite frankly I think the earth would be better served if everyone took one day a week – shall we choose Sunday? – to go to church and spend time doing restful, peaceful things and looking after each other. Let’s try feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting those who stand in need of comfort, visiting the sick and the aged, teaching children moral values and maybe even teaching someone to read.

How nice a world it would be if we all took time out to thank God for the great bounty we still have? How nice to focus on our blessings instead of our challenges! If everyone said their daily prayers and took time to read the scriptures, if we really got on board with loving our neighbors and doing good in the world, if we ceased to fight with our spouses and children and treated them with kindness and respect daily, then we’d see a truly positive change in the world!