6.5.23 Our Personal Lens
6.5.23
Each human being grows up in a family and a culture that influences so much of who we become as we mature. That influence is largely unconscious, but it becomes the lens through which we see the world and make our choices. So, we follow those directives about our lives without really realizing that they have little to do with who we were created to be. Our deeper selves remain dormant in us, until we begin to look for something deeper and more fulfilling in our lives, when we hear God’s call to us. While we believe in Jesus Christ, we can still adhere to all the ideas about how to live our lives without seeking His wisdom in how we are to live. It is only when we begin to follow Him, to let Him set our priorities and goals that we have any idea of who we really are. Some cultures like the native American tribal cultures are much more affirming of the deeper/truer selves of their members, but that’s not true in our American culture. Here it’s is all about living out of our minds, setting our goals and doing everything we can to achieve them. It has little to say about our needs for community, our heart’s or soul’s desires or our body’s wisdom for us.
What would happen if we were totally engaged in our whole beings—body, mind, heart, and spirit? Wouldn’t the focus of our lives, of our families, of our leisure, of our work change dramatically?
Going back to what I wrote about our family’s and the culture’s influence on us above: these influences form the lens through which we look at everything in our lives. And they are added to our early childhood experiences of not being able to obey our parents’ directives which creates in us guilt and shame which form the basis of our self-image. Added to this are any traumatic events in our lives or big challenges that we have faced as children or as adults. Given this history, the only possibilities we see are the ones designed by our family and our culture and shaped by our poor self-images. But, if we truly want to live the best life we can in this world, we have to clear that lens in order to focus on what is intrinsically important to us, as opposed to what is important to our culture and family. And that is what happens when we follow Jesus Christ. Our wounds and sorrows get healed, our sins wiped out, all our failings and anything that stands between us and God get transformed.
For how are we to find fulfillment if we can’t tap into our deeper selves? How are we to even know what will fulfill us when all that we have learned is about how everyone in our country is supposed to live? Occasionally, something jarring or tragic happens in our lives, like the Covid epidemic, the death of a loved one or a terrible illness or even the loss of a job, which can trigger the need for a whole different way to live. Or we hear God’s call to us for the first time. Normally, the only way we can tap into our deepest selves and live from them is to see ourselves from the eyes of Someone who knows us far better than we can possibly know ourselves. And so, I highly recommend following Jesus Christ, because He certainly can see in us all the potential that God created in us, far beyond what we ourselves can experience or know about ourselves.
If we follow Jesus, we can be sure that we will face challenges and blessings as He highlights in us all the things/issues that stand between us and God. As we follow Him and lift up our issues to Him, we will slowly but surely experience the growing lightness in us and the emerging sense of the deeper, more fulfilling side of ourselves which we had been totally unaware of. It’s an amazing journey to the deepest truth about ourselves, unfazed by the culture that we absorbed in our youth. The more we grow into the person we were created to be, the wider and truer our lens on life and God and ourselves becomes. Oh! the joy, the lightness within, the peace, the love as we come to live in the truth of who we are, of how much God loves and forgives us, of what our purpose is, and of coming to see that the same is true for everyone else that we come in contact with. Our encounter with God’s love and the most difficult things in our lives, no healed, define our purpose which is to pass on His kind of love to everyone we meet as we walk the way that He reveals step after step.
It is an amazing transformation of who we learned we should be into who we are actually created to be.
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Questions to ponder over the week: Am I aware of the personal lens through which I experience my life, who I am, and respond to everyone I meet? Am I willing to give up that lens over time as I am led by Christ into the deeper truth about who I am? What is the first thing I would have to give up in order to do that?
Blessing for the week: May we be the people of God who follow Jesus Christ into living out our deepest truest selves. May be live free of the world and its influence.
Check out my two websites: patsaidadams.com and deepeningyourfaith.com.
Two Announcements
- I am giving away a 10-week journaling guide to Jesus’s Two Great Commandments. If you are interested, email me at patsadams@gmail.com and I will email it to you, free of charge.
- My latest books, “Called to Help the Poor and Needy” and “A Study Guide to the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount” are now in bookstores and on line. The first is about the more than 2,000 verses in the Bible which detail God’s instructions for caring for those in need. The second is a journaling/pondering guide to Jesus’s most complete sermon.
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Check out my two websites: patsaidadams.com and deepeningyourfaith.com.
Two Announcements
- I am giving away a 10-week journaling guide to Jesus’s Two Great Commandments. If you are interested, email me at patsadams@gmail.com and I will email it to you, free of charge.
- My latest books, “Called to Help the Poor and Needy” and “A Study Guide to the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount” are now in bookstores and on line. The first is about the more than 2,000 verses in the Bible which detail God’s instructions for caring for those in need. The second is a journaling/pondering guide to Jesus’s most complete sermon.