Change Your Vision: Change Your Life

What do you want to be when you grow up? Ask this question to an eight year old and you will receive an answer full of wonder and inspiration. You will hear unbelievable things. Children are full of wonder and hope.

In their beautiful little minds, failure is not is not even a remote possibility. They don’t know how it will happen, but they believe that it will. They have faith that they can do anything. Children have excellent vision.

Our vision becomes clouded and obscured over time. Someone tells us something negative about who we are, and our vision of how we see our “self” gets blurry. People around us tell us we cannot have, do or be whatever we want, because those wonderful things only happen to select people, and so how we view the possibility of achieving our dreams is now out of focus. We are told life is hard; people cannot be trusted, either through the fearful words of others or our own experience. We are told negative things about people of different races, genders, sexual preferences and political or religious views. Now our vision of how we see the world and everyone in it is distorted.

Things happen in life and we develop a sort of spiritual myopia. We walk around with a distorted view of ourselves, the world and others. But vision can be corrected. The great thing about vision is that the thing we are viewing has not changed; only our perception and perspective have. Those of us who wear glasses know this. When I look at a book or an object too far away, my vision is blurry. I cannot make out the words, and sometimes I view words incorrectly. I can make a mistake if I base a decision on the misread words or the incorrect interpretation of the object. When I put on my glasses, however, everything comes into focus. Things are now seen clearly.

There is a story in the Bible of a man who was healed from being blind all his life.

When he was first asked what he saw, he said “I see men as trees, walking”. Now the men had not changed at all, they were men, however, his perception ofthem was off- clearly the men were not trees. Sometimes, the vision in our own lives is just like that.

We incorporate one fearful piece of advice or have a bad experience and start to view everything we see and experience from that point on through that lens. Eric