What Shapes Your Perspective?

by Kath

What shapes our perspectives - of ourselves? 

The people we live with.    When we're little and as we grow through the teenage years into adulthood, what shapes our perspective of ourselves is family.      Our father and mother, and siblings and others, reflect back to us worth, direction, values, confidence,  beauty, identity, etc, etc.  

Families are great.   God designed them to be a humidicrib of love and affirmation and nurture and enabling and encouragement and growth and safety and strength.  

 

But, what if that isn't the case?   What had the potential for power and faith and strength has just as much potential for great damage and disablement.  

Sometimes, the two go together.   Our family can enable us in one area, and disable us in another.    Families are the structures that either hem us in or allow us room to grow.

Are we disabled and insecure and unsure of ourselves because of our family's reflections of our worth?

So, how is YOUR perspective?   

Is your perspective about you the same as God's perspective?   Or is your perspective about you still being shaped by what your family say, think, feel about you?   Where your family and God agree, then you are doubly blessed.   But what if your family didn't/don't reflect back to you the worth you have?   What if your perspective is limited by the small perspective your family had or has of itself?  Do you need to get out of the city centre and see it and yourself from a bigger perspective?   

Psalm 139:13-18

Oh yes, You shaped me first inside, then out; You formed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank You, High God—You’re breathtaking!  Body and soul, I am marvellously made!
I worship in adoration—what a creation!  You know me inside and out,
You know every bone in my body; You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, You watched me grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of my life were spread out before You,
The days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day.

17-22 Your thoughts—how rare, how beautiful!   God, I’ll never comprehend them!
I couldn’t even begin to count them - any more than I could count the sand of the sea.
Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with You!

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