World views

As our last W2W meeting we were discussing how we viewed five areas of our lives - self, life, others, the world and God. (We are in the middle of John Powell's The Fully Alive Experience.)

My vision of the world scored really high for I saw the world as a beautiful place that God had created. When M. shared that she couldn't score that section and that she thought she ultimately saw the world as a scary, frightening place it got me thinking.

She is not wrong. Look at the fighting and unrest going on in the world. The mindless violence. Multitudes of people being abused, oppressed and killed. Disasters of all manner you read about in the newspaper every morning. The world IS a grim place.

So have I hardened my heart so that I am inured to the horrors of the world? Or am I myopic and cannot see beyond my nose and hence live life cocooned in my own little world?

I suspect I am guilty of both instances at times and can only pray that they are few and far between.

However, I also choose to see the glory of a sunrise breaking over the distinctive skyline, the graceful beauty of the trees that grow outside my window, or the elegance of herons wading in the canal in the cool dawn air as the world that God made and the world that man has contributed in adorning.

All the ugliness and the suffering to be found are mainly man-ufactured and have little to do with the world we have been tasked to be stewards of, a world that evolves and surprises as it revolves around a primordial cycle of its own.

There is, of course, an inherent fragility in life. Everything ages as time passes. People, animals, plants, fall sick and die. Death cannot be denied, or explained at times. But that's what makes life, the world, even more poignantly glorious. The transience of natural law that can be cause for sorrow and celebration simultaneously.

The world we live in cannot be a perfect place - we already know that as paradise was lost due to the disobedience of the first humans. It will only come to perfection when we are reunited with Jesus beyond death. Or when we choose to live out God's will in our lives and the beatitudes Jesus gave in His sermon on the mount.



So let us honour the world we have been given and make it a better place by staying focused on God and never losing hope; being poor in spirit, pure of heart and compassionate, principled kingdom-builders.

Consequently, if we learn to view the world through Christ's eyes, maybe the world won't seem so scary after all.