Perspective (by Esther Carey)

While describing Reuven’s time in the hospital, Chaim Potok makes several comments pertaining to how one’s perspective affect what one believes.

The first instance seems very simple – Reuven wakes up and tries to figure out what day it is. He cannot know for sure until he is told by someone else. In other words, he must look to some outside source. Likewise, we cannot always discover the solutions to our problems by using only our own knowledge and experience. We need an objective truth point outside of ourselves. For Christians, that is God and His Word. Without that reference frame, we cannot truly know anything.

Second is Reuven’s predicament while in the hospital: he does not have his glasses. As a result, everything beyond a certain point is merely a confused blur. Our lives can sometimes be the same way: an indistinct haze about which we understand little. I think that a correlation can be drawn between sin and such spiritual vision problems. Our humanness (and our sinful nature) causes us to be near sighted. We can only see the immediate surroundings. Only when we put on our Biblical world view glasses (to borrow from Ken Ham’s illustration) does the fog of our lives become focused in relation to God’s plan.

Lastly is the situation between Reuven and Danny. Initially, they hate each other because they see only the surface of each other’s lives, and they draw the wrong conclusions from the limited amount that they see. As Reuven’s father says “Things are always what they seem to be, Reuven? Since when?” This ties into the parable Dr. Stratman included in his post last week. When we look at another person’s life, we only see the outward struggles. Before we leap to conclusions, we should try to get to know them in order to understand what they are going through inside.