My father-in-law used to say, “They don’t cut pants as full as they used to.” It didn’t seem to occur to him that he was taking up a bit more space inside those trousers than he did when he was younger.
This always made me smile. Until I reached my sixties. That’s when my aging body forced me to reevaluate the youthful self-image that I had been clinging to for several decades longer than biology and my place in the life cycle warranted.
The writer Anais Nin was on to something when she said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” You’ll find a similar insight in the Babylonian Talmud (completed around 500 BC). It’s been around for a while.
We inevitably see things from a perspective. Our personal stories, our education, our culture, and our social context shape how we interpret our experience. And crucially, they shape how we perceive and how we respond to other people.
Jesus teaches us that how we see and how we relate to other people is a crucial test of our faith. H…
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