Our eyes give us visual clues to how we perceive our world. A blue sky means fair weather. A grey sky means impending rain. BUT, have you ever been caught in a sun shower? Have you ever been pelted by hail from a bright blue sky? Sometimes what we see, while often true, is not an iron clad case of fact. But when we tell someone, “Wow I just got pelted by hail but the sky was bright blue,” if he has never also had that experience, he is likely to doubt our tale.
Take the example of a mirror. When you look at your reflection, you see yourself. But if you hold a paper with a word written upon it up to the mirror, you’ll see that the word and the letters are backward. Sometimes you need clues, or science, to understand what you are really seeing. A mirror, usually a thin film of silver or aluminum applied to glass, reflects back the light that hits it at an equal angle to the angle that the light approached the mirror, thereby reflecting the image back in reverse. So while that image in the mirror is you, it is actually a reverse image of you. It’s not an exact image of you.
Now consider fun house mirrors, concave and convex mirrors with varying angles that will really distort the light that reflects off you. If someone were to see you only as the image you present in the fun house mirror, they would have a severely distorted image of you and they might judge you to be very out of proportion. When you then speak to that person on the phone, having never met you in person, his judgment of you would be different than if he had seen the real you.
The same analogies work in our human relationships. What someone else shows us about someone can sometimes be a distortion of what we have seen or know. What we experience can be true to us but unbelievable to others.
A great example of this can be newspaper stories. How often have you read a news article and found mistakes in the headline vs. the text or the photo caption, or someone’s name is misspelled. Or, you answer questions for a reporter and when you read the story you wonder if he was listening when he interviewed you because half of the article reports some kind of distorted version of the facts, or you are completely misquoted, or taken out of context.
We give incredible power to newspapers, or other news media, and are inclined to believe what we read. Because of the incredible power we give to those who report the news, we are easily swayed from believing what we know to be true, to believing the incredible. The tabloids exist and are profitable for a reason.
When we talk about human relationships, sometimes we need to rely on experience, or the conviction of our hearts, to reveal what is really true. Sometimes what we see in the flash of a moment is only a small piece of the picture and a distortion of the truth.
We need to take care to search out the reality. We need to seek out the origin of the light that gives us the images we see and look at the angles that have distorted our image, so that in searching we might someday find the truth.
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, the then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:12-13
Have you ever been misunderstood because of a distortion of the facts? How were you able to convince others of the truth?
http://www.elcaandy.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment