There just isn’t anything quite like seeing how the other half lives to gain a perspective of appreciation for all that you really do have going well in your life. Luckily for me, tonight, this happened the easy way from just sitting in a movie theater watching these peoples’ lives unfolding on the safe cinematic screen in the movie “Winter’s Bone” (http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/movies/11winter.html). I feel like a very blessed woman tonight in very many ways. Wow.

When I think of the time in my life when I was the poorest, I was about 25 and lived in a one room efficiency. I had maybe two plates and three cups — all mismatched of course — and some odds and ends of forks, knives and spoons. But I had them and I had a roof over my head and I had a pretty comfortable bed to sleep on and I had running water and electricity and indoor plumbing and even a big ole red dog to keep me company and protect me. What I didn’t have was a lick of sense about how to make a better life for myself. In reviewing this time in my life it has often felt like I just stumbled along and fell into pockets of grace by accident. I don’t think I even had myopic vision then, it was more like a pin prick to let in just the barest shard of life to keep me going.

In spite of myself, somehow the pinprick of my perspective on life grew wider and wider with each passing year. It’s kind of cool how that perspective works too because not only has it helped me get to where I am today, but I can look back at my past and see a whole lot of things that I couldn’t take in back then. Like in that little tiny one room efficiency that I lived in there was a family of geckos that would hang out around the mirror in my bathroom and I kid you not, one or two of them would let me put them on my finger and stroke them under their chins. That was such a hard time in my life back then but the memory of those little geckos is such a ray of sunshine for me. I love it when perspective works that way for us.

In this movie tonight about a young 17 year old girl who was trying to hold her family together while figuring out where her meth cooking father had run away to as well as having to avoid getting killed in the process, there were scenes with her young sister and her animals that were sweet and passing scenes of the beauty of the land in between various meth lab encampments. I guess the truth for many of us is that when we’re in the thick of the choking black density of dysfunction it’s often times hard to see the good that is also there amongst us, but it is there. The challenge for us is to not be hypnotized into believing that the off-perspective of a person or a whole clan of people is the right or the only perspective….it is just theirs. We can choose to see our lives from a different perspective. Always. I believe that must be a universal law.

So I’m sitting here tonight as I type this realizing that I have an abundant life of blessings in so many ways and I’m reminded once again how easily I can succumb to looking through a glass darkly instead of into the light.

How can you change your perspective today? What do you not know that you don’t know?