Life Metaphors

Here’s a confession that could open me up to a bit of ridicule … so be kind to me! When I was little, I discovered on car rides that I could pick out a spot on the window, stare at it, and then close alternate eyes and that spot would move in relation to the horizon. [If you haven’t discovered the wonders of the dominant eye and what it can do to perspective, I encourage you to explore it]. That’s not so bad; but the fact is that I still do it. I can still entertain myself on car rides by doing that; just a few weeks ago a friend caught me watching the world go by through the cardboard sleeve that had been over my cup of convenience store hot chocolate. Yes, that’s right, I was essentially pretending that a roll of cardboard was a telescope and framing different scenes out the window through it.

Perspective … we all have these narrowing and different ways that we look at life. Another oddity about my strange mind is that if I’m driving cross-country, I have in the past thought that I could be a character in a movie and tried to think what music would be playing in the soundtrack at that moment. Usually I’m driving across Wyoming or North Dakota, so music is something like, “It’s been a long day driving past grain towers and telephone poles.”

If your life were a movie, what music would be in the soundtrack?

OR, do you have a dominant metaphor through which you look at life? Yeah, I have one of those, too. I often relate my life to the verse in Isaiah that says that God holds us in the palm of his hand. Sometimes I’m just nestled up, contentedly sleeping in the palm of God’s hand like so many posters in Christian bookstores. Sometimes I’m perched on the edge of God’s hand like Merry and Pippin in the Ent’s hand in the Lord of the Rings, seeing what exciting things are going to happen now that I’m connected to someone so much bigger and more powerful than myself. Sometimes I’m just hanging out, sort of doing my own thing like a kid on a playground, but knowing that underneath me and all around me is this powerful hand. Sometimes I’m like a grasshopper that a little kid caught, now cupped in his parents hand – jumping all over and fighting to get out and spitting gross brown stuff on those hands – but still I am held securely (but not so tightly that it would crush me). Sometimes I’m like a scared little mouse who is held just securely enough to know that I am safe, even though I have no idea what’s going on around me. No matter what my perspective is, I'm always reminded that I am being upheld by God's strong - yet gentle - hand.