Changing Perspectives

By Marc Massery

View the previous Discovering the Diary.

Turn to any page of the Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska and you find spiritual gems. Like this one:

"Do not examine with curiosity the roads down which I lead you. When boredom and discouragement beat against your heart, run away from yourself and hide in My heart" (1760)

Sometimes, our lives don't seem to make much sense. People abandon us, illness drags us down, dreams wither away, unfulfilled. Uncertain about the future, concerned about the paths down which the Lord is leading us, we find ourselves bored and discouraged, thinking we must be doing something wrong.

So Close You Can't See
The Lord says that when we feel this way, we need to "run away" from ourselves and hide in His heart. In other words, we need to take our focus off of us and put our attention on Him.

Keeping our focus on ourselves, trying to understand all our problems on our own, is like trying to get a good look at the Statue of Liberty by standing six inches from its base and staring at it through binoculars. Lack of effort does not bar us from seeing things as they are so much as having a bad perspective.

Of course, changing our perspective, turning our eyes away from ourselves and back towards God, is not always easy. Satan is constantly trying to distract us. His goal is to draw our attention away from the love and mercy of God, towards our own sinfulness, failures, and problems. When we focus too much on ourselves, we see things less and less as they truly are, overlook the mercy of God, and become hopeless.

Therefore, we need to run to the Lord, armed for battle against Satan and his minions. We can do this by praying regularly, especially by examining our consciences daily, receiving the Sacraments as often as we can, and performing works of mercy. All of these practices lead us to have a healthy perspective of ourselves in relation to God.

Taking a Step Back
The more we shun self-centeredness and open our eyes to the Lord, the more our perspectives will begin to change. Having a holier perspective does not mean the Lord will tell us the future. It does not mean that He will take away all our pain and give us exactly what we want in this world. But He will console us. He will give us strength and peace to persevere. And perhaps most of all, He will lead us to learn to trust. His plans are always better than ours, anyway, and His blessings more than compensate for our problems.

We'll know our perspective has begun to change when we start thinking more about God's love and mercy than our own sorrow and misery - when we find ourselves contemplating His suffering and death more than we obsess over our own.

When we learn to hide in Him, we won't worry about the future so much. The problems that used to leave us hopeless, the memories that used to plague us, won't seem so daunting anymore, because we'll know that no matter how terrible things might look at any given moment, Christ always has the final say.

My prayer: Jesus, please help me to recognize when I become too self-obsessed with my problems and overly curious about my future. Protect me from the constant attacks of the evil one. Help me to focus on one day at a time, to put the future in Your hands, and to believe that You are good and merciful.

View the next Discovering the Diary.

BCBB

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