Gaining Perspective

It's so easy to get caught up in our own lives and our own concerns. Sometimes there really are big issues---helping a loved one with a chronic disability, confronting cancer, dealing with a drug addiction. Much of the time, though, we are caught up in small annoyances---the dishwasher is broken, the elbow hurts, the teenager is whining.

Some of us at our church have begun to write letters to prison inmates who are in prison for life. Some are on death row. Their lives have for the most part been a series of disasters, even from a very young age. For many of them, they went the route that everyone around them went---drugs, crime, increasing violence. There wasn't much else to do.

It rather puts things in perspective when I am upset that the coffee pot boiled over and made a big mess on the counter. Yes.