Life is about perspective, what is yours? Is it yours or did someone else give it to you?

I find it interesting the older I get the more I find out about how my kids see me.  They see me in such a different manner than I do, I know I am not supposed to care what other people think of me, but then my kids aren't really other people are they?  Well maybe they are and I shouldn't care what they think of me either, something to contemplate.  I do know that when I talk of my memories of childhood my mom rarely remembers the same ones as I did so maybe it is generational and the important things that occur in my life aren't the important things in my kids life or my parents lives.  So maybe it is not so much about what others think of my life as the perspective of our  individual lives.

I once was on an ambulance run and spent several hours with an old man who was in his last days in an ex ray room.  He was as grumpy as sin, and quite mean, so I was trying to get his mind on anything but the pain he was enduring, and trying to aid the lab tech in getting him to cooperate with what needed to be done.  I started asking him about his life.  It seemed to work he had been a hard working engineer and father or four girls, not an accomplishment by his standards, real men have boys, but I digress.  He said that he had been an engineer on the Fort Peck dam.  I thought I had found a place of mutual interest with him but I was so wrong.  I made the mistake of saying, with pride, that my Grandfather Jim had been a worker on the Fort Peck Dam.  I was so proud and it had made such a difference to our family that he had had the work in the Great Depression.  The Grumpy old man looked at me and said "I was an engineer and your grandpa was a peasant, a nobody".  Well that made for a long morning of helping the lab tech.  Maybe we shouldn't know what others think of us after all, but then again maybe just maybe his family needed the money he made as an engineer as my family made from my grandfather the peasant in the depression.  They didn't have food stamps or medicaid back then if he didn't work my grandfathers 8 kids didn't eat.  He raised 8 kids that all love the Lord and maybe his peasanthood was all that God asked of him.  Funny without knowing anything about me, or my grandfather, he was a peasant to that Grumpy old man?  Maybe he and my grandfather had a conversation about it in heaven a few months later?  Maybe it was about perspective?

I have a facebook friend, I have over 200 and they are all people I do know, I don't just accept willy nilly, but I do have an extended friend list of over 200.  Anyway, one of them is forever posting really derogatory things about God and religion.  The ones that are about religion I can sort of excuse but the ones about God are abhorrent.  The ironic thing is that her mother, who is also one of my friends, is one of the most faithful God supporting posters I know.  Is it perspective?  Is it that the mother and father had not embraced their faith when they were raising their kids and only went back to the teachings of their family once the kids were grown?  How does a faithful woman raise a daughter that bad mouths the Lord for no other reason than she can?  How is it that a daughter that loves her mother can so publicly degrade something that is important to the mother?  Is is about perspective, mine, or is it about the evils of this earth taking hold of a child not raised up in the Lord or is it about a daughter just trying to get attention on a social media platform and maybe she is not so Godless as she implies? I wonder but only for a second as it really is none of my business, but isn't it a thought on perspective?

I find that my son, not only thinks his dad was a bad dad because he was not a mean old logger, he was too kind and didn't show him how to be the manly man he so wanted to be.  He struggles to this day to try and be that manly man when the kind man lives in there somewhere if he would just embrace him he would be more at peace with his life.  He is and can be his fathers son it is just not his time to be enlightened I suppose.  His memories of childhood are all disappointing, I suppose, because so many children would love to have had the gentle father and not the mean one, a matter of perspective again.  He has recently decided that I love girls more than boys and raised him as lesser than his sisters.  Funny asked the girls and they will say he was my favorite, all a matter of perspective.  Is it that we are narcissistic and only see our past from our point of view, well maybe that is the point, but do we ever consider our past from the outside and not just the inside?  The past is the past and I think the good should be held on to with love and memory, I do so love to remember my Grandma Gladys, that fishing trip or that camping trip.  The past is the past and no good comes from dwelling on the bad and the sorrow, learn from it put it away and forget it.  When God forgives our sins, when we repent, he tells us that he forgives us and he forgets all our sins.  Oh, to have the ability to totally forget, no hard feelings, nothing to bring back up later and hurt others with.  Oh, for forgiveness with forgetfulness, won't heaven be a glorious place? 

Today, Poppie, gets to be baptised into the body of Christ.  The Lord has forgotten all of his sins, the Lord paid for them so long ago, the gift was given so long ago, Poppie only had to accept it.  There was a time in my life when I knew he would never get to this point.  I think it took Poppie almost dying, when a tree fell on and hit him, to begin to see the Lord for what he was and is, it is all in the perspective isn't it?  Today is a glorious day and one of the best of my life.  The Lord is so good and works in mysterious ways, so never say never because in God all things are possible even the point of your perspective.... tomorrow.