Perspective: A blog I wrote hours before learning we were coming back to America

So if you haven’t heard by now, due to the coronavirus and more specifically to countries everywhere closing their borders, Adventures in Missions decided to pull all 500+ missionaries off the field. AIM leadership has poured their time and efforts into flying squads from around the world back to America as quickly and safely as possible and as of yesterday all squads are officially back in the USA.

There are still a million questions like what now? Will we go back out? When? Is the race over? What about the money that was fundraised? Do I just get a job now? Honestly, I don’t have any answers yet. But I do know that the Lord has it all under control. I know He has big plans and completes all of His promises.

I am currently hanging out in Georgia with a few friends from my squad. We are piled into one house and processing this crazy abrupt transition back home to a country that is pretty chaotic right now. There is still so much to process and I am still short on words regarding the whole thing.

But hours before abruptly finding out we would be brought home immediately, I wrote a blog about perspective. So I’m just going to share that because I think it’s still relevant:

The last couple of months the Lord has been talking to me a ton about perspective. Still is, really.

Perspective is a tricky and beautiful thing. If we aren’t careful we get trapped inside our own perspective. But the beauty is in the perspective shift.

Think about light. Light is amazing; it is full of colors and wavelengths. It bounces off objects and hits the rods and cones in our eyes letting us see the world around us. But light becomes mundane and normal. We forget that it’s spectacular  – that it is why we can see.

But when light passes through a prism it is diffracted, it’s sum broken down into its parts. And that’s where we see it’s beauty. You see the different wavelengths were always there, we just couldn’t see them. The beauty of light was never missing, we just weren’t looking for it. It takes that shift, maybe even the action, of passing light through the prism to change the way we see. Without the perspective shift that the prism provides we miss the beauty that’s right in front of us. 

Light remains light, that part hasn’t changed, but the way we see it has. We can see it more fully, understanding a little bit more of the parts that make up it’s whole. And with that understanding comes a reminder of just how spectacular it is. 

When we are stuck in our own perspective we can get lost in the mundane. Or maybe even frustrated with our circumstances. We lose track of the beauty in our lives. But it’s still there, it always was, but maybe we stopped looking. Maybe we just can’t see how the parts will equal the sum.

But Kingdom perspective turns it all on its head. Kingdom perspective holds up the prism and changes the way we see things. It helps us find and actually see the magnificence and beauty in our lives, in our circumstances. This shift takes the focus of of ourselves and points us to the Father – it’s better that way.

The more we practice holding the prism up to the light. The more we practice looking for and seeing the beauty around us, the more likely we are to remember how spectacular the things right in front of us are. 

So especially now, in the chaos and the unknown, let’s practice holding up the prism and seeing the beauty around us. It’s there I promise.

-Kayla