Expanding My Vision

Expanding My Vision

This week my husband found an article on speed reading. It said the majority of us view words on a page as if through a straw. We see the individual letters, turn them into words, into sentences, into paragraphs, and then into a story. In order to absorb the story at a faster rate — or get the bigger picture — we simply must expand our range of vision by backing our eyes away from the page and reading the story in its entirety; as the author had purposed when he/she wrote it.

Immediately after my husband read this to me (at a far faster rate because he was applying these tips), I knew that it could be applied to my life as well. I’ve been so caught up in my own petty ambitions of building a writer’s platform through social media, writing X number of words each day or else, working in our business, building our house, ect., that I’ve narrowed my range of focus until it’s become nothing but a pinprick. Somewhere I’ve lost sight of the Biggest picture while honing my sights on my dreams.

This past week, though, in the middle of the night, we received two phone calls that expanded my vision. Both of the calls involved death: one, the death to a dream; the other, a physical death. My husband and I were both so stunned upon receiving these calls that we could barely explain to each other what the person on the phone had said. In one instance, we threw on clothes and drove down to the police station. In the second, nothing could be done except to pray for those left behind.

While these devastating calls were expanding my range of vision, they were also realigning my petty ambitions. I was so stunned that, for days, I could barely type a word. Suddenly, the idea of molding a fake world while there was a real world full of hurting people seemed so trivial. In case I ever had to make a call like the two I’d just received, I also didn’t want to spend my hours behind a laptop when I could be with those I dearly loved.

I guess the key in all of this is to keep the Biggest picture in focus even while creating the smaller ones. That, even while we’re honing our sights on our dreams, we are careful not to lose sight of the people who those dreams are for; that we do not lose sight of the One who put those dreams in our hearts in the first place. That, without Him and the people He’s placed in our lives, we would only be seeing the letters on a page, that we would never see the entirety of the story the Author of all Authors has written before the beginning of time.