Purview
“Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.“
- John
We start all our corporate engagements with a two-day offsite. We help the folks we work with settle on the right executive leadership team to attend. Some already have them and are based largely on tenure and many, to our surprise, don’t really have one formally established.
In order to change their perspective, you have to change their environment. There is a lot that happens there, but one of the more philosophical objectives is to get them thinking beyond their current circumstance and expand the horizon of their thinking. We help them actively capture and simplify their current challenges. And then we set it aside.
We dramatically overestimate what we can get done in the next 3 days and underestimate what we can get done in the next 3 years.
Getting that clear as well as a clear vision several years into the future creates the delta that strategic planning needs to solve for. If you can force yourself to think with a bit longer time horizon, things start to find a less stressful perspective. It provides for an elevated, hopeful, and far more actionable view.
What if your perspective were not just today, this quarter, or even the next several years? What if your perspective was eternal? What if the way you saw things transcended your circumstances and took on an almost unfathomable timeline into the future?
In the worldview we operate within, it says our God has an incredible breadth of understanding (as far as the east is from the west) and that his perspective extends all the way into an eternity we can’t possibly grasp. And with that kind of perspective, things look so much clearer, hopeful, and right.
We’ve been asking God really big questions and getting a taste of that transcendent understanding.
When praying through a new pandemic-impacted budget, we prayed for guidance. He said, “You will have everything you need to do everything I have for you to do.”
We prayed for a client who was wrestling with whether or not to accept a newborn baby offered to him through a foster-to-adopt journey. He said, “I am not in your pride of doing the right thing and I am not in your shame of not doing what others think is right. I am for you and will walk with you regardless of the decision.”
And when we asked for perspective on the racial tensions gripping the land, He said, “My heart is for the rioter and the racist. They are both in pain, broken-hearted, and they are my children.”
Neither my gut reaction, my intellect, or my best attempt to say the right Christian-y thing could have possibly conceived those answers. And while His purview (the range of vision, insight, and understanding) is beyond what I can fathom, it is completely accessible.
And while I spend a lot of time challenging my clients to look beyond their current circumstances for clarity, hope, and understanding, I spend too much time doing the opposite. But I am learning to not lean on my own understanding. I am starting to get more comfortable sourcing the wisdom of eternity. And it is completely changing my perspective.
Consider
Do you feel overwhelmed by your life and leadership responsibilities?
Are you having a tough time looking past your day to day challenges?
When is the last time you got away to look a little further down the road?
When is the last time you asked God for his perspective?