Narrowness of experience

Another aspect of perspective is that one can get so close to an object, that it obscures one’s view from all else. For many, personal experience has become the ultimate authority and measure of truth – it is the only thing they’ll believe or place any confidence in. But there are few things that can skew our perspective more than personal experience. Let me explain:

In my early childhood – I was about five years old – we moved into a new house. Most of these houses in South Africa had big back yards and these made ideal playgrounds for small boys. We called it a ‘yard’ instead of a garden because it wasn’t really a neatly kept garden – it was more like a large enclosure. On the day we moved in I noticed something very tempting: the neighbour had a small orchard of mango trees in his back yard … and I loved mangoes. My dad must have read my thoughts because at the moment I noticed these trees, he said to me: “Don’t even think of going into the neighbour’s yard – there is a vicious dog guarding the trees”. That was a very disappointing piece of information as through the days and weeks that followed I witnessed the mango fruit ripening.

I often played in the back yard in the afternoons and felt terribly tempted by the ripe mangoes over the fence, however my fear of the vicious dog prevented me from even attempting to pick a mango. One afternoon, while playing, I became desperately ‘hungry’ and the fruit seemed particularly inviting. I nervously sneaked onto the fence at the far end of the yard to have a better look at the dog, but I couldn’t see the dog anywhere. I took my chance and jumped over the fence, grabbed a couple of mangoes and jumped back into my own yard. They were delicious!

It did not take me long to realise that there was no dog! The moral of the story is not about temptation or repentance or anything deeply spiritual like that. The point is simply that my experience of hunger was real, my experience of fear was real, but these real experiences were based on the lie that I believed regarding a vicious dog. The moment I realised that there was no dog the fear disappeared … and as a consequence so did the hunger. How many of our real experiences are based on lies? How different would our experiences be, if we believed differently?

The truth that Jesus introduces us to is of a much higher authority than our experience – it is a truth that is able to transform our experience. He wants to introduce us to a truth much broader than our narrow experiences.

“… my judgement would be true because I wouldn’t make it out of the narrowness of my experience but in the largeness of the One who sent me, the Father.”(John 8:16 MSG). If Jesus considered his own experience as narrow compared to a much greater reality, then we too might have to re-evaluate the importance we attach to personal experience.

In the same way as our personal experiences are to narrow to reveal our true identity, so too is our culture too narrow; our language too narrow; our society too narrow; our race too narrow; even our relationships, no matter how precious, are too narrow. He reveals that all the measures we’ve used to measure ourselves with are completely inadequate. “but when they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are without understanding” He shatters our illusions, but at that very moment He also brings to light the truth of our design. We are eternal beings, which means that anything temporal will not do justice to God’s estimation of our worth and He invites us to see ourselves from His point of view.