Frames

Everyone I know in my circle of friends and colleagues comes with a unique frame.  They see and react to life in ways that are unique yet frequently are not hard to anticipate.  As I reflect on their choices and my own, I find myself returning repeatedly to the same conclusion.  The way we look at life is often the key determinant to how we react to life.
Ironically, I find that I do very little thinking about my framework.  While I work on disciplines, I often ignore why I feel what I feel about what happens.  Even as I focus my attention on the process of making the decisions and choices that I make, I skip most of the calls to understand the way I see my values and the values of others.  With the lessons that experience gives, an outsider's assumption that I study the context of what I take away from life would be, in general, misguided.  I rarely look at the framework of my life.  It is as if I have accepted how I see life and merely respond with to what unfolds as it happens.
As I age, I increasingly find that everything in life is a choice shaped and determined by the framework that I see, feel, and experience it in.  If I am struggling to hold hands with hope, I often find myself defensive, sullen, and wrestling with a call to depression.  If I have lost sight of God, my actions determine my worth, not God's view of me.  If I am purely focused on what comes from within, I catch myself drowning through self-centric behaviors.  There is a simple alternative found in one man's observation; “I'm glad from the inside out, ecstatic; I've pitched my tent in the land of hope.”  (Acts 2.27b)
You and I have an opportunity to see life through God's eyes.  We can look at ourselves as God does, priceless children of Divinity.  We can experience what happens around us with the knowledge that we are all siblings in God's family.  We can, now.