Perception

We've recently added more tables (and thus more seating) during worship. That's a great thing, for obvious reasons. But I something interesting happened yesterday.

As we were singing, I looked out and thought "Huh. Looks like about the same size crowd used to have back in the fall when attendance was lower." Then after worship I talked with our 'attendance counter', and he told me how many people had been there. And I thought "Huh. That's higher than it was in the fall. In fact, that's about what I expected." So why did it not look that way to me? I quickly realized that the new tables threw me off. As I looked out, the density of people was unchanged. But they took up a larger space. So while the number of people looked like it was about the same, it was in fact larger than back in the fall.

Perception. So many things go into it. Is what I'm seeing accurate? Am I thinking things are better than they are or worse? Maybe a more appropriate question would be "Which things am I too optimistic about, and which am I too pessimistic about?"

One reality is that I will never be able to see the whole picture. No one can. I will always have blind spots. As we grow as a body of Christ, one of my tasks is to find people with different blind spots so we can work together to have an accurate picture of what is really going on. Not people with no blind spots, because that will never happen. Just different ones, so our sight lines overlap. The other reality is that God will always be at work in ways we don't even see, so no matter how many people are looking we'll never have the whole picture anyway.

Still, I found one of my blind spots yesterday. That was a good thing. I pray God will work through those around me to bring intersecting sight lines. And I pray for God to grant me faith to know that God is at work in ways I will never see.