I have pictures in my head that I can’t shake; I don’t want to shake them out.

Forgive me but these images remind me that there are more important issues in life than eye make-up and hair highlights. Sometimes the images haunt my dreams but more often they pop up during daytime trivial life. The sewing machines whir twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Burmese hands keep the machines going. Little Kalah bare-feet tread on trash – the floor of the family’s tarp shelter is the garbage dump. The local Burmese-speaking church emails out a newsletter. The sweet pastor and his wife are my dear friends and this is all they ask for? – Please pray for the kids to have strength to learn and to know God and…and…that they will have enough to eat. Perspective is everything. The lack of or over-abundance of experience makes our vision what it is.

My culture chips away at my resolve to not be sucked in to the “needs” of richness. Relatives, friends, co-workers, church, the media – everywhere I look the implied or direct plea to conform whispers or screams in my ear. You should purchase this spring’s latest sundress. You should get the latest sparkling Tom’s shoes. You should get an iPhone, cannot live without one. You’re in your 30’s and, you know, you really should invest in a home. You should have that career established by now. And why are you still single? You really should be married and be starting a family. As if all these choices can be decided and purchased from a website. My generation of online shoppers forgets that some of these scenarios are not purchasable.

I feel should-ed to death and, just like Katy Perry, I want to throw my (cheap flip phone) away. Instead I just turn it off for the weekend and pray God will get me back to a community of poverty without sinking into it myself. I long to be part of the solution; I dread adding to an already heavy problem.

Every New Year I have a habit of asking God for a theme, a focus, a direction. Silly? Maybe but I think I would sink into depression without His guidance. I am weak and honestly believe that I can’t do this life without the Divine leading me. The last half decade reveal one-word mantras scribbled on scrap paper – jump; adventure; preparation; healing. And this year? My greediness was hoping for another adventure but instead I got “perspective”.

Perspective – remember this physical life is temporary but has eternal ramifications. Perspective – you really are an alien, a refugee, a traveler in a land that is not your true home. Perspective – what is love? God loves me (Eph. 3:14-19) and to love him back is to feed His sheep (John 21:15). Perspective – when I see with God-glasses, I can view situations with true joy.

It’s the Thai and Burmese New Year. Revelers just spent the last few days soaking each other with buckets of water to ring in the coming rainy season and the growth of new life. Daw Aung San Sui Kyi followed Britian’s Prime Minister with a speech of hope at democratic reform for her country of Burma. She ended with the advice to enjoy thuh-jan and wash your sins away…that is, if you have any. She laughed. He laughed. The reporters and the crowd quietly joined in. It was not a laugh of mockery but of knowingness. Ethic murder still occurs in the villages. Child soldiers still wear guns over their shoulders instead of backpacks. But….perspective would choose to hope that refugees can return home, that love and joy are possible here and now and not just in the after-life.

Forgive me. My perspective has been “damaged” by too many images and experiences. Some days I fight to be “normal” and fit into the culture I was born in. Some days I fight to hang onto to the big picture of a world that lives in utter poverty while I wallow in my richness. But most days I just beg God – I beg Him for His perspective because He sees from the top down while my half-blind eyes squint from the bottom up. “I once was blind but now I see.” It’s a dangerous line to pray for to see His perspective rocks my boat. Sometimes I’m sea-sick from the view but I would have it no other way.