Keeping Up With My God Outlook | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Keeping Up With My God Outlook | Previous Challenge Entry
By Kathy Warnes
06/08/11
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I don’t always use the word outlook, but as a human, I have several of them every day and they change according to my mood and the events in my life. The dictionary says that an outlook is a view or perspective from a particular place and an outlook can also be an expectation. I have and have had multiple outlooks in my life.

As a child my perspectives focused on my parents, siblings, friends, and twilight games of hide and seek in the vacant lot next to the house where “The Boy” lived. My outlook then consisted of escaping from babysitting my brothers and sisters, riding my bicycle endlessly and playing endless games of tag and hide and seek in the vacant lot with the neighborhood gang.

I went to church and learned stories from the Bible. My Sunday school teacher told me that God loved me and everyone else, and that He made the world and everything in it. In my own life, my grandmother reflected God’s love.

My God Outlook consisted of “Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep,” and loving the flowers in my Grandmother’s garden and the look on her face when she kissed me.

My teenage perspective changed almost hourly and involved makeup and boys and a great deal of wondering about God that I carefully hid from everyone, even my fellow churchgoers.

I still went to church, but the inner me didn’t always sit politely in the pew like the outer me did. The inner me rebelled against what I considered the limited, childish outlook people had about God. My God Outlook stretched over the horizon to places I hadn’t yet imagined or contemplated exploring

Then my beloved grandmother died suddenly and the people around me who said they knew about God didn’t give me the assurance that my grandmother lived well and happily in heaven. I volunteered to take her place in their hell and I changed my outlook about God .

God and I separated for a time. Our outlooks were too different for us to live in the same house, but I still considered him a distant friend.

For part of my adulthood, God remained my distant friend. Some days I viewed him from the perspective of standing in a dense valley forest with little sunlight filtering through. I knew that a mountaintop and God’s presence hovered nearby, but I couldn’t see it and some days I forgot to image it.

One of God’s most effective outlooks is from the perspective of a human defiantly standing on a sand castle while greedy waves devour it. Even after the sand castle is gone, God shields the human from the waves and gives the human time to consider a change in outlook. If and when the human decides that a change in outlook is necessary, God becomes a closer friend.

God rebuilds outlooks. One day while trying to create some order out of clutter, I found my grandmother’s picture that I had buried in a trunk, trying to forget what she and God and meant to me. I wiped the dust from her face and I felt God wiping the tears from my face.

Slowly God helped me rebuild my sand castle, grain of sand by grain of sand, all the time shielding me from the waves.

My adult outlooks still tend to split into kaleidoscope pieces that sometimes I can’t meld together no matter how hard I try. Some days I don’t even try.
My dreams and realities don’t always meet and match my outlook and I don’t always keep my God Outlook up to date. Some days I neglect my God Outlook completely, but God remains my best friend and meets me in the middle of my outlook so we can work on it together.

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