Perspective. In eighth grade art class, I learned to draw a house in perspective. You know, so it looked three dimensional instead of just flat. I felt clever and accomplished.

Perspective. It is what we need every day to keep ourselves from swirling out of control. In the fall of 1990, Dave and I built our first house. We had been married five years, we didn’t have a lot of extra money and we had two children. I was a stay at home mom with a garden the size of Texas.

Building the house is only the beginning of making a plot of land a home. There is yard to seed, bushes and trees to plant, walls to decorate. The house is just the beginning.

The summer of 1991, I spent a lot of time on our front porch (it seemed like anyway) snapping green beans to preserve for winter. (That was when I canned and preserved a lot of stuff.) As I sat there and snapped my beans, I looked at our unfinished landscaping. The ground was hard as rock, the weeds were tall as the house and I was a disillusioned home owner. I wanted to get this finished! I spent a lot of time that summer stewing that there were weeds rather than bushes and flowers!

Perspective. From the vantage point of time, I can see it wasn’t worth the energy I gave it to be upset that the landscaping wasn’t finished in my time frame. And to be honest, I could have taken more initiative to pull weeds and keep it looking clean until we had the time and resources to do the job properly.

Read: Ecclesiastes 6:9

Sometimes I ask myself if there is anything I wish I would have done differently along the way. In this situation, I wish I would have been more content. I wish I had enjoyed the process as much as the end result.

Is there anything robbing your perspective today? Does something eat at you and keep you from embracing this moment? Enjoy where you are today! Enjoy the process of the next steps as much as the finished product!