In comfort and in crisis, we must not lose our perspective. Many times in life, we are derailed by frustration, angst, even a feeling of irrelevance. I have been through what they call a mid-life crisis, and by any standard it was not a walk in the park.

Sometime in 2003, at the height of debilitating quarrels at home compounded by the hard times, I wrote the following in my journal:

“There may be reason to be cynical, or overly angry at many of the things around us, i.e. human frailties, commercialism, corruption — but we really should continue to believe that the flip side does exist: the basic goodness in others … faith and hope.

“Therefore, we must not lose our perspective amidst the storms raging outside and inside us. We must not be too consumed in our passions that we fail to see the larger picture, the picture that shows where we are and how we must comport ourselves in the scheme of things. Once we lose this… we are lost.”

Easier said than done. But a beautifully-crafted prayer I came across many years ago helps provide the perspective that we all yearn for, albeit unknowingly:

Disturb us, O Lord/When we re too well pleased with ourselves/When our dreams have
come true because we dreamed too little/When we have arrived in safely because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, O Lord when with the abundance of things we possess, we have lost the thirst for the water of life/When, having fallen in love with Time, we have ceased to dream of Eternity/ And in our efforts to build the New Earth, have allowed our vision of the New Heaven to grow dim.

Stir us, O Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas, where storms shall show Thy Majesty, where in losing sight of land we shall find the stars.

In the name of Him who pushed back the horizons of our hopes and invited the brave to follow him.