When my youngest son was 5 he brought home a picture from school. He proudly gave it to me with the exclamation that it was Daddy. My wife and I oohed and aahed over it but were a little mystified by his drawing. There were two long legs and a long body with no arms. In the middle was a large circle and on the top a small semicircle. I asked him what the circle in the middle was. He said my belly button. Where was my head? He pointed to the little lump at the top. Well, where are my arms? Oh, they’re behind your back.

After he went to bed we had a good chuckle over his drawing. It was his perspective of his daddy. To me it looked distorted; to him it was perfectly normal. It gave me pause for thought. How often do we think our perspective on life is correct? When was the last time I stopped to think about how others see situations?

The world is fraught with tensions and broken relationships. People are angry at one another and full of resentment. Could it be from as simple a thing as our perspective of life? Normal for me was not normal for a 5 year old. Was I right and he wrong? We were both right.

Umm! If we are both right, how do we reconcile this? Is it possible for both parties to be right? When we think we are right, we will defend our position to the death. Unfortunately we think in terms of one must be right and the other wrong if we don’t agree on what we see. Could life be more of a paradox then we allow it to be? Are we trying to keep everything simple so that we don’t have to think outside our boxes?