Vertical Focus

Philippians 4:8 -- "Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things."

Reading about the dust bowl in the 1930's actually triggers the instinct to put my hands over my mouth and nose as I empathize with the families caught in the whirling torrents of pelting sand. It can be said that the drought and devastation that went from bad to worse due to improper care of huge expanses of very flat and mostly arid land - was one of the most terrible "natural" disasters the bread basket of America has ever faced. It could also be said that we as a nation learned a very great deal from the "Dirty Thirties". Vast progress and huge strides have been made in the area of horticulture - and our country is richly blessed with an abundance of cultivated resources, in no small measure, due to the hard lessons learned from some pretty serious mistakes.

Though our lands and people have done a great deal of healing since the huge rolling walls of dry top soil blew across our plains like the Tasmanian Devil, there are places where one can see the scars. And thanks to some amazing photographers back in the '30's, there is opportunity for future generations to witness the stretchmarks created during some of America's most intense growing pains. 

A beloved fellow missionary and outstanding History teacher once told me that: "History doesn't repeat itself. People repeat history. If we go through our lives not paying attention to the lessons learned in ours [history] we will surly be doomed to repeat it [our history]."

Truer words were never spoken, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to share with my two home-school students - the documentary recently published by Ken Burns - "The Dustbowl". [I highly recommend this film, by the way.]

An interesting thing popped into my head as the stark black and white images of true poverty and hopelessness displayed on the television screen: looking out into the vast expanse of dry land, I could not help but think - what a perfect place to look up into the night sky and see the stars. 

The sky is bigger out on the plains. While the camera panned outward on a steady horizontal track, I kept mentally willing its operator to pull upward into the pure darkness, unpolluted by man's attachment to electricity. Let's face it, sometimes it is in the dark and quiet that we have the best opportunity to appreciate the flickering pin-points of light that generate so much beauty. Looking into the heavens next to a busy city, so many of those blinking stars are lost in the hazy glow generated by a dense population.

It occurred to me that WE are the same.

Migrant Mother by: Dorothea Lange 1936

Looking outward and backward - we may be able to review some harrowing moments in our past, but even with the good intention of learning from previous mistakes our focus remains trained on sadness, on poverty, on poor choices, and on grief. There is no question that the deeply moving photo of Florence Owens Thompson by Dorothea Lange in 1936 brings to mind a decade of thread-bare survival. There is no light behind the "Migrant Mother's" eyes. No assurance that the two children in the photo with her will have food on their dinner plates. One can't help but wonder what worrying thoughts caused the furrow in her brow and the wrinkles around her eyes.

But is it not those moments that force us to put our faith in the hands of the only ONE who can truly save us? On the wide, naked plains where there is no green, no warm homestead, and no elbow to elbow suburbia - our focus is drawn from a horizontal perspective, to a vertical one. There is no light but that of the amazing Creator. 

In the middle of a dank prison cell - Paul tells the church in Philppi - "if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things."

There is a great deal to be said of learning from our past - for sure, we don't want to go about our lives making the same mistake twice. But I think the best thing of all would be for us to say, "look at the light that God gave me, when I was too busy placing my focus on the dark."

In the next sand storm, the next drought, the next family crisis or the next national political free-for-all - might we pan the camera from the blank open plains to a brilliant night sky peppered with twinkling, blinking hope? After all, "if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise," let us dwell on THESE things.