Your world is your home, family, neighborhood, work, church, and school.
It’s the stores where you shop, the government you pay taxes to, and your favorite websites and TV channels. It’s movies, songs, sports, and politics.
They all have their own reasons for doing what they do and being who they are.
And they don’t ask your permission.
They don’t invite you to all their meetings. Usually it was a long journey of hours and months and years for them to get to who they are and what they do.
You don’t ask their permission either.
And you don’t invite them to all your meetings. Yours was a long journey too.
You have opinions of those things in your world, and they have opinions of you. Often it’s not positive. Often it’s cliches and stereotypes. Sometimes it’s even aggressive and confrontational.
There’s a two word phrase for people who have strong opinions on things without having been part of the journey:
“Overnight expert.”
You use it for them when they don’t understand you, and they use it for you. And you both can be right.
This is the disconnected dot of your world.
Christians used to be a dot like that for me. I was an overnight expert on them. Then my wife became a Christian and I met some others. More and more they didn’t fit my stereotypes. More and more I wasn’t such an expert.
I used to have big opinions on the football strategy of my favorite teams. Then I met some people who really understood football. They had been to the meetings for years. My opinions aren’t nearly as strong now.
Ditto for politics, church, the place where you work, and The National Geographic Channel doing reality shows on drugs and cocaine smugglers. I thought NGC was about caring for the planet — what’s with that?
Your world is the place you look at and go, “Why do they do that? They don’t know what they’re doing.”
When your world connects with the world of others, and with people and God, your world changes.
Can you think of a time when a new perspective changed your world?
For a bit more perspective you might also read What if they’re NOT Martians? and Expect the basement.
