Magnify the Lord, not your problems

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Personally, I like change. I like change so much, in fact, that I often bite off more than I can chew in my excitement to switch things up in my life. Whereas I hear of friends who want to avoid doing certain things because they are scared of what the changes will bring, I complain to my friends about wishing I hadn’t tried taking on so much before I realized I couldn’t do it all.

Sometimes I try to pretend that the change I embraced up front isn’t a big deal and I can handle it. Recently this very act blew up in my face. My wife and I moved from Tennessee to Arizona while she was in her third trimester of pregnancy. Once we got to our new home, we took a decrease in pay and our baby came a month earlier than expected.

I tried to accept the changes without complaint, but the stress got to me and life was rough for a couple of weeks. It was easy for me to get caught up in all the problems in my life and focus on them. I didn’t want to accept that I had too much on my plate and that I needed to turn to the Lord for help.

But one evening I was feeling exceptionally lost and overwhelmed. I turned on the TV and flipped through some Face to Face videos on YouTube where one interview of the cast of Studio C caught my eye. The whole thing was very inspirational, but one line in particular, said by Matt Meese, really hit home for me:

 “David faces Goliath and Goliath is huge, but God is bigger than any Goliath that you may face.”

The change taking place in my life at this time was my Goliath. I was struggling as much as I was because I had forgotten that the Lord truly is bigger than my struggles in chewing through all the changes hitting me like a brick wall. I could have felt even more discouraged and angry with myself for making my life harder in discounting what the Lord could do for me. I am grateful, however, that the Lord helped me put it into perspective.

I had been focusing too much on my problems and my vantage point was skewed. As I made this connection, I remembered an awesome photo that I had my wife take for me a couple years ago:

We had seen the above giant stork statue on the side of the road while traveling from Bismarck North Dakota to Grand Forks North Dakota. I saw an amazing photo opportunity but getting the picture just right was tricky. The first couple of shots failed miserably because they focused on me and the distance between myself and the statue. The fact that I was merely a fraction of the size of the metal bird was blatantly obvious:

I am learning that there is a spiritual truth alongside this optical illusion phenomenon. If we focus too much on our problems, we start to believe that the Lord is smaller than He really is and its harder to turn to him when in reality He can help us better than anyone else.

Believe it or not, Sherlock Holmes is a great example of maintaining focus where it didn’t distract from the truth. He may be a fictitious character in a series of books but he taught many people the importance of not letting the obvious facts get in the way of the small clues that led to the overall truth.

I recently read an article online published by the Smithsonian museum that takes the fiction out of the Sherlock Holmes character and provides a real-life application for each of us. The author of the article, Jimmy Stamp wrote:

“Forensic scientist and Holmes scholar Dr. Robert Ing, has closely read Conan Doyle’s stories to craft a… specific list of skills that Holmes demonstrates a working knowledge of: chemistry, bloodstain identification, botany, geology, anatomy, law, cryptanalysis, fingerprinting, document examination, ballistics, psychological profiling and forensic medicine. But knowledge by itself is not enough. In order to put these skills to use to find and decipher the clues that lead to his uncanny deductions, Holmes relied on the optical technology of the time: the magnifying glass and microscope.”

Jimmy Stamp mentions further in his Smithsonian article that:

“In the 19th century, these optical technologies changed the way we see the world. The magnifying glass and the microscope reveal aspects of our world that are invisible to the human eye. Sherlock Holmes does the same. The magnifying glass has become so closely associated with Holmes that it is, essentially, a part of him. He internalized and applied this new technologically-assisted understanding of the world so that the optical devices of the 19th century were merely an augmentation of his natural capabilities.”

There is a connection between the magnifying glass and the photo my wife took that acts as an optical illusion. A magnifying glass allows one to make an object appear bigger than it actually is so that it can be studied more closely. This can be very helpful but only in the right context. We don’t need to hone in on all our problems and the things we are doing wrong if they aren’t going to help us succeed.

In fact, the Lord teaches us to use the power of magnification but not to make ourselves feel guilty nor to focus on the negative. He instead encourages us to focus on Him and the work He wants us to help Him with:

Job 36:24 – Remember that thou magnify his work, which men behold.

D&C 88:80 – That ye may be prepared in all things when I shall send you again to magnify the calling whereunto I have called you, and the mission with which I have commissioned you.

By magnifying the Lord and His work, we are not making the Lord any bigger; he is already the biggest, most powerful being in the universe. What we are doing, though, is putting our relationship with Him in perspective and realizing even further that He needs to be the focus and center of our lives.

When we have the Spirit of God in our lives, we can see things how they truly are in relation to everything else. It becomes harder to be deceived because the truth becomes blatantly obvious and the lies around us no longer seem too big to handle.