One of the central issues with stress is perspective. No matter how many times we’ve survived a flat tire, a disgruntled congregant, or a cluttered house, these troubles feel like epic challenges, threatening to unravel the fabric of our worlds. Our fretful mountains often turn out to be nothing but molehills, and so we miss the true mountains. We don’t pay attention to what’s truly majestic and encompassing. Our problems become the text of reality, and everything else is relegated to a footnote. As said long ago, we fail to consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.

Next time you need your perspective recalibrated, check out the web-program The Scale of the Universe. It’s an incredible representation of the wonder of creation, how there’s so much to life that’s bigger and smaller than us humans. Between the one nanometer Buckyball (composed of sixty carbon atoms) and the one million kilometer star Alpha Centauri B (the second largest star in the Alpha Centauri star system), the problem of next Sunday’s sermon might not seem as significant.

How do you put things in perspective?

–Tommy Grimm

(Image by Flickr user Lanzen /via Creative Commons)