Kaleidoscope Perspective

I’ve attended approximately one million writing workshops in the past decade, and one frequent piece of instruction for devotional writers has always caused me to shudder. “Start with a good story,” writers are told. “Then find a verse in the Bible to apply to it.”

Lots of writers follow this advice. The results are troubling. Frequently, the writer takes a verse out of its context and gives it a meaning far from what is intended in order to make it fit the story. In other words, the story drives the message, rather than the Scripture passage. Dangerous ground. I used to joke about that kind of teaching in seminary, telling my fellow seminarians: “I love it when Scripture backs me up.”

So I have been teaching the opposite approach to writers at conferences and workshops: study Scripturefirst. When God gives you a principle to share, then is the time to choose a story. Don’t approach the Bible from the wrong end.

Sometimes we approach God in the same backward manner. We become absorbed in how God is at work in our lives, in our story, and then base our beliefs about him based on what we see. But without a proper context, our limited experience can steer us astray. Any expectations or assumptions about God not based on the whole truth are destined to disappoint.

We need to start at the main source, not with our personal story. God has revealed so much about himself in the Bible. As we learn about him, his nature, his ways, we get a frame that will define the parameters of anything we see of him in our personal lives.

It’s a little like that toy we all had when we were little: the kaleidoscope. It looked like a telescope, with a lens on one end and the piece you turn on the other. If you looked at the large end, all you would see was a bunch of brightly colored plastic pieces gathered into a tumbled mess against the bottom of the opaque filter. But if you looked through the correct end and held it up to the light, a magnificent picture was revealed. Those jumbled plastic pieces were transformed into a lovely display of color and shapes, slowly changing as they turned and shifted.

Coming from the right perspective is crucial for correctly understanding and knowing God. As we see him in the Bible, offering grace and mercy, unapologetically holy and just, acting in love and power, we get a frame that will keep our personal experience from leading us to misguided assumptions. He’s so much greater than what our lives display. Let’s not sell him short.