Mindset
Beyond the Typical
It started as a simple call, with a tone of urgency and slight worry. A sister in the diaspora had contacted me, and what struck me first was not the content of the talk but the method. I observed that she was calling directly on her local line, and I was quick to ask if she was around. Somehow, her response turned into something unexpected.
She explained that earlier in the week, she had tried to reach me through someone in church, but she was told I had left. I paused. That was the first error. I hadn’t left. I had only stepped out briefly to the car park to attend to an urgent call, and I returned shortly after to the auditorium. Before I could quite take that in, she continued that she had sent someone over to check on me again, and again, she was told I wasn’t at church.
Again?
That second assumption was weightier than the first. How? I was not just in church at that time. I was sitting right next to the altar. It was the grand finale of youth week, and as the youth coordinator, I had intentionally moved from my regular seat to support the activities more closely. Earlier, I had even made a key introduction, one that I assumed would have made me visible to all present.
However, I realised that visibility seems to be more correlated to perception; it doesn’t seem to be a matter of being there. Visibility, I learned again, is not always about presence.
It was obvious that I had been searched for, just within the boundaries of familiarity, and significantly so. My regular scope was marked as my identity, and a conclusion (twice) was drawn based on an incomplete and insufficient dataset. Simple, yet profound: My regular seat had become my identity in the eyes of another. Once I was not found there, the conclusion was drawn that I was absent. No further search. No expanded perspective. No alternative consideration. Just a conclusion, from a locked perspective.
How often do we do the same, not just with people, but with opportunities, ideas, and even our own growth? How often do we look in the “usual place”, and when we do not find what we expect, we conclude it does not exist? How often do we confine possibilities to patterns we are familiar with or comfortable with?
Sadly, though, life rarely operates within such narrow frames. We often operate within the confines of our familiarity, within the boundaries of what we know, and when we fail to get the results that are expected, we are quick to assume impossibility and conclude that our answers do not exist. However, the Bible reminds us that God is not confined to our patterns: He is always ahead of us, reminding us from time to time that “See, I am doing a new thing!” Isaiah 43:19 NIV.
Transformation begins when we expand our thinking beyond what is conventional, expected, or familiar. Growth begins when our perception expands. A regenerated mind is a mind that thinks more deeply, sees more clearly, and perceives beyond the obvious.
I learnt from the experience that limitation is often not the same as ‘lack of possibility’ but more like the ‘existence of a confined perception’. Vision extends beyond seeing what is ahead; it is the ability to see completely, beyond fixed positions and predictable patterns. A restricted vision produces immature and incomplete or imperfect conclusions.
Where there is no vision, the people perish….” - Proverbs 29:18 KJV
As I ponder this experience, it occurred to me that growth requires a willingness to look again, to think again, to see again. I was there but unseen. Here, not here. Not because I was hidden, but because the search was focused on just one location. Oftentimes, what we are looking for has not disappeared; it has only gone beyond where we last saw it. It has simply moved and can be found by the most desperate search.
“Open my eyes to see the wonderful truths in your instructions.” Psalms 119:18 NLT