The easiest perspective to understand is your own.

It’s also the hardest to notice.

We don’t tend to think of it as a perspective. We tend to think of it as “the way it is.”

You want proof? Hand your phone to a toddler and ask them to take some pictures, then look at what they bring you. The world is a different place when you’re eye-level with the countertops and you have to reach up to turn the doorknobs.

Same objects. Same world. Totally different perspective. More importantly, a valid perspective that doesn’t invalidate yours just by existing. Some people just have an easier time noticing what’s under the counters instead of what’s on top of them.

When we talk about how the world works—when we talk about “the way it is”—we tend to speak through the lens of our own perspective. We tend to see “the way it is for us,” not realizing we’re only seeing part of the bigger picture.

Every moment you experience shapes your perspective. But for every moment you experience, then are ten thousand others you don’t experience—and some you’ll never experience.

You’ll never know what it’s like to grow up in a different culture, in a different home, with different parents, in a different decade, as a different ethnicity. You can imagine, you can ask questions, you can try and empathize and understand, but you’ll never experience it. It’ll never shape your perspective in the same way.

One lesson is just to remember that.

Still, universal truths exist, and that means not all perspectives are valid. If someone comes to you saying that doorknobs are poisonous and all countertops must be painted a specific shade of blue, well—at least one of you is having a little trouble with reality.

God’s word is truth, and nothing anyone thinks or feels or sees can change that. But we also all see that truth from different perspectives at different times. Sometimes you’re be tall enough to see what’s on top of the countertops, and other times you’ll be the toddler, wondering what’s up there and whether it’s interesting.

Paul once remarked, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known” (1 Corinthians 13:11-12).

Until we are made perfect, there will be many ways in which we retain the perspective of a child— issues we are incapable of seeing from the height of Someone who can see the countertop.

That will change, eventually. One day we’ll know just as we’re known. But until then, each of us are trying to see the same truth from (sometimes) wildly different perspectives, describing it with words and in ways that might not immediately make sense from where the other stands.

There are universal truths.

Not all perspectives are valid.

Even so, remember:

The easiest perspective to understand is your own.

It’s also the hardest to notice.

What we see as “the way it is” is far more often “the way we see it from where we are.”

As we continue to “grow up in all things into Him who is the head” (Ephesians 4:15), remember to have patience with yourself—and others.

It might be a while before we can see the countertops.