For a few days, I have been looking at a section of my backyard. This is what it looked like.
As you can see, it was an area filled with dandelions that had gone to seed. It was nice to see the yellow flowers dot the area, but the tall seed stalks looked so out of place. Whenever I would look at this, the thoughts that would come to my mind were in the likes of "I need to mow that down", "that sure looks ugly", and "I hope no one complains about my yard".
During the same time, along my daily walks, I would see the following:
You can see the dandelion seed heads barely making it through the tall grass providing a welcoming change to the flowing green.
So this got me thinking. Could it be that the dandelions in my yard were not the problem itself, even though it appeared to be so? Perhaps, the problem in my yard was not the fact that I had dandelions that had gone to seed, or that I had allowed them to grow this tall.
If the dandelions looked perfectly dotting the tall grass, and ugly in my short cut grass, could it be then that the problem in my yard was actually the mowing of the grass? Could it be that the mowing of the grass created an unnatural setting upon which natural plants looked "unnatural"? That is certainly a shift in perception.
If you see the dandelions as the problem, then the actions that one would take to solve the problem would be quite different than if you recognize the short grass as the problem. One would require the "battle of eradication" of "weeds", while the other would require simply letting the grass grow tall. One is "toil, sweat, spend money", the other is "relax, enjoy, keep your money".
A slight shift in perception does indeed make a difference.
When an outstandingly Good, Ethical, Respectful, Faithful man or woman walks upon the land the tendency is for society to try to "mow him / her down" to its low standards. Perhaps destroying such exemplary measure is not the answer. Perhaps the answer is for everyone else to rise up to their full and highest potential. In a society were everyone is allowed to walk upright in their Spiritual Journey with the Father, such individuals become indeed a welcomed occurrence.