A Different Perspective Official Podcast - Big Picture Faith // By Faith, Part 2

In the busyness of our lives, it’s really easy to lose sight of the big picture. Why am I here, where am I headed, what’s it all about? So often it’s when we’ve been working so hard at life and one day we lift up our head and start asking those questions, that people have what they call their midlife crisis.

Are you familiar with that term, that saying that "someone’s lost the plot"? What it means is that we've lost sight of where we're going, we've lost sight of the objective, we've managed to get things completely out of kilter, out of balance or out of whack as we Australians like to say.

"Oh man ... hasn't he lost the plot?" I don't know about you but there are times in my life where I've lost the plot. Come on, there are times in your life too when you've lost the plot. And often it happens because we've become so focused on just one thing in our lives, maybe it's a single relationship or a single thing that's not quite right.

When we're hurting we focus just on that one thing that's hurting. Sometimes we lose the plot when we're so focused on making ourselves happy that we forget about everyone and everything else and somehow the more we try to make ourselves happy the more empty we feel. It seems to me that the one sure way of feeling depressed is trying really hard to make yourself happy.

Why? Because we don't live in a perfect world that all clicks into place around us to make us happy, we don't live in a world where everyone and everything bows down at our feet and says, 'Hey here I am, I want to make you happy, what can I do for you?' And so we try so hard to make ourselves happy that we simply lose the plot.

A good friend of mine in the UK, Derek Stringer, has a radio program called, "Finding The Plot", it's probably not such a bad name when you think about it. I think the reason we lose the plot is that we lose sight of the big picture.

We're so busy working hard in life, pedalling harder, working faster, especially when the storm strikes, especially when there's a head wind slowing us down, it's the easiest thing in the world to lose sight of the big picture, the context, the sense of meaning and purpose and direction that maybe once seemed so clear. We had it for our lives and now the harder we go at it the murkier it appears to be.

Once it was clear when we were young, now it seems blurry. Sometimes it's like living our lives in a fog, you know what I'm on about here right? And then one day you wake up and you think to yourself, hang on, I've lost the plot and that right there is a scary place to be.

I found myself in that situation when I'm busy, working hard, even when I'm doing things for God. None of us is immune here. I don't get some exemption ticket from this stuff just because I work in a Christian ministry. This is real life, this is real stuff.

What we're talking about this week on the program and in fact over the next few weeks is faith. There's