Perspective

    Yesterday, I flew from Providence, Rhode Island to Chicago Midway Airport and changed planes, to continue on to Indianapolis. It was a sunny, clear day, but cold (-4 F) in Chicago. I usually try to get a window seat on the airplane, because I always am in awe of the view from the airplane. It seems a minor miracle to leave the solid ground and watch the familiar trappings of our lives (houses, cars, streets, lakes, parking lots, trains, towers) become smaller and smaller, until they look like a child's toy set. The houses, with their little wisps of smoke, emitting from tiny chimneys, look like paper homes or like from a storybook. The trains, colorfully flowing along winding tracks, look like little boys' train sets.
    As the plane goes higher and higher, even these features become too small to distinguish and fade in the distance. It is a time to sit back and reflect on the larger picture and see how vast the land is and how individual people and trappings of our life are too small to be seen from that height. How did this complexity come together? Who oversees this wonder?