The Brother's Bloom

[Penelope (Rachel Weisz) grew up as a recluse because her mother believed her to be sick, which later found out she wasn't really, but then Penelope stayed to take care of her dying mother.]

Penelope brings out a great point about perspective.  Given her childhood and the way she was treated she could have felt cheated, that she had a wasted life, but she didn't.  Why?  Penelope recognizes that you can actually have a meaningful life that it is all a matter of perspective.  Some people would look at her life and say that is was useless, pointless since she spent all day indoors not doing anything of merit.  People might draw the same conclusion about cloistered religious, as I sometimes do.  But why is it that their life is considered wasted, or cheated?  Just because I cannot see the meaning there, does not mean that there is not meaning.  It is a matter of perspective. 

She also brought up the point of telling her own story, which is important, but we must also remember that there is a grander storyteller than ourselves, namely the Creator, God.  It is God that asks us to participate in our own story.  This is the very premise of C.S. Lewis' conception of Heaven and Hell in his book the Great Divorce.  He describes the difference between the two as perspective.  When we, hopefully, get to heaven it has a retroactive effect that all the things in our life, even the bad stuff, have lead us exactly to here.  Hell is retroactive as well, but in the negative.  Our life will have lead us there, and we will come to realize that even the good stuff were sources of pain, bringing us to the reality of hell.  So you see it is matter of perspective.  

Do you like out on your life and see a victim who has been acted upon?  Or do you see a hero, somebody to act?  God made us to be the hero in our own story, not somebody to be cheated, or wasted.  How much time do we waste blabbering on about what we have lost, or how so so acted? "When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, 'Lord, what about him?' Jesus said to him, 'What if I want him to remain until I come?  What concern is it of yours? You follow me.'" (Jn. 21:22)  The only persons actions, and ultimately salvation, we have control over is our own.