In his initial encounter with God, Moses sees a grand vision and then is left to himself and others the words “now I know that man is nothing which thing I had never supposed”.
Likewise King Benjamin emphasized how we should recognize our own nothingness before God.
So how do we reconcile these paradoxical statements with others that talk about how the worth of souls is great in the sight of God, and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son?
Often we can become so bogged down in our own lives that all of the tragic things we experience seem to be overwhelming, and like Enoch of old, we refuse to be comforted.
Yet Enoch was told to be of good cheer and to “look.”
There is incredible value and looking at your life through the eyes of heaven, from a higher plane and where we currently stand.
Short of communing with God and having a grand vision there are other ways that we can gain even a little bit greater perspective.
One is by physically moving yourself to higher ground. I like to hike up to the foothills behind my house where I can look down on the city and my neighborhood and contemplate the lives being lived in this vast sea of homes.
Up there everything seems to be so peaceful, quiet, and orderly, the tiny turmoils below are imperceptible to me from where I stand.
If the area you live is flat, open up Google maps, find your house take a look at the satellite view and slowly back away.
I have had moments up in those foothills where considered my life, and like Moses, have thought about how small and really insignificant my life really seems in the grand scheme of things.
If we return to Moses we find him pulling himself up from the dirt and immediately challenged by the adversary.
Whatever sense of nothingness he felt concerning himself, that changed during this confrontation when he realized another important truth, though individually he was perhaps nothing when compared to the great scheme, individually he was a son of God.
Perspective can help us understand that the value of something is not in its size but in its qualities.
Like the priceless pearl or the powerful potential of the mustard seed, we each have value that we don’t understand and may not perceive, either because we do not have eyes to see or we have not yet grown into our potential.
It is only by pouring ourselves into the Scriptures, visiting the temple, and actually communing with God that we see ourselves in the grand scheme.
