A light-focused perspective
Benefits of positive health and a kingdom gaze
In the last post, we discussed the importance of recognizing the interplay between mind, body, and spirit in navigating our health (see link below).
Today, we’ll move on to the second principle I plan to emphasize. Here’s a reminder of all three:
The interconnectedness of health
A light-focused perspective
Health as a walk
This second point is more of a paradigm shift: Moving our gaze from what ails us in this world to the wholeness, healing, and blessing God created us for. I will call this a light-focused perspective.
Healthcare: Well-being and positive health
In a previous post, we looked at two definitions of health. The first is defined by the absence of illness, the second by the presence of positive well-being. The beauty is, we can often achieve the former by focusing on the latter.
Focusing on well-being can be helpful in several ways:
It is more preventative than reactive, which tends to address issues at their root cause rather than waiting for and addressing symptoms as they emerge.
The individual is an active versus passive participant in their health, which is more empowering and often more effective.
It reinforces positive health behaviors and pathways that can lead to habit formation and more permanent changes.
We see the adoption of this new perspective in healthcare with the rise of practices such as functional and lifestyle medicines, positive psychology, and life coaching. Though each has different emphases, they all offer holistic, individualized, preventative, and wellness-centered approaches.
I am not advocating we throw all traditional Western medicine out the window. There are still medications, treatments, and procedures that are crucial for specific illnesses and conditions. But the positive approaches can be done in unison with, and often enhance, these conventional practices.
Research has shown that improvements in areas such as activity level, stress management, sleep, diet, social connectedness, and substance abuse have profound health benefits. It also demonstrates the importance of cultivating traits like gratitude, optimism, resilience, meaning, purpose, and identity for our overall health.
Interlude: How we perceive light
Imagine spending the morning in a dimly lit room. All of a sudden, we decide to go outside where it’s a clear, sunny day. We hear a noise in the sky and look up. The brightness of the sun is overwhelming. We squint and shield our eyes with our hands, but still struggle to discern any details above us.
Then contemplate the reverse. We’ve spent the whole morning in the sun. Suddenly, we need to rush back inside to grab something from the bathroom cabinet. In our haste, we forget to turn on the light. Now we’re fumbling around and can’t tell what type of tube we just removed from the shelf.
Similar to our eyes, our minds, bodies, and spirits respond and adapt to our environment. They do not quickly or easily switch between high contrasts like light or dark, safe or dangerous, peaceful or stressful.
If we set our gaze on the beneficial or beautiful, those pathways become more ingrained and easier to traverse. Conversely, if we’re always looking at what is wrong with the world, the difficulties in our own lives and health, then those networks become more entrenched and triggered.
Neuroscience says, “nerves that fire together, wire together.” The Bible says to fix your eyes on Jesus (Hebrews 12:2) and your mind on things above (Colossians 3:2).
Faith: God in the light of His Kingdom
This perspective shift has taken me most of my life to embrace in my relationship with God. The eyes of my heart were naturally attuned to the dark. I saw all the ways the world and I fall short of what we were meant to be. Thankfully, this despair led to a longing that helped me see the need for a Redeemer and feel the embrace of a Comforter.
I am not alone in finding and connecting to God in the darkness. I rejoice that we have a God who enters into human suffering and rescues us from hopelessness! But by abiding in the same place where we met Him, our Christian walk can stall.
Focusing on God in His Kingdom, rather than in the shadows of this world, allows us to perceive aspects of His character that are only visible in the light of His blessing and promises. This grows our faith in a couple of significant ways:
It deepens our relationship with Him by allowing us to perceive the fullness of His love and the multitude of His names.
It generates more personal transformation as this deeper relationship increases our capacity to be filled and empowered.
This does not mean ignoring the darkness
This is not, as the kids say, Toxic Positivity. We should not deny or avoid the disease and difficulties in our lives. We can, and should, acknowledge them, yet take care not to reinforce or wallow in them.
There are moments, and even stages of our lives, when to move forward, we must firmly address the darkness. Grappling with our pain can be a necessary step towards conviction and repentance, processing grief, and the integration of abuse or trauma.
But it is imperative that when we do stand and face darkness, we learn to do so within the protection and unconditional love of the Light.
Light-focused perspective
Where then is our present gaze? Do we view health as the absence of illness, and God as the opposite of darkness? Or health as the presence of thriving, God as the full expression of love?
If we don’t make a conscious decision, the world will choose for us. We are swimming in a sea of clearly articulated, in-depth information, teasing out the details of the darkness.
Will we choose to swim upstream and spend time appreciating concepts of faith, health, and life in the light?
Jesus calls himself the Light of the World. Let’s choose to bask in the glory of that title and allow it to recreate us.
Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Have you noticed any health correlations with times in your life when you were focused more on light/positive or dark/negative circumstances?
One of the best books I've ever read is:
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans and Anna Rosling.
If anyone is looking to nurture a positive perspective, give it a read, I just about promise you will not be disappointed. It is perhaps not specifically light-focused in the Christian sense, but I'd surely recommend it to every Christian.
I think this is a great, and underappreciated, point. In media, they say, "if it bleeds, it leads". Our attention is easily grabbed by the negative. And because a lot of media is designed to gather and hold our attention, it leans heavily that way as well.
"Local school board maintains its normal strong performance with little fanfare or controversy". "For the 20th year in a row, XYZ metric has improved worldwide by an average of 0.2%". These are not the headlines that draw a million clicks, nor the videos that go viral.
To generate attention, money, or interest, the easiest route is to evoke strong emotion, often the easiest ones to evoke are fear and anger, and the easiest way to do so is to create drama or conflict.
By stoking fear and anger, through drama and conflict, you can make an interesting reality TV show, drum up a fair amount of money for a political candidate, have a video clip go viral, or run a successful news (well, maybe opinion) organization.
What you cannot do is live a peaceful, healthy life that way. There are a number of theoretically healing spaces that in practice focus heavily on the negative, are extremely critical and bitter, and seem to leave people mired in despair and self-focus.
One opposite of a light-focused perspective is a dark-focused perspective, and we see too much of that, but I think another opposite can be a self-focused perspective, where we don't even know if we're in the light or the dark, because we are looking at nothing but ourselves, which also isn't healthy.