One of the things I’ve always loved about traveling is how my perspective shifts. I get outside my comfort zone and walk in someone else’s path—not their shoes, but at least I see a different way of living or thinking. I don’t want to lose that willingness to shift perspective and listen long enough to at least have a small understanding of someone else’s way of doing life.

I am realizing that a lot of our relationship with God is about changing our perspective as well, and starting to receive God’s instead. I think prayer is entering into a conversation with God and allowing Him to shift our perspective—to think differently about whatever situation is in front of us, and to accept that what we can see may not be the whole picture. We are invited into life that surpasses anything we could have imagined.

This is why when we try to anticipate beauty from ashes, or all things being worked together for good, we get a little stuck. We can’t see how its possible because we don’t have the perspective that God does. I love that not one thing in this world can defeat what God is doing in us. I meet so many people who feel they can never amount to anything because of what has happened in their lives or what they have chosen. Yet that is never God’s perspective. He sees who you are the whole time, and nothing can change or alter that. He is making you to become who you already are, which means your identity is already true, and there is also a process of revelation as He shows you who He is through you more and more.

Sometimes I limit what Jesus is doing to what I can see and understand in my circumstances, but He is showing me over and over again that He often does things in the most upside down and backwards way that I could imagine. That’s why I need a perspective shift. I keep asking for His perspective, or at least the knowledge that what I can see isn’t the only thing that’s true or real.

When I see an obstacle that feels insurmountable, I want to hear from Jesus about how we are going to get over it. When I feel I have made a mistake that alters my whole life in a negative way, I want to hear from Jesus about how He isn’t afraid of my failure and will still bring good from it. When a story feels too hard, too much, too broken, I want to hear from Jesus about how not one thing is too much for Him, and His love will heal all the brokenness. This is where I start to understand that we are indeed invincible, not because we don’t feel pain, but because no matter what we encounter, we can live free and rise above it. We don’t have to cower in fear.

This is how we are triumphant—more than conquerors over all things—because His love makes us so. He has made us to be conquerors, not conquered. This doesn’t mean militarily, but rather in every circumstance I can be unconquered by fear or guilt or failure. Instead, I can walk forward knowing the truth that God has made me to be more than a conqueror, even when I don’t see how it could be possible yet.

Yet even in the midst of all these things, we triumph over them all, for God has made us to be more than conquerors, and his demonstrated love is our glorious victory over everything! Romans 8:37