Point

I am not a Marshall McLuhan scholar by any stretch of the imagination. I know enought about him to realize that even though his life was filled with writing scholarly tomes and giving lectures, he approached life in a rather simple way.

My favorite McLuhan quote is "A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."

He was educated at Cambridge, heavily influenced by another of my favorites...G.K. Chesterton, and a convert to Roman Catholicism. Writing heavily in the area of media and its influence he is credited with coining the phrase, "the medium is the message."

Perhaps that is why his quote about "point of view" is so intriguing to me.

I have seen people hold tenaciously to their "point of view" while sacrificing an inquiry into "insight and understanding." It makes me wonder if this might be the source of many conflicts in the places we work, in our relationships and in the places we worship.

How often I have seen people close their mind to any insight or new understanding because it conflicted with their "point of view."

What if our "point of view" is just that....a "point?" What if our view ought to be more comprehensive than some "point" on a line? What if our "point of view" ought to have an elasticity to it that allows new "insights and understandings?"

The apostle Paul understood this before Marsall McLuhan ever thought about it. He wrote, "Even though I am free of the demands and expectations of everyone, I have voluntarily become a servant to any and all in order to reach a wide range of people: religious, nonreligious, meticulous moralists, loose-living immoralists, the defeated, the demoralized—whoever. I didn't take on their way of life. I kept my bearings in Christ—but I entered their world and tried to experience things from their point of view. I've become just about every sort of servant there is in my attempts to lead those I meet into a God-saved life. I did all this because of the Message. I didn't just want to talk about it; I wanted to be in on it!" I Corinthians 9:19 The Message.

What's your "point of view?"

I guess it depends on where you're standing.

What do you think?