Filters

Each one of us has a filter through which we see the world. With that filter we are able to focus on certain things and not on others. Our filter basically encourages to choose one path over another, choose one person over another, to choose one life over another. Our filter becomes our personality. According to some researches our filter is set in place by the time we are 15.
Since we see the world through our filter, we also see people through that filter as well. We fail to see others for who they truly are. Instead we tend to focus on aspects of others and ignore other attributes. Our perceptions of people will become the reality of our relationship with them. Our relationships as adults are usually formed from the relationships we had as children.
If we had an over emotional, controlling, or absent mother, it will affect or relationship with women. If we had a loving, caring, and attentive mother, our relationships with women will also reflect that. If we came for an emotional rich family, it will encourage us to reach out and befriend others. If we came from an emotionally chaotic or depleted family, it will encourage us to protect ourselves either by isolating ourselves or by controlling others. There is a saying about financial wealth that could easliy be applied here:The emotional rich get richer while the emotional poor get poorer.
What if we weren't born into an emotionally rich family? What if our background is so full of brokenness, chaos, or addiction that there seems as if there is no hope? What if we started creating the same depraved legacy our parents or grandparents started? Can we possibly end the emotionally desolate family tree that is ours?
The answer of course is yes. Yes we can, through the help of One who is stronger than you or I.
We do not have to continue the cycle. We can choose to momentous effort to stop. But it is not an easy choice. It will be a struggle. It will be hard. We will have to not only face our own fears and our own pain but that also of our family. If we truly want to transform the inheritance we give our own children, we first have to take stock of the inheritance we were given which created our filter. We have to look at our filter's influence in order to understand that our filter does not always adequately perceive the world. We must identify those areas and the context in which they formed in order to move on.