When I was growing up, one of the greatest gifts my father gave me was perspective.

Dad had his share of health challenges. Difficult things happened. Life wasn’t always easy. But he had one phrase that came out whenever things weren’t going quite to plan:

“It could be worse. We could be in Afghanistan.”

Yes, I know. It’s horribly politically incorrect…..I’m not condoning it just acknowledging it as my reality growing up….

It became something of a family joke because Dad said it all the time. But beneath the slightly dubious phrase was something that has stayed with me: perspective.

I was thinking about it again this morning as I watched the news.

Somewhere, someone may have started today with only the clothes on their back, preparing to climb into a small boat and attempt to cross the Channel.

Someone else may have woken trapped underground after a disaster, waiting and hoping to be rescued.

Someone started today not knowing where their next meal would come from.

Someone doesn’t know where they will sleep tonight.

And then I thought about how my own Saturday began.

I woke up in a bed.

I was safe, in a house.

I wandered through to the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea. Such an ordinary thing. But I could do it because clean water came out of the tap. There were teabags in the cupboard and milk in the fridge.

I sat on the sofa and watched Saturday Kitchen. The television worked because I had electricity. I had food. I had shelter. I had time to have a slow start to the day.

None of those things felt particularly remarkable.

But you see….. Perspective has a way of making the ordinary remarkable again.

There is, of course, a danger in comparing our lives with the suffering of others. We can end up telling ourselves that our problems don’t matter because somebody else has it worse.

That’s not what I’m saying.

Pain isn’t a competition.

Something can be difficult for me while somebody else is facing something much harder. One doesn’t cancel the other out.

And I believe in a God who cares about the detail. Jesus tells us that even the hairs on our heads are numbered. What matters to us matters to Him. If today is a bad day in the context of our lives, we don’t have to pretend otherwise.

But I’ve discovered that when my world starts to feel too big, it helps me to do two things:

Look up. And look out.

I look up because I need reminding that I am not carrying life on my own.

The psalmist asks:

“Where does my help come from?”

And answers:

“My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

And then I look out.

Beyond myself. Beyond whatever has occupied my thoughts today. Beyond the little patch of the world that currently feels enormous.

Looking out doesn’t make my problems disappear.

It simply puts them back into perspective.

Perhaps Dad’s rather politically incorrect phrase taught me something more profound than any of us realised at the time.

Yes, today might be difficult.

Yes, something might have gone wrong.

Yes, I might genuinely be having a bad day.

But I can still notice the bed I woke up in. The roof above me. The water from the tap. The cup of tea. The people who love me. The things I normally don’t even notice.

And perhaps gratitude and difficulty can sit alongside one another.

And I write this not as theory but as something I often need to practise. Yesterday sitting in hospital waiting for a routine colonoscopy, I felt pretty miserable as I felt really unwell – but as I sat there I could hear my Dad reminding me that there are many people in the world who would not even be able to access the test…..who dream of sitting in an NHS hospital….its all about perspective.

So if today feels like a bad day, perhaps there are two questions worth asking:

Do I need to look up?

Or do I need to look out?

Maybe both.