What is in a Name?

That might be overstating the question a bit.  Technically "What is in a name?" is a very deep question, that I intend to address at some point in the future.  For now, I will limit my discourse to: what is in the name "Seeing the Forest from the Trees" and why I chose that phrase as the title for this project.

Besides being an idiom for the concept of discerning the larger pattern from a collection of smaller parts, it has other more personal meanings.  As I commute back and forth from NorCal to my job in LA, my co-workers down south refer to where I live as "up in the trees."  I also do a lot of climbing in actual trees, usually pertaining to work on ropes courses, and so I spend a lot of time, some of my favorite time really, seeing the forest, from the trees.  I am actually pictured in the background, silhouetted working up in the trees, if you look closely.

Since moving back to Northern California almost exactly a year ago, God has introduced me to a wide variety of new things that have changed my perspective in many ways.  I have had the opportunity to observe two very different spiritual viewpoints contrasted again each other on a daily basis.  I have read many books and learned from many different conversations.  At this point, the biggest question I am confronted with on a daily basis is: what does God want me to do with the freedom he has given me?  The challenge is in figuring out how each of these diverse things I have learned applies to that question.  Writing about them will allow me to explore how they relate to each other and I am hoping that doing so will help me identify how they all fit together.

Each thing I have learned is a tree, but seeing every tree individually doesn't mean that you know how they all interact in a forest, nor what the forest looks like as a whole when you take the time to step back and look at it.  This blog is an attempt to step back and take a look at all of the things I have been learning and thinking about.  So once that phrase occurred to me, it seemed like the perfect title, and a good place to start. And a title is the first thing that Google asks for when you begin a new blog, after all.