Day 18 Seeing Differently

I spied them through the streaming throngs of shoppers at the farmers’ market.

“Are those cloud berries?” I asked the farmer who stood offering samples of his crops.

“You know what cloud berries are? Must be Swedish.” I laughed. I do and I am, I told him.

I was, however, wrong about the berries. They were not cloud berries (not even that they grow in non-arctic soil), but orangey currants instead. Still, the farmer told me, he was impressed with my keen berry eyes. As was I.

Perhaps neither of us should have been that impressed, though. According to a study led by Israel Abramov, a psychology professor from Brooklyn College, men and women see differently. And, as a woman, spotting berries is among the things my female eyes were made to do.


“Females are better at discriminating among colors,” the study said, “while males excel at tracking fast-moving objects and discerning detail from a distance --evolutionary adaptations possibly linked to our hunter-gatherer past.”

All this is to say that the study thinks my ability to spot berries from across a farmers’ market is evolution at work, something that made my prehistoric sisters’ berry-picking role easier.

Now, normally, this sort of talk makes me nervous. Rebellious, even. Normally whenever I’m told what I should be or do because of my gender or heritage or education or location, my immediate instinct is to prove them wrong, to bust out of whatever box I feel tightening around me. (Oh, yeah!)

But my reaction to this study was quite different. The idea that we see the world differently--whether because of gender or because of experience or quality of eye sight or because of opinions or knowledge or whatever - gets me pretty excited. Especially when there are hints that God created us or allowed us to evolve to see things differently. Although, I confess: I’m not really as interested in how well women see berries or men chase prey as I am in how we see issues and how we see God Himself at work in this world.

Especially as we sit knee-deep in election season--when we sift through politically charged Facebook statuses and take digs in casual conversation--It’s wonderful to imagine that it really is true that some of us vote one way, and some another, not because we’re smart or stupid or ill-informed. Maybe, just maybe, we vote differently because God made us to see issues and solutions differently. Not because one is wrong or right or good or bad, but because we are simply different.

Same goes with how we see God in the macro--or doctrine in the micro. It’s wonderful to be able to believe that just as God allowed our physical vision to evolve depending on our gender roles during a time period, so might He have allowed our views to evolve, so might He have gifted us with different vision, different ideas, different opinions.

Things that make this world richer and lives more interesting, if we see them in that light.

God, help us to "see differently" and help the Christian community to be more open do different perspectives. Amen.