How’s Your Depth Perception?I learned an interesting and expensive physiological lesson this past week—our depth perception is not as strong as our ability to perceive lateral or vertical motion.
Last Saturday I was at Darden Towe park, taking advantage of the sunny day to fly my new drone and get footage that I had planned to use for a Lent video at church. I was flying it over the river and bringing it back home when I remembered a tip I had seen the night before on a YouTube video about keeping your drone within your line of sight. I looked up to make sure I could see my drone, and as I looked up, my thumb shifted on my controller and the aircraft started to drift. However, since that leftward drift was directly toward where I was standing, and I was looking at the drone instead of my screen that shows the drone’s point of view, my depth perception didn’t register that it was headed for a tree. The next thing I know, it’s bouncing off the branches and dropping into the river. My treasured new aircraft was now just a painful memory (enhanced by the fact that I have the video of the crash to make me relive it).
I read this week that our depth perception isn’t nearly as sharp as our lateral and vertical perception. And I think that’s true in a lot of ways. I could easily discern the slightest movement when my drone was going up or down, left or right in my line of sight—even from a distance. But when I needed to be able to detect changes in depth, I was at a loss.
I think this happens to us in our perception of others as well. We’re good at noticing surface things about people—looks, accents, clothing, piercings, tattoos, etc. But often we don’t go deep enough to see their inner character or find out enough about them to understand a little about what makes them tick.
The same thing can happen when we look in the mirror. We see the outer things, but don’t usually take the time to look deeper to see if our heart is growing and changing to become more like the heart of Christ. Because for the Christian, that’s what God really wants for us.
That’s why we’re celebrating Lent. It’s an opportunity for us to take a deeper look at ourselves and work to become more and more like Christ as we prepare to celebrate His death and resurrection at Easter. To help with that, we’ve prepared several special services, along with daily devotions that will be available on our website, our app, and our Facebook page to help you look a little deeper. And we strongly encourage you to take advantage of them and improve your “depth perception.”
Thanks to Celebrate Recovery I didn’t scream or throw or punch anything when my drone went down. In fact, while I was extremely upset that I had lost it, amazingly I didn’t get angry. If this had happened a few years ago, such would not have been the case. So at least that cloud has a silver lining. But that lining was much easier to detect in 4K video from 1000 feet in the air!