Perspective changes everything. How you see the world has more to do with your happiness than almost anything else. You can’t always control what happens to you—but you can control how you see what happens. And that one choice changes everything.

Jesus put it this way:

“Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness.” —Luke 11:34–35

Jesus wasn’t talking about eyesight; He was talking about insight. Your “eye” is your inner lens—the way you perceive reality. If your eyes are clear, you see God’s hand in everything, and your whole life fills with light. But if your eyes are clouded—by resentment, pride, fear, or cynicism—you can live in the same world as everyone else and still experience it as dark.

You experience the same reality as everyone else—but through your eyes, you make it heaven or you make it hell.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning captured this perfectly in four lines:

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

― Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Do you see the world afire with God, or are you plucking blackberries?

The Subway Story

Stephen Covey once told a story that beautifully captures this truth. One quiet Sunday morning in New York, Covey was riding a subway. Everything was calm—people reading, resting, lost in their own thoughts. Then a man entered with his children. The kids were loud, wild, out of control. They shouted, threw things, and grabbed at people’s newspapers. Covey could feel frustration rising, and everyone else looked irritated too.

Finally, Covey said, as calmly as he could, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you could control them a little more?”

The man looked up, as if waking from a daze. “Oh, you’re right,” he said softly. “I guess I should do something. We just came from the hospital. Their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

In an instant, everything changed. The situation didn’t change—the children were still loud—but Covey’s perspective did. His irritation melted into compassion. The same scene, the same noise, the same people—but now the light had come on.

That’s what Jesus meant when He said, “If your eyes are healthy, your whole body is full of light.”