My aunt bought me a set of left-handed pencils for Christmas. I’ve always appreciated her thoughtfulness in buying products designed specifically for lefties. This time, my gratitude was coupled with amusement at the thought of a pencil being “left-handed.”

I mean, what exactly would distinguish a left-handed pencil from a right-handed pencil? Gel pens are designed for right-handed use, in that the ink often stops flowing when the angle of use is “wrong” (i.e., “left-handed”), but pencils are not subject to the “wrong angle” design problem. As far as I could tell, my aunt’s gift qualified as “left-handed” only because the pencils were printed with funny sayings about left-handedness. I particularly enjoyed the following two sayings: “I make left-handed scissors look good” and “The weird pencil.”

While using “the weird pencil” a few months after Christmas, I noticed that something looked “wrong” about the text printed on the pencil. I stopped working on whatever project it was that required the use of a pencil and began thinking about the text on the pencil. Slowly, I began to suspect that there might actually be a difference between left-handed and right-handed pencils.

To test the partially formed theory flitting around the edges of my mind, I pulled a conventional “right-handed” pencil from the pencil can on my desk, holding it in my left hand. I looked at the printing on the pencil, then transferred the pencil to my right hand. Then I picked up “the weird pencil,” holding it in my left hand. I transferred the left-handed pencil to my right hand.

Well, I’ll be darned. There is, indeed, a difference between right-handed and left-handed pencils.

The text printed on a “conventional” pencil is upside down when used by a left-handed person. The text rights itself as soon as the pencil is transferred to the user’s right hand. Meanwhile, the left-handed pencils gifted to me by my aunt reverse the situation: the text is right-side up when used by a left-handed person and flips itself upside down when the pencil is transferred to the user’s right hand.

Holy cow! For forty-however-many years, I’ve been using pencils without even noticing that I’ve been reading the text printed on the pencil upside down.

Mind you, being able to read upside down is a valuable skill. It has frequently been useful in both my career as a teacher and my career as a choir director. I can’t really complain about the fact that I have no doubt subconsciously honed my upside-down-reading skills through years’ worth of using pencils printed for right-handed people. But I am somewhat disturbed by the fact that I never noticed I was looking at the text on the pencil upside down until I suddenly had an opportunity to view pencil text from a different perspective. The wrong perspective was so familiar that I didn’t even recognize it as wrong.

How many of us are so accustomed to viewing our spiritual lives from the “wrong perspective” that we don’t even realize we’ve got the wrong perspective? How much time do we spend gauging our worth and our happiness using the worldly lens of material success? How much more joyful might we be if we used the spiritual lens of a Creator who loves us just because we are? What new worlds will open to us when we recognize that there are other ways to see? What delightful surprises will we discover when we shift angles, having realized that we’ve been seeing things, judging things, valuing things from the wrong perspective?

Let us pray for one another as we seek, find, and respond to the tiny clues everywhere and in everyone that help us find the right perspective.

-Lori Randall

Click here to enjoy one artist’s interpretation of the power that lies in a changed perspective!