Worldviews are like the picture on the box of a jigsaw puzzle. With hundreds of pieces to arrange, having a well-formed image of what it is you’re piecing together is essential to being able to determine where the jigsaw piece in front of you fits. If you start with the wrong ‘big picture’, getting the puzzle to go together well can be challenging. But, start with the right picture, and it becomes relatively easy to work out what each piece is, and where it fits.

Worldviews are like prescription sunglasses. You forget that they are perched on your nose, but everything that you see is coloured and brought in to focus by them. If your prescription is wrong, or your colour tint is too strong, your glasses filter out or distort the light reaching your eyes, making important things like traffic lights harder to see.

Worldviews are like the foundations of a building. They are almost never visible, and digging down to see them is difficult. But if they are mislaid, everyone in the building suffers.

Worldviews are like stories. They have plot-lines, scenes, themes, characters (heroes, bad-guys and extras), and a whole host of other information that helps us work out what meaning and importance the author intended to convey when they chose to retell a particular collection of events. Likewise, it is the themes, plot-lines and other narrative elements that we assume are at work in our lives that serve to give meaning and purpose to the whole of life.