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Living Daily in Reality

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Lesson 34 of 81
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Day 34: Two Worlds


Day 34: Living Daily in Reality: Two Worlds ===========================================

Living daily in reality is living in things as they are; and things – or our present circumstances – are what our maker has allowed us to make of his world. We like to think that some benevolent god will correct any mistakes we make so that we don’t have to suffer the consequences of our actions; but reality is not like that. Our maker wants friends – sons and daughters like his only Son who lived here in the first century in Palestine – children who are free to love him or themselves. So he has arranged things so that we live in the mess we have made – when we cut another person with our words or our swords, we live in the resulting alienation and stress. As we bring up children in self-love we face the chaos of an irresponsible generation.

But the paradox of our deteriorating world is that our maker foresaw all this and therefore created it in the first place inside his own son so that He himself could bear and reverse its consequences outside this limited time-space universe. He manifests this reality in glimpses of his beauty and glory that we see in a Sister Teresa or a little flower pushing up through slabs of concrete or the little Jewish girl saying to the German guard in the gas-chamber “leave him alone, my precious brother will die with me”. All of these are evidences of the real world that already exists in dependence on its maker – while we exist in the world that we have made by our dependence on ourselves.

But why? So that we can see the difference – the great difference between living as if we have no maker and living in the reality that we have a maker who loves us and wants us to live in his love. This is why his son said these words to his companions in Palestine – “I have called you friends because a servant does not know what his master is doing”. At this very moment we are actually in God, i.e. in his Son, Christ, but we have been given this temporary exterior creatureliness so that we can see what life without or outside God is like. The result is this perverted world that we have mutilated by living as if we’re not in God but in a separated creature-hood.

Our Maker foresaw all this and knew that we hadn’t the ability to reverse the perversion of ourselves and our world, so in the timeless, instantaneous moment of reality in which He exists He destroyed this mess and remade us and it in Himself. This is the final reality that exists now alongside, above, and around this present world. It’s the cosmic change that is expressed in this time-space world by Jesus’ death in the first century – “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” – remaking and renovating it to what it was originally planned to be. That is the new world that exists in eternity and can manifest its reality here in our present sphere. So – our free will is given another chance to live and experience the power of God’s uncreated life rather than the temporary created life of our independent selves and autonomous

world.

At times we are able to glimpse this miracle from outer space when another human-being unexpectedly recovers from a disease that should have killed them or a difficult financial or social situation suddenly turns right around and seems to solve itself. But often we see it after we have changed our attitude so we attribute our success to positive thinking rather than to a parallel universe.