Day 14: Living Daily in Reality: The Way We Live Now
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Living daily in reality means living lives that have been planned by the
infinite father-creator who knows how many times every fly in the world
beats its wings each minute. Although his love for us necessitates his
making us free to love him or not, each of us has been put here by him to
do something that he has planned for us alone. Obviously the state of our
personal and international lives shows that we have not made the best
choices or the choices that we would expect him to approve.

Generally, few of us have seriously accepted that we were made by a
creator who cared for us so much that he made us inside his own son so
that we could be like him. From we were born we’ve assumed that we were
on our own – after a few years of help from our parents. Normally we’ve
taken it for granted that it was up to us to decide how we were going to
survive. It’s simple to see there are six billion other people like
ourselves so it’s up to us to get enough food, shelter, and clothing to
maintain life. You quickly see that this means getting as good a job as
you can so education will help, but most of all you see that you have to
compete with thousands of other human beings who are thinking the same
thing as you are.

Moreover, even at school you feel inside that others
don’t seem to see how absolutely unique you are; that’s why the approval
and admiration of your peers becomes so important: Little League is not
just fun; sport is not just games; these things can bring you respect and
even promotion. But along with these concerns you yearn for that
combination of excitement and contentment that gives you a sense of
well-being and happiness. So pleasure of all kinds becomes an important
part of your life.

The result of this view of reality is that most of us find ourselves
pretty indifferent to what our maker may or may not want: through teen
years and into the twenties we are like little machines that live each
day to get enough things to give us some sense of security, enough
prestige to get some feeling of significance, and enough pleasures to
give us some happiness. And the only source of this security,
significance, and happiness is this world around us with its things, its
people, and its pleasant circumstances and surroundings. So we grow
utterly dependent not on the creator but on the creation. The result is
we have no idea why we were put here, and we have little time to think
about such things because life has just carried us along so fast that we
haven’t noticed the time going.

Needless to say, this chaotic, meaningless rat-race is far removed from
what your creator has in mind, but wouldn’t he have foreseen some of this?
If he made us, wouldn’t he have foreseen all of it? Of course, so
let’s talk together again about this.