Day 23: Living Daily in Reality: The Reconciliation
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Living daily in reality is letting the son of our creator live through us
the life his father has planned for you and for me. But we despise that
whole reality and shift for ourselves – we never think of God living in
us and wouldn’t put up with it if we got the chance. So we have all lived
a life of unreality – regarding ourselves as somehow self-made and
independent of any visible support. Thus we have become little egotistic
automatons doing our own thing – using whomever or whatever we need to
make ourselves successful. The result is a world that is strained and
stressed – swaying between a half-hearted happiness and absolute despair.
We bounce from war to war through the centuries – relieved only by the
unusual good actions of some power that seems to work in odd people like
Churchill or Roosevelt or Barnardo or Sister Teresa.

Why would a real creator ever make such a bunch of losers and such a
chaotic world?

The fact is, as you can guess, that our creator knows what he has made –
he knows that the only way his son can live a unique life in each one of
us is if we are willing. His son obeys him because he loves him and he
loves him because he is free. It will be the same with us, so our creator
gave us freedom to reject him if we wished so that we would have a real
choice between life in him or nothingness without him. He knew we would
choose nothingness and he, in love, committed himself to bearing that and
all its consequences inside his son. That’s how it’s expressed in the
Bible in Ephesians 1:4 ‘even as he chose us in him before the foundation
of the world’. Our creator determined that he would bear the full agony
(a moment in eternity but in time thousands of years) of separation from
his son’s humanity in its rejection of him. This maintenance of the unity
of his own nature – by bearing fully in himself the effects of the free
will he had himself created – made possible our own destruction and
re-creation. So, here in time we have a choice between our old rebelled
nature and our remade one in Christ.

Our creator cannot ‘play with his creation’ – he cannot pretend he is
loving and then allow us to hate while he remains untouched. When he made
us inside his own son he committed himself to destroying hatred or
bearing it until it was transformed. Thus he bears the fear and pain of
the last man killed today in battle – and at the same time he bears his
own pain at the anger and cruelty of the one who did the killing. By
holding together these irreconcilable attitudes he is able to remake your
nature and give you the chance to live in it.

So today there is only one reality – the one created by our maker in his
son from before the beginning of time. That is you, foreseen by him in
your rejection of him and your choice of yourself, destroyed in eternity
in his son and remade in his son. The other apparent choice we see around

us is a flash-back: it’s the morning-after-the-night-before: it’s life as
it would be without God. The only present reality waits for you to choose
it!