Day 34: Living Daily in Reality: Two Worlds
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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.