Day 54: Living Daily in Reality: How do we get where God has put us?
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We’ve been talking about the start of our life here on this planet. Â
Using the explanations given by the only human being that has ever
convincingly explained and demonstrated in his life and death that he
really was the Son of our Creator, we’ve said that you and I were
created as part of our Maker’s son to fill the earth with his life. Â
But God knew we could only know and understand Him if we knew the
nothingness that was the only alternative.  So he made it possible for
us to reject his love and his son in whom we existed, bore the pain of
his son’s separation from himself, and made you and me again in the
millisecond singularity of eternity.  You and I have this second
chance – but only our Creator knows the particular short-circuits and
peculiar corruptions that have occurred in each of us.  We’ve been
given this life to receive our personal reconciliation to our loving
Father.

So when you feel you’re a little nothing – and that nobody notices
you or cares whether you even exist, the only answer you can think of is
to show people how important or unique you are.  You “throw your
weight aroundâ€(cid:157) – you boast about something you can do well – or you
insist on someone doing something they don’t really need to do.  If
you’re a parent or teacher or boss, you create an incident or argument
by insisting that something is done in a certain way or at a certain time
that isn’t really necessary. The strange thing is that this often
makes other people ignore you more so that you seem important only as
long as the incident lasts.

But your judgment becomes impaired so that you can’t see the futility
of your boasting or your domineering manner so you intensify it until it
becomes second-nature to you.  That preoccupation with making an
impression corrupts your natural importance as the only expression of
your Creator’s son that is exactly like you.  Instead of growing in
the quiet confidence that your Maker’s eye is always on you, you become
preoccupied with getting the attention of men’s eyes and find that you
cannot bear to be overlooked.  Even when you become aware of your own
pride or envy you find you can’t stop it because little short-circuits
have been developed in your eyes’ connection to your brain and your
brain’s connection to your sense of significance – and this
short-circuit by-passes your will which sinks deeper into passivity.

Any self-help book or psychiatry yields only temporary help because they
cannot touch the basic need that is built into you by your creation in
Christ Jesus – you are made for a great love – the loving evaluation
of your Creator, who as Job writes “longs for the creature his hands
have madeâ€(cid:157) in his only son.  The only way into the original reality
of your creation is to settle whether this whole bit about Jesus is truth
or myth.  That is easily settled by intelligently and honestly

studying the historical facts outlined back in Day 4. Â

The more important step is your deciding whether you’re willing to be part of
our Maker’s Son!  Why wouldn’t you? Well, because this being –
this Jesus Christ – this Son of our Creator was as dead to his own way
as His Father.  He had to be – to agree to his father making people
like you and me and Hitler and making us inside the Son he said he
loved.  Moreover, the Creator himself had to be pretty dead to his own
wishes when he committed himself to giving free will to millions of
beings he had created – knowing that they could and would do all they
could to destroy his creation and his only Son.  You have to consider
if you are willing to be as indifferent to what others do to you or think
of you – as your maker is!!!

Are you willing to be ignored? By people less intelligent or aware than
you are? Are you willing to be under-valued – to be wrongly blamed
– to have your name scandalized – your reputation ruined?  Are you
willing to be spat upon like that man Jesus in Jerusalem – are you
willing to stay inside him while he and you are despised and
degraded?   God has reconciled the world to himself by enduring the
unendurable – He has brought harmony between himself and a rebellious
populace by bearing their injustices.  Are you willing to have that
nature replace your own proud, independent one?

That’s the human part of getting where God has put us.  Really
it’s accepting where God has put us already.