So here's some thoughts on reality;
We each have our own little world in our head. We make sense of the world around us through a kind of story that identifies us, and in which we try to place every new experience to help us orientate ourselves with the world. The story is constantly adjusted and reassessed, especially when new experiences don't fit the old story. It gets updated and we carry on using it. In this story are our failures and fears, but also our triumphs and expectations. Popular culture would tell us that it's ok that everyone's little worlds are different. Each is equally valuable and valid. Each one is true to us, which is true enough. Furthermore, we are not entitled to tell anyone else that their little world is wrong, especially if ours also happens to be right (which of course it is).
The problem is that this isn't the case. There's one reality. One world, one history, one Earth. We can't all be right, and this is our experience, but it hurts. Isn't it interesting that we get really stressed when our expectations aren't met, however unrealistic they may have been. When human beings with a non-functioning or paralysed limb can see it but not control it, they experience physical pain. People who are blind often find that sounds around them become "noise" when they can't mentally assign them a source - thinks that don't make sense to us frustrate and upset us. The point is that when people get their world-view wrong, it causes pain, first to themselves, but often soon after to those around them. These discontinuities confuse us and introduce doubt and fear. Fear imprisons us, and we live half-lives filled with empty expectations, self doubt and general unease.
To be free, we need to live in reality.
Realistic expectations don't breed disappointment. Sometimes we see this, and we see the freedom. Think of it like "living in the moment". It comes like simultaneously holding life lightly and embracing it enthusiastically.
Here's the next thing, there's more to reality than we see if we just look on the surface. To make my point, here's some physics as an analogy (stay with me here)..
Sound (yep; noise, music, voices etc) is simply ripples of vibration in the air. The average position of tiny air molecules vibrates back and forth, transmitting the vibration onto the others around it. You can measure it, you could set up a microphone, and draw a trace of these vibrations over time. To be honest, it wouldn't look that great. In fact, it would pretty much look completely random most of the time. You could tell when the sound was loud or quiet by looking at the amplitude, or height, of the peaks and troughs, but that's about it. In fact, when people like engineers, scientists or music producers look at sound, they don't normally look at the vibration over time. Instead, they look at frequency. Frequency is how many times the vibration happens in a given period of time. A frequency of 50 Hz means fifty full vibrations per second. There's a whole load of very clever maths that's used to turn the time-based information into frequency information, and mathematicians who use it talk about the time domain when you look at what came straight from the microphone, and the frequency domain when talking about the analysed frequency distribution. With the frequency information you can start to recognise pitch, musical notes, voices, even words. Frequency is the first killer-app with sound. Frequency is true: You can use this analysis to measure the energy distribution in that sound wave, you can do maths on it, it's not a quirk or trick- it's valid physics, just like the original time-based signal.
Maybe the world's kind of like that. Look on the surface and you see something, but it can fail to make sense, or appear to be random. Sure there's some cause and effect going on that's very consistent, but to understand it, really understand it, can be tricky. Perhaps impossible. But in the very same physical matter, the same motions, mass, energy and events, deeper patterns exist. There's the "physical" domain, where we see consistent laws at work but seemingly random (or at least highly unpredictable) high-level outcomes. But this is not the whole story. Filter the same reality with a higher-order analysis, and there's more meaningful things afoot. Call it another domain if you will.
If you walk into a room, God's already there. If you go somewhere that nobody's ever visited, God's already there too. If you go somewhere where truly horrific things have been, or are being done, God's there too (although I put it to you that He's not particularly enjoying the situation). He is in and through and beneath everything. If the universe is the substrate through which our existence ripples and moves and expands, interacts and plays out, then He is the substrate on which the universe finds it's being.
And above all, He's personal. With God it's always personal. He doesn't work to a broad set of policies, a divine manifesto laid out before the making of the world by which we can live or fall. No, that thing we know as love, that roaring fire in our bellies, that blazing light that ignites our hearts, that desire for right and life and liberty, that thing that makes your heart jump, that's God. He's so relational that somehow he's sort of multiple- even within His very self is sacrificial love and intimacy.
Put all that together, and you start to realise that in every room He's not only already present, He's got a very distinct intention for that place, and even more so, the people who occupy it. He is specific, precise, intentional and focused. He is incredibly down-to-earth.
So there's this other domain present and active in the very fabric of our surroundings. God is here at work. So how to live in reality..? How do we engage with this implicit meaning? It has to be in partnership with God, because it's not about Him, it is Him. His intentions are not to make the world His kind of way, be precisely to His specific plans (which include our freedom). Only with His view can we tap into the absolute reality around us. But this is no distant challenge or pie-in-the-sky dream. It is imminently available. God is right here right now and He's made it staggeringly clear that He is accessible to us in the very present. In one sense, all there is to do is choose, trust, and receive. But that's all a bit passive isn't it? How about this: Search it out, look for reality everywhere, like lost car keys- turn your world upside down and put everything on hold. It's there, everywhere (unlike the car keys!), so get personal, look for Him and His specific plans. Find out what God is up to in every room you enter and join in.
Like the clever maths used on sound signals, we can be translated, transposed, transformed into this world-within-the-world. We can live a kind of transcendent life more fully in the here and now than we imagined possible. The domain is at hand, the domain of life in, and with, and in partnership with the Life Force, the Ignition and the Fire of the universe. He wants to be known.
Reality is at hand, engage!
