Are you chasing a life that feels like it will never come?
Do you believe there's more to you being here than just the pursuit of happiness?
Have you grown weary of family, friends and influencers reminding you that you will never live up to their subjective and increasingly insane standards?
The most insidious and damaging of all deception is self-deception.
Yet we engage in this every day.
When we plan.
When we pretend.
When we say things we don’t mean just so they’ll leave us alone.
When we turn away from the horrors of a fallen and decaying civilization to anesthetize ourselves for a few more hours with the trivia of other people’s mundane lives.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
This isn’t all there is.
Beyond our five senses exists an entirely separate - “holy” - and eternal reality that in fact embodies the “real world” alluded to in “The Matrix” and other pop culture works of fiction.
It’s the world you’ve always sensed was there, knowing the world you’ve seen and tasted is somehow an artificial construct. Illusory.
Fake.
The real world is not one to which you are entitled, but one which is granted access to you by unmerited favor - or “grace”.
Those to whom this reality is revealed are recipients of that grace, apart from which they would otherwise have never even been aware of its existence, much less desire to entire into it.
No, the vast majority of humanity is so consumed by their daily input/output regimen that they scarcely have time to consider the idea of “no time”, i.e. timelessness.
The eternal reality has no clock.
No sorrow.
No pain.
No death.
Just the joy of the One who made you. And me.
His name is Jesus Christ.
The One whose name you and I have repeatedly and unashamedly blasphemed.
The One who was born as a baby but is coming back with the “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” tattooed on his body.
The One who not only died as a criminal on a bloody Roman cross 2,000 years ago, but who also conquered death for all who come to him in faith.
That is “the real world”.
Your current worries, your anxieties, your fixation on the future - those are apparitions of the mind.
They literally do not exist except in that amorphous and transitory blob we call our feelings.
And so while I acknowledge the demands of daily life - what you will eat, what you will you wear, where you will live - I also invoke Jesus’ thoughts on the subject:
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
“Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”
“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.
“If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?”
So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” - Matthew 6:25-34
Figure it out already.
It’s time.