We’ve all experienced it at one time or another. You proceed along some route of travel and suddenly some other traveler appears out of nowhere. Maybe you collide or maybe you just get a shock from how near you came to it. Maybe it’s another motor vehicle that appears out of nowhere. You specifically looked for one and it wasn’t there, but then suddenly it was. Or maybe you saw something that caught your eye and it disappeared altogether, or moved to another location by means you cannot explain by common sense.
Does it make you question your senses or your sanity? Let me assure you, the difference between a mistaken perception and an actual shift in reality is not much — often not enough to worry about. If you read between the lines of Scripture, you learn to trust neither appearances nor reality, because they are equally subject to God’s whims. Holy cynicism is part of your moral development. Your perceptions are under the Curse of the Fall, and our reality is not what God intended for us. For example, we were never supposed to die, but now we are saddled with a time-space constraint that must of necessity end in physical expiration.
How I wish this better understanding was mainstream, but it’s rejected as mythology by a world deeply stained by its own mythology. You aren’t going crazy in the typical sense where your perceptions are disconnected from reality. If you learn from your heart that ultimate reality is something radically different from what is mainstream in our Western world, then you realize that the madness is a native element of that Western world. Yes, it’s hard to tell folks that, but it’s burned into a heart-led awareness. Don’t argue, just turn inwardly to Christ living in your soul and trust in Him; but reaffirm His truth when the opportunity arises.
Granted, the native confusion and deception of Western culture is, up to now, the epitome of vehemently reaffirming the choice that makes us fallen. We are fighting that already, but even without a Western society, we do have that fallen nature as long as we exist in this form. Choosing to walk by the moral law of heart-led conviction, and studying biblical intellectual traditions to condition your mind to a proper moral expectation, will improve things. Start where you are and accept that most change is incremental, with the occasional leap in awareness. Don’t get wrapped up in the sensory shock of shifts in reality. It’s not as if God is somehow imperfect simply because His actions don’t line up with our Western image of perfection. He’s the model, and we must conform our thinking to His revelation, and it’s most certainly in deep conflict with Western thinking.
God does stuff that messes with Western minds for a reason, and the burden is on you and I to conform to His moral reasoning, not critique it from a Western bias.
A beautiful read. Sometimes I find myself in awe of the ordinariness … like how someone can be sitting across from me on a bus and it’s so indisputable, but all it takes to alter the fact is for them to get up and exit. There’s nothing unusual about this … but in such moments I can become aware that not everything around me conforms to my will. Perhaps I’m deviating in the content of my comment here, but reading this reminded me of such times …
Love the header of the ocean by the way. Has a very calming aesthetic quality about it.
What you refer to is the moral reality unseen by most people, so it’s not as if you got off track, but you point to an underlying factor. And the image (Carolina Coast during Hurricane Hermine) was compliments of Linda, one of our regulars here.