Living in God's Real World--by Linden Malki

 Do you like what you see in a mirror?  Are we satisfied with the reality of who we are?  There are two sides to the "real" person that we see: what God has made us to be, and what we make of ourselves. It's not unusual to hear someone say that "I don't need a God--I'm a good person on my own."  Or even scarier: "Why should I care about what you or anybody thinks--I'm fine doing things my way."  The reality is that we are constantly faced with choices, and we are not the best judge of the answer on our own.  Left to ourselves, we are likely to choose what makes us feel good, without understanding  the results in the real world, which doesn't listen well to our expectations.  The problem often is that we don't know enough; we think that because we do something that seems to be a good idea, it will solve all our problems. The real problem is that we're not smart enough to know all the factors involved.  Usually that is either because we don't want to know the dark underbelly of what we want to do,  or we can't know all the factors in play because we're not smart enough--and then make the excuse that "I'm only human..."

Which is exactly the point. We were created for a world that is more wonderful and complex than we know. Today's best scientific minds are coming around to the idea expressed by  J.B.S. Haldane, a British scientific  theorist of the early 20th century, who once said: “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”  I am seeing a trickle of serious scientific researchers realize that not only is the physical universe complex beyond our ability to explain, but the growing understanding of life on the most basic level is expanding into a complexity that is well beyond the capacity of random chance to explain.

If we are willing to be honest with ourselves, our pride in our own wisdom, the tendency to put our own will ahead of God's wisdom, is in reality a dead end. As merely human beings, there is a limit to what we can do in our own power, but we are capable of falling off the edge into real evil. This brings us to the reality of our own limitations: the only way to truly overcome evil is with good--the Good that is more powerful than anything we have available in ourselves. In other words, the real answer to evil is not our own limited good but God, working for us and with us.  It is discovering a whole new level of being; more real than we can imagine on our own, and more powerful that we expect. However, it requires giving up the "do it myself " attitude and moving into God's Real World.