Get Real

Without too many exceptions getting real is easier said than done, but the reality in the love and truth of God’s heart for us beckons us to exit this make believe world and enter into one that is real.

To my way of thinking one of the most classic illustrations of not being real is the poignant story of Job from the bible. What God was looking for in this man’s life as well as I see him looking for in any of us is to be real, no saccharine carob coated niceness is going to cut it living in a world where trouble abounds.

I’m not criticizing Job, he was simple living out of the imprinted script he was born with, and this is but speculation on my part but there are those born with a most sunny predisposition of seeing the world and all that is in it with a warm and toe tapping Louis Armstrong feeling of it being “a wonderful world.”
I realize that in the original manuscripts there were no breaks grammatically, no chapters, but for conversation sake it took 38 chapters before God suddenly seems to come out from his ninja camouflaged absence and begins to speak into Job’s beginning stages of his religious melt down.

There is no way we can make God fit into anything that is fake, made up, Job like all of us are at best, great pretenders. As soon as Job begins his infant like baby steps of being real, low and behold God suddenly appears.
Imagine the nightmare only having gotten worse for Job if he had simply traded in his wrong confession for the “right” one presented to him by his three so called comforting friends. It seems that God’s highest priority for Job wasn’t about fixing him but of transforming him, bringing him to a place of knowing his deeply ingrained religious mind set was not going to allow him to cut through this insane world of pain and devastation.

Only as the reality of His unconditional love for us continues to permeate us, will we be able to go on in this inner journey of being freed to live out of our new identity verses that which has and continues to try to manipulate us living out of the old.

Rich