Something To Hold On To

Hi friends.  It's been too long.  I have no excuses for not writing.  Only that my heart has not been in it.  Inspiration has escaped me.  And rather than working to develop the muscle for writing, I have allowed it to atrophy. 


I don't have a lot to say today, but I decided that writing a little bit is better than writing nothing.  And it makes for easier reading!


I just listened to a message from Seeing Grace ministries by James Barron.  He preached about the simplicity of Christ, reading from the book of Colossians where we see that everything begins and ends with Christ, and He fills all.  The Gospel is all Jesus.  He made the point that reality is a person.  That person is Christ.  If you have died and been raised with Christ, He is now your reality.  We are to fix our eyes not on what we can see, but on what is unseen.  The unseen realm of Christ and His kingdom is more real than this world we can see.  It is more real than all of our visible circumstances and pain and problems and pleasures. 


If you could get inside my head, you would quickly figure out that I have a disconnect when it comes to reality.  I am a child of God.  My real identity is in Him.  But lately I've been tangled up in the enemy's lies about who I am.  I've been so focused on my own feelings and my failure to measure up and my own shortsighted perspective on life that I can't see past my own nose.  I engage far more easily and frequently in virtual reality than in building intimacy with Jesus and learning to see His reality.  Allowing unreality to blind me to the Real. 


Some days, I lose my grip on reality.  But Reality, in the person of Jesus Christ, will never lose His grip on me.  As I begin to think about Jesus being Reality, and all that He came to be for us, I realize that He becomes all of our basic needs.  The things in our physical world are pictures of a deeper reality.  What are the basic human needs?  Food.  Water.  Shelter.  Oxygen.  Light.  Relationship. 


Jesus came to be the Light of every man.  John 1:9


Jesus is Bread and Water for our soul.  John 6:32  John 7:37


Jesus is our Dwelling Place.  John 14:3 and John 15:4


Jesus came to reconcile us to God and restore us to intimacy in the ultimate relationship for which we are made.  Colossians 1:20  John 15:9


Jesus is the source of our very being, the oxygen of our eternal spirits.  Acts 17:28


Jesus.  Reality.  All I need is truly in Him.