Christ's Climbing Companions

Twice we've caught pictures of our son in precarious places, high atop the monkey bars. Now we, too, are in such a spot for the second time, hanging in midair, looking for the most appropriate foothold. The first time we were positioned to learn something. But now, we seem positioned to demonstrate that we learned it, which makes such a difference in the peace factor this time around!

We have made great strides these last three years in knowing the heart of God, but "knowledge makes no difference in a life unless it is lived out" says my Bible's footnotes. King David knew the Lord intimately...after all he wrote the Psalms...but he also lived out that knowledge through many actual trials. So we, too, shall stand in a blowing place not unlike a desert, standing under the glaring, unfamiliar brightness of primal light, the light that was first of all creation, the light that came before sun and stars, before land and sea...stand there at the place of the beginning and offer ourselves as part of the end. This is the place and the position of reality for us. I found a nice, sane, succinct devotional about this difference between actuality and reality...which is something I think we've brought to light a lot in this blog. Here it is:

By actual we mean the things we come in contact with by our senses, and by real, that which lies behind, those things we cannot get at by our senses. The fanatic sees the real only and ignores the actual; the materialist looks at the actual only and ignores the real. The only sane being who ever trod this earth was Jesus Christ because in Him the actual and the real were one. Jesus Christ does not stand first in the actual world, He stands first in the real world; that is why the "natural man" does not bother his head about Him--"the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness to him." When we are born from above we begin to see the actual things in the light of the real. We say that prayer alters things, but prayer does not alter actual things nearly so much as it alters the person who sees the actual things. In the Sermon on the Mount the Lord brings the actual and the real together.
Daily Thoughts for Disciples, by Oswald Chambers

The Sermon on the Mount happened after the people had literally climbed "the Mount" with Jesus. No easy, broad grassy plain ministrations given there. Or in today's language, no comfy-chair-while-holding-a-latte-from-the-youth-group's-coffee-cart service there.

We've taken the red pill, as Morpheus would say, and accepted the actualities that come with our awareness of our God-given reality. And so we find the deepest sort of peace available to man. Therefore, it shouldn't surprise me, even though it does, how easy it has become to live out this verse that always before I looked at it with such dread:
"We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed but not in despair." 2 Corinthians 4:8