What Reality are you living in?

As a student when you head to houseboats, missions, retreats etc. you experience the "God High."  You had seen the Risen Lord face to face.  You come back and you are on fire, passionate.  Then, slowly, your temperature cools as you adjust to the cold environment around you.  I see this all the time.  I also experienced this in my early years as a staff at the camp. People would always say "Camp, it's a bubble, that's not REALITY."

What I have come to realize is that what if that (camp) is the reality God has for His people?  And the "Reality" we choose to live in back at home for a majority of our time is the "bubble" or false reality?  To me Camp is everyday, that is the reality I live in.  That's what stuck out to me in the first chapter.  "Things are not as the seem"(p. 19.)  This is repeated over and over.  Revelation being the "unveiling" and we see the term unveiling of an invisible reality.

I choose to live in God's Reality.  Reality where I am His son, I am holy, I am special, I am whole, I am valued, all of those I AMs we are so familiar with aren't just on paper, they are TRUE!  And so God calls me everyday to live in this Reality and live as such.

There's the reality that God is my First Love.  Wow, this chapter I'm still processing.  It was hard to not underline everything!  Holy Spirit was num chucking me!  Working in the Lutheran Church I struggle with this all the time, it's so frustrating to me.  "The church is buzzing with doing." (p. 55)  We have our school, we have confirmation, we have a lot going on, missions etc.  But, we lost our first love as some translations put it.  I have found myself here many times .  Over the past couple years I've discovered we need not be consumed by doing, but by "being."  Simply being His children, longing to spend time with Him.  Everything flows out of "being" or "relationship" as the theology of a healthy balance has it (ultra packet.)

I have been dating this girl for a few months now and I'm pretty crazy about her.  Like the book I would do anything to spend time with her.  I'd work less, give up money, drive far, talk for hours, set up a special evening for her.  So this idea of "First Love" really resonates.  Over a year ago when I was interested in a girl and I was thinking about her a lot.  I heard God say to me " I wish the way you felt about her, you felt about me."  That's first love.

God is a romancer.  That may be weird for some guys to say, but it's the truth.  The way we completely rearrange our schedules and set up dates to make girls feel special, God does the same for us.  He wants to spend time with us, He thinks about us, writes notes to us.  So this year I started doing God dates, not just a quite time, but an extended time where I go somewhere with God.  This is new for me, but it's been pretty rad.  God is so much bigger than we ever give Him credit for.

I have always loved the bridegroom analogy.  I cannot take credit for this, but I'm going to share it.  At a wedding when the bride starts walking down the isle and the music is playing, everyone stands and looks at her.  She's so pretty.  But her eyes, they are focused on one thing, the man down the isle.  And eventually all eyes follow her up the the man (Potts.)  I feel like that is how we are to be.  So captivated by our First Love and Romancer that all eyes will follow us to Him.