I was talking to a friend recently who showed me a picture and said, “I was smiling then. I didn’t know that reality was about to hit me like freight train.” I replied w/ something that had crossed my mind before but without context. Maybe it was meant for my friend all along...
“Why do we always call it reality if it’s really, really bad? Maybe the bad stuff is just corruption in the code. Maybe reality is the good stuff, the good people. Maybe what’s real is beautiful and it’s everything else that means nothing in the end.”
It’s so hard to believe good things will happen. We’re conditioned to expect everything will be awful, down to the tiniest inconvenience. The struggle is part of the story, obviously. But the struggle is the messy middle. The END is ALWAYS remedied by grace. THAT is reality.
If it’s already remedied, then why does it hurt? Because this is your story and you’re the protagonist. The Reader, God Himself, knows how the story ends. He knows that as long as you endure, there will be a perfectly happy ending.
The mortal blindness of the moment is a product of being IN the story, unable to see it from the outside. God will not snatch you out of it. He loves you far too much to deny you the education that this story provides. This trial is teaching you how to be like him.
In the end, all will be healed. You know this not bc the world tells you—it certainly never will. You know it bc the Lord told you so. And somewhere in your heart, you also hold on to a fragment of a memory from the life before this one. You know because your spirit remembers.
What is good is real. The good we become is real. The ppl w/ whom we connect—in friendship & family bonds—are real. When the veil over the earth finally drops, all the horrors, corruptions, & injustices, & all those who adopted such falsehoods for their ‘reality’, will fall away.
That which remains (every kind of beauty created) will be solid, tangible to our senses, realer than we understand our ‘now’ to be. Evil will burn away like the dew. Good will remain, because that’s what is real.
Life will hit you like a freight train. It will toss you like a hurricane. It will bludgeon you like a demon. It will hurt you. But the suffering will not last. Angels, ancestors, and our whole celestial family look on as your story unfolds.
They anxiously wait to see that broken little smile emerge upon your battered face—that smile, because you know that reality is good, and this is not over, and you are winning.
In the meantime, hiding within the murk of this corrupt world, there is so much gold to be gleaned for those who are looking. Gather it together that it may shine the brighter.
Treasure it up in your heart. Share it with those around you who are desperate for the slightest sparkle from the deep. This is your story. How much good will remain standing when the curtain falls because you helped it along?
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