Set Free

I have been chewing on an idea for about a week now. The original idea came from M. and has really changed my heart.

While spending some time together in the backyard, M. and I watched a butterfly under the trampoline. For the longest time it bumped up against the black "roof" over its head and flew up and down, never leaving the area beneath the trampoline. After it finally flew out and way up into the air, I commented that the butterfly probably thought the sky had gone black and hard while he was trapped. Micah commented that it was like our lives. We are "trapped" here on earth and soon we will be released, like the butterfly, into the real world of Heaven.

There really is a lot to that analogy. Here on earth our senses tell us everything we know and trust about reality. We hear, touch, taste, see, "feel" emotionally and create a sense of reality. But, we are caged. The Bible is clear that this is not our home. We have been sent here for a season, but the real world is waiting once we are released. Earth is full of sin and we are racked with it. Because of this our senses are deceived. I think that is why God's ways are not our ways and seem backwards. Everything here conditions us to think about ourselves first, survival of the fittest, but God says, "no sweet one, the truth is that the last will be first." We think pain is hateful and a God who would allow pain must be bad, or at least not very safe, but God says, "the person the Lord loves, he disciplines and suffering is for a season to produce godly character." We have learned by watching the world around us that we should fight, strive, and seek a good live, but God says, "the person who seeks to save his life will lose it, but the person who lays down his life will save it." We look around and want comfort so we try to amass wealth, believing it will protect us and bring us comfort, but God says, "don't build up treasure here where it will rot, do things that will store up treasure in heaven where it will never be taken away from you!"

This is very much like the movie The Matrix. In the movie, the people have lived all their lives in a "reality" that they knew no better than to trust. When all along it was literally all in their minds and the real world was swirling around them.

We are in a matrix. Everything we see and touch and feel is a type of cage. It is very real to us and we have to live in it, but God has sent His Word to us to prove there is a much bigger reality on the outside. Now we see dimly, as if through as fog, but then, when we are set free, we will see face to face, and until then He promises to guide us. Our job is to trust Him.

Just like the Israelites who were literally fed their daily bread, manna, by the very hand of God, God also leads us step by step. We really are blind beggars. It would not do for me to pat a blind man on the back, give him some instructions about how to dodge cars and then send him into the middle of the highway. Instead I would walk with him. I would become his eyes, replacing the senses that he could not trust.

God says His word is a lamp for our feet. A lamp only gives enough light for the next step. He says to forget what lies behind, to not worry about tomorrow, and to focus on the present where He is walking with us and guiding us.

Sometimes we need to close our physical eyes, understanding they see dimly, and allow God to open our spiritual eyes so they we can see the truth and the truth can set us free.