ILLUSIONS, REALITY, PAPA'S LOVE AND A REVOLUTION

Sales are now nearing 5 million copies in North America alone...and still climbing and is in it's 26th week at #1 on The NYT Bestseller List.

"Most emotions are responses to perception---what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So, check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms---what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe. The more you live in the truth, the more your emotions will help you see clearly. But even then, you don't want to trust them more than me."

Okay, this is my third attempt at a blog post today. I always know when I feel like posting here but today two have gone up only to be removed shortly after I posted them because it just didn't feel right. I've come to trust those nudges and always want to respond to them when I feel them.

I stumbled upon the youtube video of my friends, Paul, Wayne, and Brad talking about The Shack and while watching it the excerpt from The Shack I posted above came to mind. It actually sums up much better what I attempted to share earlier in the two posts I abandoned. Both those posts were about destructive false perceptions that have a way of keeping people stuck, yet blinded to that reality because of the use of the familiar justifications. People end up being hurt over and over because the cycle is left intact.

The familiar justifications keep people from being willing to reexamine what they believe and keeps the illusions alive because they take on the weight of being reality. When stuck in that place, forget about seeing clearly. I love how a line from the song in the last post describes it:

You’d think we were blind, the things we can see through

The things we look past when emboldened inside.

For the average individual to have the courage to reconsider everything they have grown up believing is certainly a difficult step. For the individual that has been shaped by religion to do so seems to be an even tougher proposition. Add to that religious paradigm a political paradigm and you have a real strong toxic cocktail of fear and dangerous extreme confidence to overcome.

I guess it all comes down to how well someone can work the illusion so as to keep it somewhat believable or when they begin to fall apart that Father Son and Spirit have become big enough and real enough to where abandoning the illusions/lies and the false perceptions along with the false security that are a part of them and stepping out into the unknown actually begins to make sense. That leap can be very scary but when you fall into the loving secure arms of Father you will be left wondering why you didn't do it a long time ago.

Wonderful healthy relationships await.