We've been saying that the worldwide recession of 2009 was permitted by the maker of the world so that we could see what life without him would be like and could see that he alone can remake this broken world and us with it.  Many of us regard this as either a fairy story or the kind of dependence that we aren't willing to accept.  Despite the historical evidence of the so-called son of God's life in the first century of our era and the extreme frustration we face in trying to find a substitute security for our Maker's love, many of us ignore these facts and continue our independent struggle against the professional, financial, and domestic strains brought on by recession.   The reality of the situation is completely different !

    
There's no way we can make our cash-flows work on our own !   Most of us live the lie that they work because of our subtle control of financing, credit controls, collection techniques and accounting systems.   But the whole house of cards depends on a complex ballet that is danced by customers' financial health and business contingencies which depend on millions of actions and events that take place far away from our control or knowledge.   Yet we continue to trust the lie that all these things take place with machine-like regularity and certainty - and that we can somehow project or depend on the millions of fallible wills and error-prone processes that run our world.

 

In fact, the opposite is true.  The whole system hangs together because “we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which he has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them”.   The real flaw in the operation is us.   We have been made part of our creator’s son so that he could complete this planet through us, but this means that sharing his love and trust in his Father – we can and do choose to reject that and turn our self-consciousness into self-centredness    This self-centredness spoils our own lives and causes most of the malfunctions in our world.  The creator foresaw all this, permitted us the free will his son had - to bring us to our senses - and remade us and the broken world outside time.

 
Our basic problem is egocentricity.   We have been given real existence in our maker’s son, but we have misused that self-consciousness to look at everything from our point of view rather than his.   We therefore see the whole world as a great hinterland of things, people, and events that exist for our use and benefit.   With six million of us doing that – the result is chaos and frustration – and actual perversion of our personalities.   In eternity, the one present mille-second of reality where our creator sees everything, he has borne in himself and his son all our pretense of self-existence and remade us, so that we are able to live in eternal reality here in time.   This is our choice – reality or unreality – the reality of being part of our creator’s son or the unreality of pretending we’re self-existent creatures.   The one brings upon us tremendous, unrealizable demands; the other brings us a life-energy of liberty and joy. 

Many quantum physicists posit the hypothesis of parallel universes as an explanation of particles apparently connected to each other over huge distances; whether or not the theory of parallel universes is proven scientifically, the Son of our Maker demonstrated in his life and death that there exist at least two versions of your life.   There is one that you have chosen until now – and there is another contemporaneous one that God has remade in himself – and he can live that one in you today.   This is  the experience of life from another world expressed in the old spiritual, “How can I keep from singing ?” 

My life goes on in endless song:

Above earth's lamentation,

I hear the real, though far-off hymn

That hails a new creation.

Above the tumult and the strife

I hear the music ringing;

It finds an echo in my soul -

How can I keep from singing?

What though the tempest round me rolls

I hear the truth - it liveth;

What though the darkness round me rolls?

Songs in the night are given.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,

While to that rock I’m clinging;

Since the Lord is Lord of heaven and earth,

How can I keep from singing?

Let us live in this reality !