There's a saying in our culture, "perception is reality," and it's functionally true but then again, it is so very incomplete! It's a useful concept that can, like many useful concepts, keep us from a larger scope of truth if we park there and refuse to move! Your perception of yourself and your situation, and even of God, will tend to govern your EXPERIENCE, and that does explain a great deal of human behavior. But, we can shake ourselves and wake ourselves, intentionally changing our perceptions. We don’t have to default into that very human habit of accepting our experience as "just the way all things are”. We can break the vicious cycle of self-defeat in which we keep blaming our circumstances, failing to pause and realize that WE are the custodians of the inner vision that is governing those circumstances! (Ouch!) All the while, however, there is another music playing in the background, another frequency of light trying to break through the shroud of darkness! REALITY--the sum total of it that God rolls it out from the center of His "pantocratic" (Creator of all) Being--could not possibly be limited to my post-Eden sensory perception! BUT THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT NEITHER AM I!
PERCEPTION will govern my experience UNLESS I allow another EXPERIENCE to intervene! The fact is there's a whole world of perception-adjustment from God Himself waiting to be summoned into my inner world! Psalm 139 is a good place to start. There we can read the words of David, who certainly had opportunity to feel persecuted and marginalized, as he raves about the vast number of thoughts God has toward him: "If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand!" The whole Psalm is a dose of God's amazing fatherly attentiveness that flies in the face of man's ill-treatment of those on a creative journey! Could it be that Psalm 139, which declares, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made, and my soul knows it very well!" was an intervention experience that David needed? Could it possibly be that he was not only writing great Scripture, but also actually living a real life? Could it be that David's perception was being adjusted to accommodate God's healing and liberating REALITY which is readily available to all those who dare to "turn aside and see"?
When your perception meets a NEW God-reality, bondages break. Perception is only local reality, but a global treasure trove of truth as God sees it (and dispenses it) await you every day of your life. Like the situation with Peter on the rooftop praying in Acts 10, there may be a sheet full of shockingly wonderful experience-changers being lowered to you! Huge changes to your perception--and therefore your version of reality--may be descending from heaven even as we speak (or as you read)! They may look as wild as unclean animals did to Peter, but, how we all need our limited perceptions expanded! (The Holy Spirit once whispered to me, "Perrianne, there are always people on the other side of your paradigm shift." In Peter's case, it was the whole Gentile world starting with a man named Cornelius who would pave the way for the rest of us non-Jews!)
All it takes is a hole, a tear, a small opening in our vapor-locked left brained assessment of our lives for the reality of heaven's hope to leak through! You don't have to labor to bring your whole consciousness under control; you don't have to sit in your room until you are "fixed" and every thought is captive; you don't even have to go away to a mountain to pray. You just need to get quiet enough for a small moment and ALLOW (that's your only real job and it's not really a job, but more a choice) a reality beyond your perception to inform your experience!
One of my favorite quotes comes from the novelist, Franz Kafka. He described for me what happens when I allow the reality of heaven to impinge upon my earthly experience. For me, it describes the "mini-Pentecost" each time I rediscover this wonderful God who is NOT holding anything back from his children (contrary to that lie in the garden). Kafka wrote, “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” Surely this is describing the GOD-REALITY which longs to invade my perception and ultimately change my experience! All that is require on my part is the willingness to let my perception be redefined by a huge contrasting God-reality and admit that, in fact, my own limited pragmatic conclusions may not actually be the only operating system available! Sit a moment today and see what happens when you when you turn aside and see. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.
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