Back To Reality (However Do I Get There?)

I know what is ultimately real, even if I can’t fully see it yet. And I know that to live faithfully, I have to stay aligned with it.

But the truth is, I’m not going to remain perfectly conscious of my worth, identity, security, purpose, and belonging in God every second of every day.

My mind is constantly being influenced by what is loudest, closest, and most repeated—and most of the time, that’s the world around me and my own emotions. So drifting is inevitable.

The question isn’t whether I’ll drift. It’s what I do when I realize I have.

At first, I thought seeking might be the answer. But as I started looking into it, another word I wasn’t expecting kept surfacing:

Repentance.

The word repentance makes me think of sin, guilt, apologizing, and trying not to repeat what I did.

That isn’t wrong.

It’s just incomplete.

Repentance extends beyond behavior. It begins with recognizing that I have been seeing or thinking in a way that isn’t true. I turn away from that false understanding and come into agreement with what is true.

The biblical words behind repentance help fill out that picture.

The Greek word metanoia points to a change of mind—a reconsideration of the way I have understood something. The Hebrew concept of teshuvah, rooted in the word shuv, carries the idea of turning or returning.

Suddenly, repentance sounded a lot like what I had been trying to describe.

I started thinking of it in these broader terms:

The process of realignment—turning back toward God when I recognize that my heart has drifted from His reality.

The next question is, how do I realign?

First, I wanted to get a grasp on the meanings of attention, perspective, and perception and how they relate to reality, drifting, and realignment.

And seriously, this took way longer than it needed to.

We’ll call it a senior moment.

Seven hours later…

(Insert SpongeBob narrator voice.)

I finally understood:

Attention is where I look.

Perspective is how I look.

Perception is what I see.

Let’s continue.

Imagine I’m lying in bed with a lamp glowing on the other side of the room. Across the wall, I see an enormous shadow that looks like a terrifying monster.

I could stay in bed and try to convince myself not to be afraid, but that wouldn’t correct the way I am seeing it.

I need to get up, move toward the light, and look again.

My attention has moved toward the light.

My perspective has changed because I’m no longer looking from the same position.

And from this new perspective, I can finally see what is actually there.

The terrifying monster is a shadow being cast by a tiny toy.

The object hasn’t changed.

I have changed where I’m looking and where I’m looking from—and as a result, what I see has changed.

The goal isn’t to convince myself that reality is different.

It’s to see reality as it actually is.

Okay. Now I practice.

I can’t turn back to reality until I realize I’ve left it.

My feelings aren’t always reliable judges of truth, but they can be pretty good alarms that something needs a closer look.

For example,

You do something kind for someone.

Something honest and sincere that requires you to make yourself a little vulnerable.

And you get no response.

Nothing.

Almost immediately, your mind starts filling in the silence.

I’m stupid.

I shouldn’t have done that.

They are sooo mean.

They must think I’m ridiculous.

Clearly, it didn’t mean anything to them.

Why do they HATE me???????

There’s the alarm.

The lack of response is real.

But most of what I’ve decided it means is not.

Somewhere between doing something kind and receiving silence, I started looking to this person’s response to tell me something about my worth—or whether what I did mattered.

So I turn my attention back to God.

I know who I am in Him.

I know my worth does not rise or fall according to another person’s response.

And if what I did was truthful, loving, and faithful, its value doesn’t depend on whether it was acknowledged.

I still don’t know what the other person thought. But I no longer need to.

Their response belongs to them. My faithfulness belongs to me.

Next…

You find out about a financial problem you didn’t know existed.

A serious one.

Immediately, your mind takes off.

We’re already struggling.

We can’t afford this.

What if they take our money?

What if this gets worse?

How are we supposed to fix this?

What if I go to jail?????

There’s the alarm.

But this time, the problem isn’t imaginary.

There really is a financial problem that needs to be dealt with. Realignment doesn’t mean pretending there isn’t.

It means recognizing the moment I move from responding to what is actually happening into worrying about everything that could possibly happen next.

So I turn my attention back to Him.

He is still good.

He is still present.

He is still my Provider.

He has not suddenly lost control because I received information I wasn’t expecting.

The financial problem hasn’t disappeared . But neither has God.

I can deal with the problem that actually exists without simultaneously living through every terrible version of the future my mind can invent.

And I’m back in alignment with reality.

And then…

Someone cuts you off in traffic and you catch the red light.

You see red and briefly contemplate hunting them down and slashing a tire or two.

But you settle for calling them a few ugly names and ranting to an empty car about how selfish and terrible they are.

Thirty seconds later…

Green light.

And somewhere in those thirty seconds, it hits you.

Wait.

Who’s being selfish and terrible right now?

Alarm.

They really did cut you off.

But somewhere between getting cut off and mentally sentencing a stranger to two flat tires, your anger became the lens you were seeing the situation through.

So you turn your attention back to God.

Okay, God.

I let that make me way too angry. I don’t know why they did what they did. I don’t know anything about them, actually.

But I do know who I’m supposed to be following. And He isn’t leading me on a high-speed revenge mission down Highway 11.

Back to reality.

And there you have it.

Three perfectly normal, completely hypothetical examples of what this might look like in real life.

Psych.

Those weren’t hypothetical examples. That was just my week.

The vulnerable act of kindness followed by silence and an immediate descent into WHY DO THEY HATE ME?????

Yep, me.

And the unexpected financial problem? Also me.

The thirty-second transformation into a deeply unwell traffic vigilante? Guilty.

Apparently, I didn’t have to look very far for examples of drifting from reality. Convenient for the article. Slightly less convenient for my life.

Anywho.

I still don’t know what the silence meant.

And I still might go to jail.

Just kidding.

Probably.

But even though none of it is actually resolved, it’s okay.

Because I’m okay.

Not because any of those circumstances changed, but because of my God.

He is good.

He is faithful.

Everything is His.

He loves me.

I’m His kid.

His Kingdom is coming.

That’s reality.