Choose Life!!

I watched a movie many years ago, called The Matrix. It made you question everything that you thought was reality. People lived normal, everyday lives - with careers, coffee shops, families and friendships. Life was good! Everyone was pretty content! Until you took a pill which released you from the fairytale, and made you aware of the ugliness that was being hidden from you - that was real life.

I feel like we're all kind of stuck in that a bit! Especially in our perfect little pockets of the world where war and famine are stories on a screen, and the sick and dying are mostly out of sight. We kind of know they're there - but we choose to look elsewhere! To be happy while we can! To cherish all the best of life! We want the dark things to stay away, and it feels like we do that best by not allowing them into our heads.

The problem is, if we won't recognise the dark undercurrent swirling around this world, capturing us all, one by one in its clutches, we won't see the need for a life line either! We won't realise how desperately we need help!

Morpheus carried a pill that showed the reality of a terrible existence. It wasn't something that most people would really want to know! They would rather be oblivious and live in their comfortable consciousness. But it wasn't real. And it was only the work of Neo, "The One", who chose to walk in the darkness of reality and ultimately destroy its power, that set people free from that ugliness and gave them a chance to build a good, real life.

So many parallels to the salvation story we know. (Also many things that are not.) But we really need to see the reality below the surface of this life, in order to hunger for what it was meant to be. Jesus came to defeat evil and give us that! But so many won't reach for it - because they don't realise the reality of their position.

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