S E V E R A N C E

"There must be some way out of here".

Have you ever viewed the world through pieces of a broken mirror?
The vision - usually many images of the same thing - strikes you, because even though this fractured view is a distortion of what is actually in plain view, it 'speaks' of something true none the less - a world painfully real to each of us, brutally etched with pain, suffering, brutality and the ever-encroaching reality of death.
Like the images of broken glass, it speaks so clearly that something is terribly wrong.

The clues should tell us how far we have disconnected from where we began.
One of the things which so strikes me about the opening account of the creation in Genesis is just how close the realms deemed 'heaven' and 'earth' were at the start.
When creation was complete (that included the realm we call heaven - angels and the like), God would literally walk in the garden at the end of the day, to enjoy His handiwork.
The very realm that we now find incredible in our 'sophisticated' society was as close as the dawn or as tangible as the earth beneath us. That should cause us to pause, to begin to glimpse just how far we have fallen.

For thousands of years, we have employed every means at our disposal to seek to gain some insight into who and what we are, into finding our place amongst all that's there, but however hard we look, the answers are damned unsatisfying.
Life equates, apparently, to no more than a cosmic accident, with no intent, real value or purpose, so we might as well just get used to it, make the most of the brief span we have, and try not to think about it too much. Is that it? The universe is meaningless.
That is the death of our race in Eden.
We were murdered by the lie that we are meant to merely be what we now are - pained, crooked things, empty of any true value. Heaven and Earth within its sphere have become a foolish dream, a myth for the foolhardy.

But God comes, not to a garden, but to this barren world.
He faces us as ourselves - as what humanity should be - and calls us to turn from the dark.

Jesus Christ teaches us that there is an end to this nightmare of corruption and death - if we but trust in His saving care.

The world empties us. It leaves us stripped bare of all that is good, for it leads us all, without fail, to the grave, and to all that death truly entails,
but that curse, that emptiness, is broken, by He who knew no wrong, breaking what we could not break, healing what we could not heal, and now, there can be reconciliation.

As the world staggers on, we can either continue to look into it's broken shards, or we can glimpse a deeper, harder reality - that beyond pain, beyond death, beyond our own corruption, there is a new life that makes a call upon each of us.
The days are approaching when heaven and earth will marry once again.