the Real World

“What is more real; picking a rose or falling in love?”

Being worldly is often considered a good thing, it means that you presumably have traveled a lot, know about various cultures and are overall quite wise. Yet the Bible warns us against becoming too worldly, about becoming too concerned with earthly things.  Yet it is easy to see why we often do become so concerned with things of this world, it’s because we can see them, touch them, they seem more real to us.

In C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters there is a passage about how humans become more attached to the world the longer we are here: 

            “The truth is that the Enemy [God], having oddly destined these mere animals [humans] to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we [demons] must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth. While they are young we find them always shooting off at a tangent. Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry - the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon - are always blowing our whole structure away. They will not apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections, and the policy of safety first. So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or "science" or psychology, or what not. Real worldliness is a work of time - assisted, of course, by pride, for we teach them to describe the creeping death as good sense or Maturity or Experience."

What we must remember is that even though we can see and touch the things on earth, they are not the most important things. The realm of things we cannot see but can only feel or experience with our Spirits are equally, if not more, real and certainly more important.

The question at the start of this post was asked in my English class my first year at University and it really made me think. Even though picking a rose is certainly a real thing, falling in love is as well. And falling in love can change your whole outlook on the world in ways that picking a rose couldn’t.

Now I know that it can be hard to make time for God when your day is full of papers, work, laundry, grocery shopping and whatever else it is that keeps you busy, but we have to remember that those are not the really important things in life. The thing of utmost importance is our relationship with God and the time we spend with Him. There is nothing more real than that.