Reality

I don't know if i've talked about this before, but i think about it all the time.
I have a very difficult time holding on to "reality".
I don't think that this is a deficiency on my part.
I think we all have trouble with this, i just don't know how many people actually think about it. And i can't possibly describe to you what i'm talking about, you just have to experience it on your own.

But tonight I spent almost an hour laying down on a hillside listening to worship music.

When you climb a mountain, one of the first things you do when you get to the top is look down- or out- at the view. You usually see an expanse of landscape, lakes, trees, and other mountains for miles and miles. It's beautiful.
It's a sight that makes many people think about God and how big he is, and that He created all of this beautiful world. Old ladies buy posters of mountains and hang them on their wall because they wish everything was as pretty as a view of a lake, or a sunset.

The view from the hillside I was on tonight is pretty much exactly that. You can see for miles and miles. Except the view is of downtown Troy, NY. (that's the actual view from next to where i was laying down)
At night, this view is one of the dingiest looking things you've ever seen.
It's all yellow streetlamps and roads. Police sirens and ambulance horns are an almost constant drone. That's pretty much the best way to describe Troy: Dingy.

The sky above troy tonight was a beautiful deep, velvet black, peppered with a few stars. After looking between "up" at the night sky and "down" over troy for a while, I decided that it's one of the coolest contrasts i've ever seen.

That's where I start to lose my grasp on reality.

I think that in America today, we are one of the worst reality-recognizers of all time. Our culture is escapism. Books, tv, movies, sex, our jobs, and video games are all ways that we forget about how we are living beings on a tiny blue planet hurtling through space.

That's what I think about when I look up at the sky- when you look up, you see the vastness of the universe. When you look down, you see the pitiful, dingy mess that mankind has made on our little blue planet.

Do you think that when God looks down on our planet, he sees Troy NY as just as beautiful as the mountainside in north western new hampshire?
I think maybe He does.

When I look at Troy, i see dingy. When I look out from a mountain top, I see natural beauty.
When God looks down at the landscape, He sees his handiwork, his Creation.
When He looks at Troy, I bet he doesn't even notice all the buildings falling apart, or the nasty smell of the streets. Because inside Troy are 50,000 of his best creation of all- 50,000 desperate human beings trying the best they can to live within the walls that we've created for ourselves that we call "reality".

I met a guy a few weeks ago on the bus to walmart.
He was having a lively conversation with the bus driver.
When we got off, he put on a visor and went to work.
He doesn't have time to go to a hillside and look at his city and think about the ridiculous boundaries that we put on our lives through our culture.
His "reality" is completely different from mine.

He knows all the bus drivers on his route because he probably doesn't have a car and probably works 14 hours a day to pay his bills. or his alcoholism. or both. or neither.

I walk around the RPI campus ignoring homework, watching people, and looking out at Troy.

These two lives are so different, we might as well consider them to be in different universes. We would have never met or affected each other's lives if we hadn't crossed paths on that bus. And two weeks later, all i have is a brief memory of his existence- an awareness. That's it.

God knows all of us, even when we don't know him, or choose to ignore His love.
That's so powerful.

The end-all point in Hinduism is Nirvana: the point where you simply cease to exist because you've somehow broken out of the endless chain of reincarnation. Buddhists claim that they know how to reach Nirvana, or that they know how to strive for it. They say that they know how to break out of our earthly "reality" and enter into the true, real, truthfulness of the universe.
Here's what I think.
I think that as soon as you realize who God is and begin to notice His Love for each and every one of us, at the moment when you stop thinking about reality in terms of your little personal mundane life and start to think about it in terms of everything, of how only God could possibly encompass everything- that's "Nirvana". I think that's the point where the Hindus 5,000 years ago were trying to get to, where Buddhists think they know how to get to. A realization of reality.

Closing thought:
As I lay down on that hillside, the wind was blowing in my face. It was cold. It was amazing. We spent money on fog and hazers, and HVAC systems that can move cold air to enhance the experience of a live show. Youth church services are like that a lot- we use fog at Uturn because it looks cool.
But when you're outside, looking at a city, you don't need atmospheric effects.
You have the atmosphere around you.