rumours of true Reality

First of all, listen to this.

When i was in middle school, my best friend moved across the world to New Zealand. Needless to say, this move drastically shaped her life, and, although in a more minor sense, shaped mine too.

i will never forget that lucky time in my life when i saw her again from out the window of a train in the small town of  Greymouth on the south island, waving her hands over her head like and S.O.S. plea. Another thing I will never forget is the car ride from the train depot through meandering and bumpy roads to her house a few hours away. We listened to Brooke Fraser, a native Kiwi and the artist who sings the song above, and i was instantaneously in love.

A few years later, she had a second album come out. My best friend and i (who was back in the states) turned it on her little CD player and sat in silence track after track. The first song on that album is titled "Shadowfeet" (lyrics found here.) and i have listened to it countless times since. It wasn't, however, until i read the Great Divorce this last week, that this song has gained all the more significance to me.

"But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly."

--George MacDonald

Throughout the book, this idea of true Reality rung out to me. While the book is described as "a dream," the thought came to me that what the main character experiences is quite real to him in the moment in which he is dreaming. Similarly, everything that we experience is our own reality.

However, there is a true Reality, one that whether we make it our reality or not, fully exists.

This Reality is God and Heaven and the Gospel. The thought came to me that no matter how we label Reality, it is there. The church, for example, exists and is fully real. However, the church is not separate from existence. The church, or the gospel, is existence. It is life, it is Reality or the way things are. The church is merely the structure that we learn of that Reality and worship Him who knows all Reality from beginning to end.


It's a reality that "whispers of a well-lit way."