Get Your Pretense On!

CHAPTER 2 The Principle of Reversal and the Upside-Down Kingdom of God

As mentioned in the first chapter, the only way to comprehend ourselves rightly is to get our mental frameworks right, that is, we must to come to see things, as it were, from God’s point of view. The truth of the matter is this: we do not live our lives on the basis of what really is, but rather on the basis of how we think it is! Of all God’s creatures, human beings cannot live well without possessing a clear reason for doing so; we simply have to have a purpose for our lives that makes sense to us, integrates the various pieces of our lives into some kind of story that makes sense and is clear. We come to live our lives on the basis of a perspective and vision that we adopt, our own personal “explanation” of why we are here, who we are, and how the world works. We desire coherence – we all desperately want our lives to make sense. People, of necessity, tend to operate according to their interpretive frameworks: we live, as one commentator puts it, as “walking worldviews,” creatures that make sense of things through the story that we tell ourselves. Every human existence is basically lived in a “story-ordered world,” where our families, relationships, and culture help us to compose a story, a worldview, which helps us to answer the big questions of our lives. Our searching and answers to the basic questions of life provide us with a blueprint whereby

37