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        Childhood is known to be punctuated for most of us by nightmares which seem to be all the more frightening because of a sort of repetition occurring in them. This gives to the youngster a feeling of an ordered interference, and not a mere passing scare. I have found something like that happening in my adult life. I have been haunted by an inability to make of  life a "wholeness." Whatever I believed as a Christian in the way of doctrines or creeds, there remained a constant background awareness of contradictions and disunities which had to be resolved if I was to live effectively. I felt I had the key to living, but how badly I fumbled around when I tried to use it! There was I living-plus something called Christianity (which even seemed at times like a dead weight). I certainly could not attain any integration, and that was what seemed so desirable to me. Was it a matter of growth? I was not excited about the idea of growing into more of this dualistic life. I began to suspect that I had some wrong basic concepts and that Christianity, rightly understood, should eventuate in spontaneous  living. I want to share in these pages something of my search for reality and how, for me, these illusory gaps were closed and life made into a unity.
        I have come to see that what we call the "fall of man" brought about a fragmentation of what was originally a whole, and that while a sense of separation is allowed to dominate life, it is in dis-ease. Redemption plainly is a restoration to life of its original wholeness and an awareness of this is intended by God to flow over into our consciousness. This is something of what is meant by Paul when he speaks of our being "transformed by the renewing of our minds." Our minds and imaginations have to be converted along with our spirits. The constantly repeated phrase in the epistles of Paul, "Knowing this," means this very thing. It is something that has to take possession of our subconscious mind as well as our conscious thought.
         A few of the gaps that I was bothered by almost fell in this order; Christ and Self; Sacred and Secular; Creation and Redemption; Asking and Receiving; Self  and Others; Good and Evil. There are others also. I need hardly say that as the first of these came into correct focus the rest have followed with very little trouble. So these pages will deal largely with the first. It has been to me almost like the picture we get of Christ giving a second touch to the blind man. First the man saw only indistinctly, "men as trees walking." Then came an all-transforming touch which brought the man into what was to him the new dimension. This leads to the true excitement of life which makes it abundantly worth living. The reality which we sensed as actually existing beneath the appearance of things is now open to us, and we begin to live from a new level, a new point of view. Separation has been overcome by unity, the partial by the whole.
         Without exploring it in detail here, I must say that the solution of our problem of separateness lies in the simple recognition of a tremendous scriptural fact. It is that all things are in God and God is in all things. For instance, God can live in me, not merely because He chooses to, but because my being is already "in Him."*

* But this does not constitute man's personal experience of redemption. My attempt is to trace the transition from the fact of immanence (inherent or inborn by natural processs)  to that of redemption by the personal recognition of broken relationship, and how it is restored in the redemption through Christ.

        This is the assertion of Paul to the men of Athens, "In Him we live and move and have our being." Therefore He comes into His own when He lives fully in the consciousness of regenerate man. He never has been absent, in reality, but I have been separated from a consciousness of Him. God never leaves in an absolute sense that which He has created. Much less can we conceive of Him as leaving that which He has redeemed. So, for instance, does it not seem rather strange for us to invite Him to be present at any function, or even into the affairs of man generally? He is the major factor of all life and all functions, and was there well ahead of us, so to recognize Him in each situation is surely much more appropriate.
        Our supreme joy and activity in daily living is the simple and effective recognition of Christ in all matters, even those most problematic. This is what closes the gap. To affirm God's presence is the instinctive way of faith-- not ignoring evil or the problem that exists, but rather seeing God as the major reality and thus, by faith, changing the situation.
        It follows then that a profound rest takes hold of us, for His presence is love, and love never gives up in its determination to bring us to fulfillment. More than that, man is the most natural means of God's manifestation-and this is what constitutes man's fulfillment. Through this wonderful recognition of God's presence, man becomes the love he never could be.  While seeing himself as separate from Christ,  merely as the object of God's love, he can never come to real fulfillment. By this total union, God has a body by which to continue His self-giving to the world. The gap is closed between Christ and us, and He can say the most astonishing things, such as He said to the band of unlikely, unfinished men around Him, "Ye are the light of the world." Not ye have the light, but ye are the light! Right there and as they were, He saw them as united with Himself in an indivisible unity for the redemption of the world .
         But before the realization of this unity, God has to work upon man, as we well know, to produce the hunger for it. That patient working of God is the story of the historic redemption of Christ which is part of the mystery of godliness, as Paul calls it. Let us make no mistake, however; redemption is not forgiveness and reconciliation only, but God living in men. That is why Pentecost follows Calvary. The new humanity emerges at this point, a true humanity indwelt by God. Only that is real redemption. God living in men secures Calvary as a contemporaneous fact, because God is always Calvary, so to speak. The Lamb was slain "from the foundation of the world," Peter says. We will try to explore these facts and bring them into focus in life itself.
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(1) Whittle, John.  man ALIVE - P.O. Box 2877, Glen Ellyn, IL 60138, Union Life Ministries

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