Seen & Unseen: There's More Going on Than We KnowSýnishorn

Living in a Here-and-Now Culture

Most of us have, indeed, just like naturalists and humanists, adopted an intense bias toward the physical world. We may believe in a spiritual realm. We may believe in God and heaven and worship and prayer. But we believe more in the here and now. 

Much more.

“Our trouble is that we have established bad thought habits.” And things have just gotten more unbalanced since 1948, when the great gospeler A. W. Tozer wrote those words. We go to church on Sundays—maybe—but we put virtually all our energy and time and worry toward the physical world. Work. Money. Pastimes and entertainment. The spiritual realm gets what’s left, if there is anything. 

Because the here and now is greedy and relentless. Demands and deadlines at work. Requests and responsibilities at home. Pressures to keep up and get ahead. These things are in our faces. We see them— email inboxes overflowing, to-do list items calling for attention. We hear them—mobile phones ringing, meetings at work never ending. And we feel them—texts and reminders and notifications buzzing, stress building. 

“The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the whole of our lifetime,” continued Tozer. “It is clamorous, insistent and self-demonstrating … assaulting our five senses, demanding to be accepted as real and final.” 

Compared with this barrage, and with the busyness and hustle we muster to meet the barrage and survive as best we can, the spiritual realm can seem as if it’s a million miles away. It can become, in our minds, simply something we’ll (hopefully) experience someday. When we die. When we finally leave this physical, in-your-face world behind. But not now.