God's not in heaven

Because we think God's somewhere far off, we don't realise he's right beside us, every minute of the day.

Jesus said the kingdom of God is within us, and that's where he is, if we'd only realise it.

The problem is that he's trying to talk to us, and we can't hear him, because we're shouting so loud.

We're shouting so loud because we're in pain, every one of us. We don't realise that the pain won't go away as long as we can't hear about the cure that is being offered.

Because things that happen hurt us so much, we've armoured ourselves to keep out the pain, not realising that it comes from inside us, not outside. So we're locking it in, instead of letting it go.

How can we stop doing this? It's not going to be easy.

But we can take one small step, by admitting we have a problem, and we can't solve it on our own. That creates a small chink in our armour that God can get through.

He will do the rest.