Get in touch with reality

The world is full of reckless people, especially young people, who think that reality and its limitations do not apply to them.

Many times reality reasserts itself in the form of an accident or some other problem that was very avoidable.

Many times the consequences of this recklessness are felt only later and then with great bitterness.

This "doesn't apply to me" mindset is part of what is meant in today's first reading (1 John 2:29-3:6):

Everyone who commits sin
commits lawlessness,
for sin is lawlessness.

Sin is an attempt to break with reality - not just the laws of physics or epidemiology, but also the purpose and plan of God.

As Christians, we need to be respectful of reality - the reality established by the Creator - in this world and in the world to come.

See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.

Yet so we are.

The reason the world does not know us
is that it did not know him.

Beloved,
we are God’s children now;
what we shall be
has not yet been revealed.

We do know that when it is revealed
we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.

Everyone who has this hope
based on him
makes himself pure,
as he is pure.