These are the times that try our souls. We live in an age that is increasingly narcissistic and self-focused.

Go to any book shop, and you will find an array of books that tell you how to “find yourself.”

This unhealthy love of the self is a symptom of a society whose people have turned away from God and now seek to worship themselves.

Narcissus was the character in Greek mythology who saw his reflection in the lake and fell in love with himself. He would gaze upon his reflection, infatuated. Finally, he leaned down to kiss himself, only to fall into the lake and drown.

If I live apart from God, I will create a persona and identity separate from God, but my identity will have no solid core. When everything is peeled away (my achievements, my relationships, my talents and my experiences), I will be left with nothing.

It’s normal for the Western mind to consider spiritual realities less real and less solid than the material realities of this world.

Don’t be fooled by the mindset of this materialistic age. Just because you can’t see or touch spiritual realities with your natural senses does not mean they are less substantial than those things you can see and touch.

Many will attest to witnessing the miraculous. Many will attest to seeing the spiritual realm, to having encountered angels and demons.

The supernatural happens today, but few notice or believe. The supernatural occurred in the past, and few believed that either. It’s one person’s understanding against another’s.

Just because it hasn’t happened to you, does that mean it doesn’t happen? Just because you haven’t been raped, does that mean it isn’t a reality? Of course, reality is scary and disturbing, so we like to convince ourselves that rape is fiction and “she asked for it” or must have deserved it somehow.

There is such a consistency to human psychology, isn’t there? We embrace what we find easy to understand and accept, and we explain away and deny what we don’t want to hear.

How can we explain away a sane person’s claim that he saw a person possessed by another entity pull back his lips, bare his teeth, snarl, shriek and growl like a wild cat? How can we explain the many who have seen angels?

We can ignore them but not delete them from existence.

Similarly, and contrary to what our pride would have us believe, whether we believe in God doesn’t change God. If we refuse to believe in Him, our minds do not have the power to make Him disappear.

We witness the complexities of nature and science everyday. Every generation tries to discover what the former could not uncover. Clearly, there is an intricacy to creation that is unfathomable in the human mind.

How can the random molecules that created humans be more intelligent than what it created?

Why has it taken us so many generations to come this far, and yet there are still so many questions unanswered.

Thus, we either believe that random acts of chance are directing the complex laws and order of the Universe, or we believe that God is that Director, that Creator.

In the end, it takes just as much faith to be an atheist as it does to believe in God. So, we have two options.

We can live our life trusting we’re right to assume there is no God, no life beyond and that the cultures before us have been ignorant.

Yet in the back of our minds, we will always know there is a possibility we are wrong, which is scary.

Or, we can put our faith in the centuries of humans who have reported having divine encounters and have been inspired by what they called “God.” There seems to be a greater peace in this mindset because there is no fear in the alternative to your decision of faith.

Let me ask you a question. Is God more real than you, or are you more real than God?

God is spirit, and you and I are flesh and blood. If we assume that the physical, material realm is more real than the spirit realm, then you and I are more real than God.

But God is spirit. He is fourth-dimensional reality, and He created us. He existed before us, brought us into being and will go on existing long after this world has been destroyed.

Only that which is spirit will last for eternity. Only those men and women born of the Spirit of God through Jesus Christ’s baptism will last for eternity.

Therefore, “spiritual realities” are more solid, more lasting and more concrete than three-dimensional, material realities.

We don’t have the answers to a lot of questions.

It’s fearful to think about dying, but it’s even more terrifying to think that our human eyes may not perceive an entirely different realm that exists.

An ant cannot perceive the human world or understand that its existence is only a tiny part of the universe. What if the same is true of us?

The ant busily bustles around working, striving and storing. But with a single swipe of our foot, the tower they’ve built is instantaneously scattered dirt and dust.

They had no reason to believe we existed. Maybe they’d heard somewhere but just ignored the warning and were too busy to give it thought. They couldn’t see the world beyond.

It’s futile to put faith in ourselves. It’s time that we put our faith in something eternal, something that is more of a reality than ourselves.

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April Goodwin is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Ames.