“You have the name of being alive, yet you are dead.” (Rev.3:1)

When you really want to understand someone, you have to be willing to reverse roles with him or her.  Usually we look at things from our own standpoint, our own opinion.  We owe these to our closed personality, which has become a distant spectator of the world: I think… I feel… My opinion…  With all our opinions, we also lose connection with the world the way it presents itself to us.  One could say: if people didn’t have so many opinions, they would discover much more.

Imagine that the roles are reversed.  We are more or less blind to reality.  I do not see the world, but the world sees me.  I do not know the spiritual world, but the spiritual world knows me—better than I know myself.  Christ sees me; I cannot hide from Him.  He knows me inside out.

What does He see when He looks at me?  “You have the name of being alive, yet you are dead.”  That is the depressing reality of a spiritual world that sees us and sees right through us.  We act as if we stand in the midst of life, but before the countenance of God we are “the living dead.”

When you begin to live with the Act of Consecration, eventually you cannot remain a distant spectator anymore.  The roles are reversed.  Like the blind, we feel our way to the spiritual world.  But Christ, He sees us, with all our strayings, denials, weaknesses.  And in spite of that—or perhaps precisely because He sees us and knows us—He gives Himself to each of us.

Though I am blind, though I am as dead,

He cares about me.

Take me as You have given Yourself to me.

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, November 9, 2025