Forged By Faith

1 Peter 1:6 NIV In all this As in everything. The waiting, the worry, the wanting to go home once we realize this ain’t it. The promises, the punishments, the precariousness of their being always mixed inside what is so often a life that is quite hard and impressively heavy. The hope and the hardship which allows it to shine only brighter as we stumble ever closer. The joy of knowing where we’re going and learning as we go that it’s not what we go through that matters or makes the difference but that it’s rather the anticipation of the destination that’ll define all we go through as meaningless once we get there. Yes, what matters in this story of God’s surpassing glory is just that: His glory surpasses both all understanding, yes, even ours, but that most often as it even surpasses this passage aimed right through the heart of the rest of the worst that this wicked world both has to offer and insists we see. But please don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t make it easy. Worth it? Yes. Easy? ...

1 Peter 1:5 NIV Almost home And yet so far away or so it seems here most days as most days here find us still lost within the horrors of what is a horde so hopeless that it often feels as if God can’t see us through all the nonsense and disbelief both swirling around us and too inside even our own words and actions and the lack of life often lived or loved within them. Indeed, so many days it seems as if we’re still just drifting atop this endless sea of a world that seems only to see no real need to seek for He who came to save us from what most here can’t see coming. A question which should begin by asking will we make it as ought to be answered by even the shakiest of we will make it’s ever known amongst a stumbling men. But alas a question impossible to ask and thus an assurance equally unattainable so long as we look unto any of we the stumbling for something, anything of any help, inspiration, confidence or consequence. Which, in all honesty does indeed pose quite the problem for...

1 Peter 1:4 NIV Treasure in Heaven For simply Heaven is the treasure. And this matters as much as ever because despite whatever we might feel we have found or could find within this world, we’ve all known every ounce of it to spoil, to fade, to perish, to rust, to ruin, to be removed unto our being forced to realize that it was our eyes, our ears, our minds that made ourselves believe that this thing that we’ve had but have no more is evidence sure of the lack of assurance given unto everything here. Almost makes you start to wonder why it is that still we look. And that because, well, we do. All of us do. All of us do this every single day in fact. This life is one that has us living as if all that matters is the little we’re seeing and the less we’re hearing and the less of both that we’re anymore understanding because of such things as all these lies of Ai’s and closed minds and ears that can hear but just choose to not listen to anything they simply don’t want to. Indeed, all of us...

1 Peter 1:3 NIV A living hope And that it’s novel too as is seen through the promise being stated that says it comes from a new birth which hints always toward a new life as is ever defined as one not lived as of yet, well, this seems then to mean that perhaps what we had been living wasn’t a life as it had for us to find no hope that was itself alive as instead maybe we had all died already back when we walked inside what was not a life but rather a time in which it sure seemed as though there were times in which we thought hope we did find. But even then, if that hope wasn’t alive then, well, what was it then that we had found? This is something of a question that exists as something of that thorn in Paul’s side as so too do I ride this train of thought seeking for what I’ve lost in what I truly thought was a life. Indeed, just last night it hit me yet again as I brushed my teeth preparing for bed. I realized that somewhere across the space and time that has been my life over the las...