Forged By Faith

Isaiah 59:4 NIV agnizes the agonizing And that amongst all things and everyone as are all done and did within this den of what is sin now so superficial and yet soul-reliant that one can no more separate the stains from the spirit than they might make red into blue. No, rather it seems with those who’ve eyes to see that we indeed are through. We’re finished. We’re anymore so fake and flimsy that we’ve made friends and family with everything from evil to enmity. In fact, we love those things more than we love our friends and family! They’re in fact the very basis of our every identity as has been so widely chosen for us by a culture of such chaos as to both chase corruption and yet never recognize the cost. Instead we seem to have not merely accepted the downfall but are still actively seeking out ways in which to inspire it to fall further apart. Wanting for ways to waste more of our days doing more of those things which the Word says ought not to be done. Doing only whatever we’ve eit...

Psalm 35:20 NIV dams the disquiet Because there comes hopefully a day inside of our every life in which we look up with our own eyes and determine that our lives are not going to be lived locked in step with those who will continue to insist that we join always the consist of what is a culture given unto the cancer that is caring as to what others want us to do, to say, to be, to become. No, there has to come a time in which we take control of our lives back from those to whom we’d sheepishly given it, playing ever since the victim of what is the venom that rules this world in vengeance. We should want more than this, and yet to find more than this we need then to allow only less of it. And that is everything that this world insists upon us. Every headline that the media asks us to become angry about. Every post that some stranger shares seeking to ruffle feathers and start comment section arguments. Every new technological advancement that we hopefully know deep down that we don’t rea...

Psalm 120:6 NIV breaks with belonging Here at least. And indeed, this, to me it seems, is perhaps the scene I’ve seen become something of a show that continues to go on and on inspiring me to do the same but only in the opposite direction. And this is because I daily become more and more aware as to the thoughts and attitudes of where we are. I see every day more than plenty of things that I honestly do not think are as they ought to be, aren’t what they ought to be, things said and done then by people who care not to be what they ought to want to be. No, daily in this world I see only less reason to continue thinking that I’m supposed to belong here. And as of 38, well, I’ve all but run out of reasons to ever still think I might even like to someday try again. Rather I’ve found myself thinking more and more as to the elsewhere that we’ve all been called to come and should honestly hope to be. Every single day I have at least one moment in which I find myself longing to just go home. T...

John 15:19 NIV hears healing in their hatred Because it’s entirely easy to see what makes this world happy. For indeed, down here such things as happiness, agreement, interest and acceptance are anymore so flimsy and faked that it feels as if they no longer mean a thing. And that’s simply because they’ve been allowed to become matters that mean something different to everyone. All of us have taken it upon ourselves to define a life that always sells only this idea of our being the ones who determine alone what’s good and what’s not, what right is and what it isn’t, even going so far as to mix up our own version of truth served with a side of insisting others just play along. And we have. And we did because we thought that that’s what love would do. That it was supposed to seek of highest priority the comfort, the enjoyment, the approval that we know so well that everyone in this world wants so much. And that’s something that’s been made dangerously clear to us. Indeed, this society tel...

1 John 2:15 NIV amends adoration All because all along all we’ve learned is that all we need, all we should then want, it’s all apparently only right here. And indeed, in some sort of strange entirely unseen way it is because so too is He who is all we need. He is here. He is now. He is so close in fact that we hold what He sold His flesh, His very life, to call His home. For the Scripture tells us that He died to go before us so as to, once having reached that place where He came and preached we may now come, He sent back the Holy Spirit that would guide our lives into living in the light of that Way that loved us so much as to come down here and die for us. Ridding Himself of the sinful flesh so that our sinful flesh might wonder what it might be like to live that life in which we wanted more than merely whatever pleased the surface and thus superficial. Alas, the surface and superficial has literally been all we’ve known to care about for however long we’ve walked about the same. An...