Forged By Faith

Jonah 2:8 NIV What have we missed? As I get older I find myself more and more convinced of some of the sheer nonsense that we’ve come up with seeking to assure ourselves that our mistakes, our wrong choices, our past fears and present worries aren’t wasting for us opportunities that we may well never have again. Such ideas as this common adage you see tossed around from time to time that tells us that “we’re not strong enough to ruin God’s plans for us.” It’s a most hopeful outlook to be sure and indeed one in which I do believe as I do believe that His will will be done and there’s not a single thing anyone can do to change it. But again, as life goes on and we continue getting plenty of things quite willfully wrong within it, well, seems I’m pretty certain that while we may not be strong enough to ruin God’s plans for us, time will prove that we are well stupid enough to spend a good portion of our lives running away from them. And in truth this is something we’ve all chosen, again w...

Romans 8:18 NIV What we’re missing. It’s the chance to find joy in changing. It’s the opportunity to experience hope in hardship. It’s the ability to recognize the necessity of loss. It’s the growth in an understanding that there’s simply more to life than all there is to find where we’re standing. It’s the importance of humility and its unique capacity to help us find a way of life filled with so much happiness that simply cannot exist whenever a person feels they’re owed such a gift as happiness truly is. It’s the peace that comes with knowing where we’re going and that the promise waiting at the end of the road is worth more than all the pain the road will hold. It’s the gift of getting to walk that road with He who both knows the way through all the worst this world can bring but also that so well that He is the Way to everything this world will never know. It’s the resolve to dissolve our every worry over absolute destruction designed inside all the danger we’ll face and, with tha...

1 Peter 4:13 NIV What are we missing? Is it an understanding as to the promise given unto all of us? Is it the ability to appreciate the honesty of the call? Is it the humility that would allow us to better uphold the opportunity? Is it an awareness as to what all this means in that being so hard only proves to accomplish a deeper hope that won’t let go of us even when we prove unable to keep hold of it? Is it realizing the fact that we’re dying, a realization given unto the heart of every man so as to inspire within the same an urgency to seek for some way to escape that reality? Is it reality, are we missing the true gravity of why we’re here as waits always hidden in what all we’re not doing? Is it that fact that all we are doing is most often just losing everything from our time to our lives to our minds in what’s become so sadly a life in which so much matters that doesn’t and all that does often then doesn’t either? Is it the chance to change, the opportunity to actually start ov...

Hebrews 12:4 NIV What is enough? Is it a measure of misery mixed with a moment of peace? Is it a scene showing the sum of something that defines all we’ve done that agrees we could have done no more? Is it a place we go to which we know that we’ve exhausted every opportunity we’ve ever been given before? Is it our experiencing of a level of exhaustion that we’ve never known, a tired that proves more is simply all we’ve not anymore to offer? Is it our offering of all we have, and yet that still somehow defined by what we’re willing to give? Is it giving everything we have with the audacity to actually hold nothing back? Is it enough to feel bad, to know shame, to carry guilt around as if a suitcase that never leaves our side? Is it enough to spend our every single day and so too our every single night allowing our eyes no sleep but rather insisting we tear-stain our shirts and sheets? Is it enough to hit our knees and there ask for forgiveness for the many wrongs we’ve done and all the ...