Forged By Faith

Ecclesiastes 3:18 NIV Wonderfully unwonderful It’s a sight there to be seen inside of both every mirror and too everyone who looks into one trying to see whatever might be the reflection they may want to see. But indeed, so often the image we seem to see is but this photo of who we think we be, the person we’ve tried to become, the better we may actually believe we are. And yet because we so often lie to the mirror whilst expecting it to then somehow tell us the truth in return so too then must we fail to learn what the truth really is about everything a mirror might show. All because to learn we are slow, so slow in fact that everything bad that ever happens in life is only there to help us see something we’d never agree to see otherwise. For it seems as though our eyes have gotten so used to these rose-colored glasses that we’ve given up on stopping to smell the roses and instead we use our noses as something of flags flung from our face pointed straight upward amidst our days of ref...

Ecclesiastes 3:20 NIV The burden of beasts Unfortunately it’s something we don’t think about because we only seem to think about the fact that in this life we are burdened. We think so often about all we have to do, all we’d like to get done, all we plan to have did by the time we end up dead. And yet even in this we think so little about life itself other than all our plans and the priorities that they ask us to place wherever it is that they ask we do, something that we do more often than not, doing thus and then only whatever they ask us to. Because we think we’re more important than we are. We’ve embraced this idea that to life there’s some unseen and yet entirely noticeable hierarchy upon which all things, all creatures especially, are to be measured and thus by which we should measure them. And it’s within this now endless measuring of everything seeking to determine, for ourselves and usually only by the same, the value, the worth, the importance of everything. Except ourselves....

Psalm 146:4 NIV The slow fade It’s something that unfortunately everyone here will feel at some point as this life is destined to go the way it’s been intended to go which is back to all the different parts, pieces and places from which we’ve come. But you see, the unfortunate thing isn’t that life is designed to unravel the way we’ve come to believe it does but rather that the unraveling is so feared as it’s so clearly become. And we all do fear it, or have, because our lives have become this bag in which we try so hard to fit everything we want to see, hear, do within it. And the call of the grave at first whispering our name in what is a whisper that grows louder and louder as we get closer and closer is what causes so many to spend their lives looking over their shoulder and under the same. Indeed, what if I told you that we’ve all chosen to carry this weight that was never ours to even notice? I’m not saying that death isn’t a weight nor something we shouldn’t notice or consider o...

Job 34:14-15 NIV Framed by fragility Humanity’s lack of humility has left us without an ability to see just how much we’re not and thus how small we are. And I think that perhaps this was always bound to happen as ever since the very beginning of our each living we’ve been within what’s become a world in which we’ve so much opportunity and access and excess that both time and chance would seem to suggest that eventually we’d all come to find ourselves having done so much, learned so much, loved so much and lost just enough to stumble upon this belief that we have some kind power, authority, responsibility even to live these lives however we determine to live them. And considering how we’ve all done exactly that, to what has long been a fairly decent degree of success, again, time and chance continue to suggest that maybe we do have some sort of say within the way things go and thus a responsibility to ensure they all go okay. Because, well, for the most part they have. Now sure we all ...

Psalm 104:29 NIV We huff and we puff Probably because we know that one day He will take these lives away from us. And, well, we’ve become of the mind that these lives are ours, a lie in an accordance with we’ve lived for so long now that the promise of our leaving this earth seems the promise of only a jerk. Because the simple truth is that we all enjoy these lives. We love the act of living. In our opinion living a life is something we’re all fairly good at, something that we’ve been doing long enough, and with success enough, that we feel as if we’re somehow owed the opportunity to go on living them for however long we may want them. Losing the promise of eternity within our hurry to always keep doing whatever little it is that we’re still willing to try and that alongside our appreciation for the fact that this life we have is an opportunity that we’ve been given. And, well, bad things happen whenever you start to become unappreciative. Especially should it get to the point in which...