Forged By Faith

Lamentations 3:18 NIV What is disappointment? Is it a simple disagreement with the general direction one’s life is going at any given moment? Is it a life in which we’ve given way to doing things that we didn’t want to do thinking along the way that we had? Is it a time spent looking back on all you may have had the hope to do, the chance to be, a collection instead of things that you never did and thus never were? Is it just a word that we’ve invented to give us some way to define a life upended, a journey daunted, a soul itself endlessly haunted by the many hopes that passed us by? Is it a dream that wakes us up at night, a story told to a slumbering soul under a starlit night of that way of life that life could have gone, perhaps should have gone had we not gone and done all we did that left that life in those dreams but for dead? Is it death, the very end of a life in which we always thought that our every hope might we find, or is maybe death the end of disappointment? Reality is ...

Lamentations 3:17 NIV What is depravation? Is it to be deprived of something in life, of life itself perhaps? It is the missing of something, misplacing of something? Is it the seeing all that another has and holding only in that a list of all we don’t? Is it this insistence upon housing our hope inside all things held either in the hand or heart of those with whom we share this hole? Is it the relative wholeness witnessed within the walk of another, a comparative lack then seen inside our own? Is it to go without, to never know, to never feel, to always wonder what it might be like to be like another? Is it the life of a drifter who’s sometimes unhappy that they’ve chosen a life without a home? Is it understanding the idea of home, and that of hope, and realizing that no matter what we might try our trying still to find either where we are is but as wasted an effort as any might try and that toward anything at all? Of all we have, of all we’ve seen, of every story we’ve lived and all ...

Psalm 88:15 NIV What is despair? Is it a result of a life broken beyond repair? Is it a symptom of a soul seemingly the same? Is it the number of days spent in the sun being drown by those flooded with rain? Is it a man who’s borne so much pain, strain, struggle and sorrow that all he seems to know is to hurt? Is it a hurt so deep that there’s no hope left to find or feel? Is it something a person can even feel at all or is it maybe just such a depth of despondency that the dejection discovered finds no objection from joy as there’s simply no such happiness to disagree with our feeling so far down anymore? Is it a matter of all of life’s terrors finally triumphing over us, leaving us in a pile of torment that no torrent or tempest could ever wash away? Is it a day at which we’re all to arrive in which our life is so far away from the sun that we finally just succumb to the idea that we’ll never know life again? In fact I do think it’s a place that most if not all of us have been, maybe...

Job 6:4 NIV What is terror? Is it the soul of someone suddenly seeing struggle as nothing but a success able to avoid it? Is it a heart left heavy having had to hold the wholeness of hopelessness when faced with a distress too deep for words? Is it the kind of fear we find or feel when found face-to-face with that which promises to our entire lives waste? Is it the wasting away we’ve ourselves chosen inside every single day along what’s been a story spent seeking our glory and thus denying Him any share? Is it a life lived in which we never learn to care as to the turmoils and tragedies we leave behind as we walk unashamedly toward only those places in which we believe wait only our prizes? Is it the work of the Almighty seeking to help us find humility knowing that there’s no other path by which Heaven shall be found? Is it nothing but worry won within our wanting life to always be easy, a war lost when so often it’s not? Indeed, terror is a tactician of sorts as it sort of insists up...