Forged By Faith

Ecclesiastes 1:15 NIV What it is Is what it shall be as there are things which simply cannot be anything other than whatever they are. And even this reality has managed to find a way to be, at least sometimes, agreed upon by humanity in that every now and then you’ll hear a man or a woman or perhaps it spoken even from the mouths of children that now common concession that it is what it is. It’s something of an agreement as to the impossibility of our changing anything about whatever something is or has become. But for most of us that agreement is often spoken in something of shame as if a failure found only at what’s then the end of a certain period of time likely having been given trying to change inevitability’s mind. And we sure do that a lot in life. All of us find nearly every day here this desire to prove that we’re the ones who can do what reality, what logic, what simple and honest truth and mathematics say cannot be done. We want to be the one who proves otherwise. And indeed...

Ecclesiastes 1:14 NIV The madness of meaning It’s found in this seeing that all you’ve done and likely then all you’re doing is without reason, without purpose, without then anything of any ability to offer much in the way of a return upon that which is invested in it, toward it, for it. And this realization causes you to sort of begin to undo, to unravel, to all but come apart at the seams you’ve sewn yourself into trying to make do with all that you’ve had to do as is all done under the sun for things under the same. All the struggle, all the strain, all the tears and all their stains, it all means nothing. So long as all it means is something here. Why? Because all that’s here is already gone. All the things we have, they’ve already been lost. All the plans we have, already finished and proven futile. All the hopes and goals and hurt and gold, it’s over. We are all here as what are but the final cars in humanity’s train of existence pulling begrudgingly into the station that is eter...

Ecclesiastes 3:19 NIV A dominion divided And that due to such things as division, darkness, disinterest, distraction. All of which have befallen only us who somehow still consider ourselves the pinnacle of God’s creation. And indeed, perhaps we are but I contend that what we are is but the remnants of what was once intended to be lightyears ahead of where we’ve ended and will end because of it. For where we’ve arrived is as a people who are living always this life as if we’ve some sort of supremacy or superiority over everything from everything to everyone. Indeed, we all live, or have lived I pray, in what is that commonest of all common ways in which we’ve seen ourselves as the very top of the crop. A prayer I pray because I hope we’ve found/find the day in which we can look upon our way and see just how confused and misused we’ve all but demanded it be. Alas, I can’t really say that we’ve really found that day nor then that we feel that way as rather we seem still tied to the tether...

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....