Forged By Faith

Acts 2:33 NIV A gift from home And as it’s the most expensive ever known, proven only in the Son showing that this life we live is ours on loan, it’s also to become the most priceless of all possible possession as it proves the very start of what begins a progression from what’s been our every broken part in our every broken past that continues on from all of that toward all that He said is waiting at the end of all that is. An end itself seen and shown inside so very much within this rental home in which we live on loan these lives we hold. Seen and shown inside the sights and sounds we somehow come to see and say as are spoken and known of a love that’s grown inside our hearts by at first tearing them all apart. All to begin in us the brand new start that He said He had to reach His end here only to leave and send back that which He knew we’d need to find success along this journey. What journey? The descent into madness that we’ve been talking about for I believe over two months now...

Titus 3:5 NIV with humility’s help For only within humility might we be helped as the life we’ve all known to live, that lie in which we lay in which we live as if we do nothing wrong and can thus never make mistakes nor be proven mistaken, it’s left us all having missed so much in terms of meaning and mercy that having been met with them in Him, we too, at first, felt it was best to back away and belittle. All of us have believed the Good News to be nonsense. We’ve all considered the cross to be some story cooked up to keep us confused and ashamed. We’ve all spent a lifetime building up our name into this thing that needs nothing from nobody. This is the concept of freedom, of fortune, of favor, of everything that everyone down here has come to understand. All our lives we’ve all been told that we’ve to stand alone. That we have to do all we do all by ourselves so that it’s only ourselves who will gain whatever gloating or glory that there is to find within however we determine to wri...

Titus 3:4 NIV everything changed All of the sudden the life you’d been living didn’t seem quite so much like a life worth living. The words you’d been saying sounded different, many of them words you didn’t like the sound of anymore. The thoughts you once thought are slowly replaced with things you never knew you could or should think instead. The things you have start to become just things you have rather than prizes you prize. Your eyes begin seeing things you didn’t see before, even amongst and within things you’d seen before. Everything begins to become so different in Him that you begin to think you’ve gone mad. And maybe you have. Indeed, there are so many days these days in which I catch myself doing, saying, thinking something that I know my old self would have never said or done or thought back when I was who I’m not now and who I am now wasn’t who I thought I could be. In fact there are an increasing number of things that I’ve become and am becoming that my old life, my old m...

Titus 3:3 ESV befriends the fade Because within this belief you come to believe in what becomes an oddest of all reality and that is that you find that you can’t gain anything in, of, for, from what is this life and whatever this life is unless and until you at first give it away. That you can’t find that which you already have. That you can’t become that which you already are. That you cannot ever possibly grow in what is the way of life that you know you already know. No, in this faith we will come to know that the only way to ever gain anything is in the getting rid of whatever we thought it was. And thus begins the fade. To me it’s become one of my favorite parts of this faith as I sit daily and watch the person I was grow further and fainter into the fuzzy forgetfulness of what’s come to be a life I chose to give away and choose now to not remember more than I have to. And it’s an altogether strange adventure to see the sum of all you’ve known, wanted, won, wished to be an indeed ...

1 Peter 1:14 NIV learns there’s more to life Than basically the entire sum of everything you’d come to live it for. And yeah, that’s in pretty much every way possible one of the hardest possible lessons for us to learn as, well, most of what we’ve come to learn has been learned in the language of like and dislike. And what defines then the difficulty of this path ever-narrowing toward an eternity promised to do entirely otherwise is that within our lives we’ve all come to find so much we think we like, alongside a rather concrete assurance that we’re pretty sure we’re almost always right, is that our lists of likes as measured against the more we don’t is pretty much set in stone. Thankfully there’s another set of stones into which at least an alternative theory as to how we should spend our lives does exist for our considering. It’s called the Ten Commandments and they’re a pair of stone tablets that a man named Moses carried up this mountain, both because God called Him to and, well,...