Forged By Faith

Job 21:7 NIV It’s just unfair For it seems that this world and how it works is almost a perfect contradiction to so much of what Scripture talks about in regard to God’s design and demand, both built upon and based within what He deserves as opposed to all the more we all so often assume we do. And yet I think that’s at least part of the confection that’s made for this confusion. It’s that we all so love this now ideal delusion in which we’re losing our minds daily to this lie that has us all convinced of the veracity of this sweetest of all ideas: That both there exist here good people and that, ironically, we’re always among them. Indeed, I don’t know that I’d have had any way to ever count the number of times I’ve heard in my life someone ask that age-old question: Why do bad things happen to good people? And that because I was both once a kid who didn’t know how to count that high, I also once believed that lie, and, perhaps most honest of all, I just never saw the potential for ha...

Ecclesiastes 8:14 NIV A topsy-turvy world One of the more unforeseen aspects, symptoms perhaps, of what is a Christian walk is that it turns you into something of a student of life itself and how it’s lived and why it unfolds the way it does for those who do whatever they do or don’t. It causes us to consider basically the sum of everything done under the sun seeking to find those things which seem right and thus should be emulated as measured over against those which seem only wrong and thus haven’t the same need of being replicated. And this has in fact become something that I find myself doing all the time. Just can’t find any way to make much of it make any sense anymore. For what we slowly come to see is that the world isn’t really anything of everything it was meant to be, could still be, ought to be if only we could gather together and stop treating God like some whether or not situation, destination, consternation, objectification. Indeed, I think we’ve gone and gotten so much ...

Psalm 76:13 NIV The difficulty In this life we’ve come to measure pain in scars or at least the wounds which leave them. We estimate danger based upon the particular risk inherent within a situation. We believe sorrow something seen only inside a mirror showing a reflection of someone dejected due to a trouble they’ve brought not on themselves. Indeed, it seems we believe still this idea that has us convinced that bad things happen to good people, and that probably because we see daily good things happening to bad people. And it’s within all of this that we all stumble unto one of the more challenging aspects of not only life in this place but even more so of this faith that calls us to be here but become something else. Something that neither belongs here nor then continues to seek that feeling as if we could, should as in Christ we can’t and thus we arrive eventually upon this understanding that we simply won’t. But still, there comes for us many days in which that boat don’t float a...

2 Corinthians 4:8 NIV It doesn’t matter At some point along this ride through what is this life and whatever else it may become there simply comes a point in which you stop keeping points. You stop keeping score. You quit worrying about the weather, the war, the worry about whether or not the fighting or fun will ever come and which of them might beat the other to you. Maybe that’s just because it starts to seem as if most things here are just there to beat you, to confuse you, to lose you inside what is this maze that is this mind that has mankind by the throat. A mindset sat upon still trying to gloat as if to gain or successfully avoid pain was ever to prove worth anything. An idea we’ve all believed before, but a belief itself that becomes so frivolous and foolhardy that we eventually find ourselves having to make a choice between continuing to believe for such trivial things as time and comfort or if we’re rather to shift our hopes to perhaps even the both running out so that we c...