Forged By Faith

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,...

Colossians 3:3 NIV decides upon the death And that of even all that is because along this line you’ll come to find within this time that we call life there’s so much that isn’t what you’ve long thought it was that because you did you do start to agree that the part of you that still tries so hard to see, to know, to hold, to have is indeed better off left to a dirt nap. Because there’ve come entirely too many times within every single one of our lives in which our hearts and/or our minds thought and felt that they’d figured out the reason, the purpose, the very promise of life. Only to all of us stand here still today still looking through things for something that will perhaps not let us down this time. Or, and it would in truth be a feeling finally even better, perhaps something that we won’t let down this time. Because, at least for me, that’s been the story of my life. And it’s become such the tagline that my mind finds only all the time all of the ways in which I surely disappoint...