Forged By Faith

Psalm 73:5 NIV What is pain? Is it the inner intensity met at the intersection of illness and injury? Is it found within the physical feelings of physical beatings? Is it seen inside the twisting of insides due to having eaten something rotten or witnessed something the same? Is it heard within the horrors of a hope gone to waste? Is it having to wait to see if that hope might dare again show its face? Is it the fear we feel when faced with something of which we’ve long been afraid? Is it the struggle that’s made inside facing down our fears and finding out all the reasons why we were always right to have feared this something that’s left us physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually struggling? What is struggle? We’ve been inside this proverbial bubble for a few days now as we’re trying to plumb the depths of this seeming discrepancy we all continue to see inside what is a life in which it often seems as if one side wins and one side won’t and yet those who do are those who don’t ...

Psalm 73:4 NIV What is struggle? Is it something disclosed in discomfort? Is it disease undisguised? Is it the lack of health known to us as having wealth and knowing nothing but happiness? Is it misery made in more moments than those in which we meet it not? Is it not having the ability, the opportunity, the affluence to afford something we want, something that someone else could afford and many have bought? Is it pain proven in mental delusion designed inside all manner of inner distress never seen, or so we try, upon the surface? Is it seen inside a lack of success in regard to whatever it is that success is to us? What is success? That’s what we spent yesterday trying to discuss. And indeed, it seems that in many ways, if not most, struggle forces us to go in that direction that success doesn’t know. For it feels as if struggle is something seen by eyes that haven’t the life that’s therefore free from the misery that it seems that all struggle means. And sure, to struggle is a bund...

Psalm 73:3 NIV What is success? Is it something best proven in prosperity and thus presented only in profit? Is it a matter minted in money or maybe measured by material? Is it the funds of fun as are found in friendship or just another of such fame's fantastical fakeries? Is it a consideration of coziness considered inside comfort or merely another confusion of complacency? Is it the reward of royalty or just the dream of those destitute? Is it seen inside the substance of where we’re standing and thus waiting for us to want it enough to win it? Is it something then lost by those who lose the lane in life along which it lies? Is it lies? What is success? For the strangeness of this life is that it seems as if it means something different to each of us. To some it’s the sum seen inside a bank account. To others it’s having a whole bunch of sisters and brothers inside what is a large family made of the success of the parents’ desire to have a children. To many it appears made of mat...

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...