Forged By Faith

Jonah 2:4 NIV What is determination? Is it the investigation of at least the willingness to try? Is it the audacity to stare risk in the eye and wonder why not rather than why? Is it the courage to consider that there may well be no other choice but to see what you can be? Is it the rarity of a heart that’s able to hold so tight to hope that all it knows is to try for whatever that hope can always become? Is it believing that hope can in fact always become something bigger, better and, in that belief, adamant to find the very outermost of every hope’s extremity? Is it an extreme toward which we go when even hope itself seems all but gone for good? Is it our souls becoming something a bit more unbreakable, unwilling even to bend anymore as we know there is still more that is in store that asks we become relentless in our pursuit there toward? Is it a body able to feel deprived, in danger, filled with doubt and a million miles from nowhere but yet entirely unworried as it knows that it w...

Psalm 31:22 NIV What is desperation? Is it a final yet violent separation found between a hope you have and a realization that you can’t force it to be had? Is it a person devolving into such a depth of personal despair that they believe all of life itself is beyond repair? It is a soul dissolving into a manner involving such pain and panic that it just can’t stand it? Is it suddenly finding we either don’t know how to stand nor what we might stand for thanks to so much so heavy so suddenly stood against us? Is it the result of a life gone against us, the same as has happened already, just now something happening again that we again can’t stand? Is it a disappointment so deep that we even make friends with dejection and enemies of sleep? Whatever it is it sure seems to be something each of us have seen inside entirely too many times in life. For each of us have been known to do some rather desperate stuff when it seems to us that the stuff around us, or perhaps even that within, just i...

Lamentations 3:18 NIV What is disappointment? Is it a simple disagreement with the general direction one’s life is going at any given moment? Is it a life in which we’ve given way to doing things that we didn’t want to do thinking along the way that we had? Is it a time spent looking back on all you may have had the hope to do, the chance to be, a collection instead of things that you never did and thus never were? Is it just a word that we’ve invented to give us some way to define a life upended, a journey daunted, a soul itself endlessly haunted by the many hopes that passed us by? Is it a dream that wakes us up at night, a story told to a slumbering soul under a starlit night of that way of life that life could have gone, perhaps should have gone had we not gone and done all we did that left that life in those dreams but for dead? Is it death, the very end of a life in which we always thought that our every hope might we find, or is maybe death the end of disappointment? Reality is ...

Lamentations 3:17 NIV What is depravation? Is it to be deprived of something in life, of life itself perhaps? It is the missing of something, misplacing of something? Is it the seeing all that another has and holding only in that a list of all we don’t? Is it this insistence upon housing our hope inside all things held either in the hand or heart of those with whom we share this hole? Is it the relative wholeness witnessed within the walk of another, a comparative lack then seen inside our own? Is it to go without, to never know, to never feel, to always wonder what it might be like to be like another? Is it the life of a drifter who’s sometimes unhappy that they’ve chosen a life without a home? Is it understanding the idea of home, and that of hope, and realizing that no matter what we might try our trying still to find either where we are is but as wasted an effort as any might try and that toward anything at all? Of all we have, of all we’ve seen, of every story we’ve lived and all ...