Forged By Faith

Colossians 3:1 NIV starts the reassembly of reality For in Christ, you know, the One who turns tables upside down, seems that so too shall our lives be turned rightside up. And yet this can only come when, again, we are in Him and He then in us. And yet this can only happen when we’ve happened upon the end of us and our love for what, in Him, becomes then what was. And yet we can only have a ‘what was’ whenever we endure whatever it is to endeavor to be undone by what He’s done. And yet that can only just barely begin within what’s been the what is that’s to become, in Him, what was. See what I’m saying? It’s basically that a life spent following Him is one in which everything’s pretty much always changing. I mean, even our perception of change changes. This is something I make mention of all the time anymore. It’s our well-known and thus commonly-help aversion to change. We hate it. We fear it. We feel it something entirely unbecoming of whatever this is that we’ve become. And that’s ...

Colossians 2:12 NIV sees success inside surrender Which is in every way possible nothing we’ve ever been able to see before. And that because for all our lives we’ve seen success inside only, well, success. And yet success has always, to us, meant something gained. It’s been a matter measured in material wealth or personal health or societal hope. It’s a dream for something more, usually something had that we had not before. Success has always been assumed within the substance of excess, of extra, of excitement and every outermost extremity of all the above that we could ever possibly come to assume we’d love. And we so clearly love not losing for within the loss of something we see nothing of success. Nor often of even reason. Because, again to us, so too does reason usually rely upon our being rewarded as we’ll not do anything without ensuring that we achieve or obtain something within the doing thereof. We even have all these little cultural colloquialisms in which we all but consta...

Romans 6:6 NIV reaches the road’s end And there finds this strange elation as to the conversation had with what’s by then a past that, though once found as a friend, suddenly there seems something different then. For along this journey what we stand to find is that as our lives as were lived in sin begin to die, we ourselves begin to lose the rather natural instinct to try and keep them alive. And that is in every way a truly strange thing to feel as, well, one of the main goals and thus common pursuits, one justifiable in every way possible, is to keep oneself alive and well. It’s just that whole “well” part of that equation is the part that endures some changing. And that simply because, when come unto the well, we find there that we’re not. We may have thought we were along the way and within the walk that led us there. We may be surrounded by people and possessions that have possessed for us this measure of trust for which they’ve had in us, perhaps even our trusting deeply in ours...

Ephesians 2:14 NIV betrays the barricades Which, in a way, means nothing short of betraying ourselves. And that’s simply because it was us who all but insisted upon the now longstanding separations designed inside the distance from where we started to where we are. And that is in itself something that continues to both lengthen, deepen and, in many ways and that in every day, darken. There’s this ongoing division between man and He who made them that’s allowed them to all but forget Him. A choice chosen on our part because we’ve become of the mind who finds a greater hope in His forgetting us than in His forgiving us. Simply because we’ve become so hostile unto hope itself that we’d rather continue waging this war that is our every worry and want than to lay down such weapons and allow Him to heal our wounds. No, for if we were so healed we might too be helped unto humility and, well, that’s just about the last thing that it seems we’re left able to assume is at all conducive to the wa...