Forged By Faith

John 14:3 NIV pursues the promise of patience Though, if we were to be honest, it’s usually one pretty hard for us to find the need to feel as if we need to find it. And that simply because, well, we’ve become so impressively impatient that now being patient, or even being asked to consider it, it’s something that feels unto us as if a punishment. It brings with it always this weight, the wait, and it seems more often than not measured only in wonder and worry, neither of which seem at all light to a life lived always in a hurry. And that’s the problem precisely! It’s that this version of life we’ve all chosen, yes, chosen to live is one lived so fast and, well, freaked out both by and because of it that we’ve all basically become entirely willing to abandon boredom and belief as both of them ask that we sit inside a silence of time that, again, seems almost a violence against us as it brings unto us all the thoughts we’ve never thought that we thus have no idea how to think. And that ...

John 14:2 NIV ponders of a place One in which what’s here isn’t. A hope where all that’s held isn’t so hollow. A joy met at the end of a journey taken hoping that the joy we find doesn’t fade so often. A place in which peace doesn’t exist in pieces ever-fractured by our own failures and a fallen world’s foolishness. A meeting of meaning and finally learning whatever it always was. A learning of life and why we had one. A receiving of an outcome that we’d long since come out of this world and, in so doing, come out of our minds trying in hope, in patience, with purpose and intention to find. Why? Because it sounds more amazing by the day, does it not? Indeed, I think often of what Heaven might be like, though being always careful to never travel over that line in which I allow it to become something that can actually fit inside my mind. No, I just wonder where it is, what it feels like there, what all of what we all want gone isn’t found or felt anymore, then too the finding and feeling...

1 Corinthians 2:9 NIV imagines in the impossible For why continue to hinder whatever our every hope may still be as to insist it be whatever we think it could? After all, what sense does it make to insist we’re the ones who can in anyway know anything as to everything that isn’t yet? As is asked constantly in Scripture, who was there when God set all of this in motion? Who of us knows the ways to where are stored the waves of the ocean? Who of us know where the stars go to sleep when the sun starts its shift? Who of us knows why the wind goes whichever way the wind blows? Indeed, who of us can even say we know the reason yet for all the thoughts we’ve thought or can understand those we’ve not? I am convinced that among the greatest tragedies to befall a fallen man is for him, her, them to imagine themselves as anything other than paper-thin and temporary. And that’s because, as again the Bible makes mention, the surest way for any to fall is to find themselves thinking they’re able to ...

Hebrews 11:16 NIV hastens the horizon Because there exists this beeline in belief that desires, demands, determines to decide upon no relief until we see what all there is to that in which we believe so very deep that we know it’s there if even we know not where to go nor how to get to wherever all of it is. No, when you believe in something said something becomes eventually a longing the longer said belief asks that we believe for whatever it is that the something seems. And the simple fact is that these lives we live within this world so lost are in fact really long. So long in fact that many have fallen away from every hope held still just out of sight. Sadly most in fact have exchanged every better hope for what is here a better life. They’ve traded away the trying for what only our souls seem to know for what more our eyes can see and hands can hold. They’ve given up on going further into the fog of the future, afraid that their inability to see what’s waiting equals a chance they...

Hebrews 11:15 NIV ignites the invites Because, well, we’re gonna have to find something to do with them! And that simply because the truth is that they’ll just keep on coming. And that because what this world clearly wants is for us, all of us, to stay more or less who and what and where we are. That is by far the biggest goal of this globe, to just stay put and find contentment within that existence in which so little changes that nothing is ever hard again. Yes, this world is so desperate for that which is safe and easy and simple that we’ve learned to live only for today, but that mostly by repeating yesterday. And yet, as far as I’m concerned, there is no part of this where I go back. For I know where I’ve been. I know what I’ve done. I know who I’d become because of what I’d done where and when I did it. I remember so many moments in what has been a great life in which I do delight inside many the memory as they’re of times that made me happy, made me better, gave me hope in that ...