Forged By Faith

Acts 7:52 NIV Nothing ever changes Rather there’s this ever-generalized stagnancy to our society that’s been inviting us all to continue along within the same direction that those who’ve gone before us have always gone. And now sure, we paint it up all nice and pretty to help pretend it isn’t there. We hide it behind all of our constant technological progressions and hierarchy-based algorithms. We mask it with team logos and ignore it as we focus on various other fandoms and friendships. But the cold hard reality is that among humanity there is no novelty. There is nothing new to anything we do. Maybe even somehow less to everything we are. And to be honest, which has never really been a part of our preference for repeating the past’s penchant for hypocrisy and dishonesty and deception, we like it this way. We really don’t mind things being always the same. In truth it makes everything from figuring out how to live amongst a lost and losing society and hopefully have some fun and make ...

2 Chronicles 36:16 NIV They shot the messenger Although by ‘shot’ I mean stoned, crucified, beheaded, fed to lions, sawed in half, beat to death, stabbed, hung, burned, crucified some more, one or two perhaps even upside down and did probably all sorts of other really horrible things unto these men and women to whom God had given the words of warning aimed at inspiring His people to turn off their path toward the impending (still) destruction that they’d all earned thanks to their all having learned to love this life in this land rather than the love of the hand that is Him who came down from Heaven to save we heathen. And by ‘they’ I mean we. Because, well, all of us have hated this message. All of us still hate being told we’re wrong. All of us despise the suggestion that we should probably begin doing something differently because of it and too that if we don’t then things probably won’t go very well. Why? Because things are going well. Life here does make sense. Most things do work...

2 Chronicles 36:15 NIV Not for lack of trying But rather simply due to lack of interest in hearing, in seeing, in believing even. Indeed, all throughout time itself we’ve all managed to prove time and again a people who seek not friends with attention given unto anything which doesn’t give us only exactly what we want in return for our sullen willingness to turn toward it or they whom begs a moment of our acknowledgement. It’s truly as if we’ve become so impressed with ourselves that we’re now instantly depressed whenever another asks we bother to focus on anything or anyone other than us. We love us some us and, well, it takes a literal act of God to change that. Thankfully said acts of God are what God’s the very best at. He’s in fact been acting in and on and for our behalf ever since He determined that we should be here. It’s like a person who decides they want a puppy. They go looking to get one knowing that they’re bringing home with it the responsibility to feed it, to protect i...

Zechariah 7:11 NIV Voicemail It’s that thing that we consider a modern convenience that allows us, whilst always busy, entirely too much so to be ever bothered by what is in all likelihood a message we don’t really care much about anyway, to get around to hearing something from someone else whenever we’ve either the time to do so or, and vastly more common the case I consider, we’re finally interested in hearing whatever this other has to say. It’s a thing that lets us choose when we pay attention, doing so always only at our earliest convenience. And that tends to usually work okay among people who are themselves busy and probably would agree that most things that they might leave messages about aren’t really all that pressing nor important anyway. It’s just that God’s not a person and, while probably very busy what with, you know, keeping all of us alive and this world spinning just right so as to hold us to the ground rather than watching us get flung all around, His messages that H...

Isaiah 63:10 NIV The war within It’s the one waged without what is the hope of hope itself as, well, we’ve become of a mind who so believes that we alone know always best in life that we cannot risk being proven wrong. And this fear of our folly being what our failures know it to be but our pride insists it isn’t has left us taking always to arms against even the long arm of the Lord who uses said length so as to reach those who are so very lost as to think they’ve found what life is in this place in which life isn’t. Because indeed, while we may have a life here the truth of life is that for us to so assume that all of it is supposed to be here, to fit here, to stay here, this has left us lost in a willingness to lose it all. For no matter how great we may come to think we are, still comes the fall. I reckon the problem is that as a people we don’t experience it for the most part within this place. Rather this place had become a pride’s paradise in that nearly every aspect of life its...