Day 2978 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 24:16 NIV

For what do we have if not for the hope that our sincere efforts are worth the time and energy given to make them manifest?

I woke up today just as I do every other day with a verse or an idea in mind and an excitement to see what words flow from my fingertips into the keyboard onto the screen. And I sat down and got to work trying by feeble daily attempt to capture the lessons and meanings of a truth I’ve lived failing to uphold. I typed away at what was yet another great feeling post that had the flow I’ve come to appreciate. It wasn’t this post though. It was a typical continuance of the day prior.

But after an hour or so of trying to do what I always try to do, plans changed because that’s what plans do. Wifi wigged, everything froze, account logged out and depression set in. An hour of effort vanished in an instant. My normal collection of 2,000+ words of work erased in a moment. Just a blank screen where an entire morning had just sat waiting to be saved.

Then I got home after the day’s errands had been ran and all the boxes were checked and another moment to write all over again presented itself. So I frustratingly started over. 20-30 minutes of beating a dead horse failing to capture what was stolen this morning, and I finally agreed to listen to whatever is telling me to talk about something different. So here I sit hammering away at another post that holds a little more of what I’m feeling at the moment.

In truth, it’s what’s I’ve felt for a while. It’s tangible combination of frustration and failure. It’s a mix of misunderstandings and an inability to make them make sense. It’s a realization that it doesn’t matter. A firm grip on the understanding that all of this is just an attempt to be something I’ve failed to be more times than not. It’s all just a stubborn effort to do something that I hope means something.

I know many of these daily efforts likely come across as arrogant or angry. I share the things that have left me shaken or strengthened in hopes that others might find encouragement to stand firm or urgency to make some changes and do better. I seek to serve God with one of the few skills I think I have to offer. There’s a love for words and writing that I’ve had for a long time. This is enjoyable for me, making all these letters become words that add up to sentences that form paragraphs that attempt to capture one of the many ideas that never seem to stop speaking in my mind.

But I don’t put me in here all that much. I feel that there are bigger things to share than my personal feelings or failures. I just don’t want this to be about me in any way whatsoever. This is God’s, not mine. I don’t want anything out of this but only to try and please Him in the hope that I can maybe make up for the countless times I’ve failed to do so.

But as I sit here struggling to write past the anger of the day getting away from me, I’m suddenly reminded of a conversation had in the midst of the hours now fading into the past.

As we were driving back this afternoon, I was talking with my mom about the past few days frustrations after the past year of trying and hoping and falling just so slightly short so many stinkin times we can’t remember them all. And she was talking about how frustrated she was last night. And I just told her that God wants our honesty. He wants our real. He wants our failures and flaws and typos and tantrums. He needs us to be genuine because it’s only when we’re honest that we have any hope of growing.

So this is my honest.

This life sucks sometimes. It’s hard. It’s frustrating. It causes us to bend to the point we break and lose our minds for a moment. It fails to be everything we want it to be, and in turn, we too fail to be everything we ought to be. Life is a collection of failures, what makes it different for each of us is how we respond to them.

The fact is that I’ve done this very thing every single day for 2978 days in a row, and in truth, every single one of these posts have failed to measure up. They’ve fallen short of impressing the meaning of the many verses we’ve covered. They’ve contained mistakes and misspellings and missed opportunities. They’ve fallen so far short of coming anywhere close to what the Bible already says that I always tinker with this idea that I’m messing up and wasting my time and trying to share something only to distract from what it already is.

But still, even after yet another day of disappointment and frustration, I sit here trying. Why? Stubborn. Addicted. Arrogant. Egotistical. Maniacal. Maybe just plain silly and foolish and too complacent to quit. I don’t know to be honest. But I know that no matter the reason, I won’t quit. Simply because I think sometimes the devil does everything he can to make us give up on doing something that may somehow amount to something good and I just don’t want to give him the satisfaction.

Then I think about verses like this. It’s a matter of how we respond to the circumstances and situations we face in life. They’re not all going to be conducive to whatever we’re trying to accomplish. Things will always go against us simply because there’s always something against us. If you speak the truth, those who are living a lie will hate you. If you speak only lies then those seeking the hope and growth offered by truth will be disappointed. If you try to avoid it all, well then, you never come anywhere close to really doing anything. And to me, that just seems like a wasted life.

We all fall. We all fail. We all make mistakes. We all get angry. We all fight against selfishness. We’re all impatient. We all have a whole host of really impressive issues that, if we’re lucky, we’re courageous enough to try to address. We’re all truly far from perfect, which is oddly enough what today’s post was going to be about, in some sense anyway. It’s just reality, just truth, just an honest look at who we are, where we are, where we’re going and how we’re managing along the way.

But man, what a bumpy road this life is sometimes. What I think we need to always remember is that God knows. He knows we struggle. He knows we fail. He knows that our best is pretty much not worth the time given to try for it. He knows that there’s nothing we can do to make up for who we’ve been. A million prayers, a million words, a million posts, a million efforts will all ultimately prove insufficient to get us anywhere.

So what do we do? What can we do? If all we’ll ever be is failures incapable of coming anywhere close to being worth what’s been done for us, what do we do?

We try. We try. We keep trying. We wake up ready to face whatever weather has blown in overnight. We get kicked in the teeth and dropped to the ground and pummeled into near oblivion. We make mistakes and try to not repeat them. We offer the best we can muster at every moment we have remaining. We do what we can to focus on God when everything is ripping our eyes off Him. We pray when we’re too angry to feel like it. We worship while feeling worthless. We say grace even when ungrateful for the circumstances we’re in.

We just try. Not because what we accomplish means anything in the grand scheme of things. Not because we can earn our salvation or make up for the price paid to achieve it. Not because God is pleased with our best, but because our best is the least we can offer. We try because we have no reason not to. We try because otherwise we’d have nothing else to do other than accept defeat and wonder what could have been.

There are so many deep aspects and angles of faith that I fear are often lost between the cracks that form upon the surface of our insufficiencies. Faith isn’t just hoping in the outcomes we want. It’s hoping that we don’t lose sight of the outcomes already promised. It’s not thinking we can please God with what are nothing but human efforts spent to accomplish something that will one day mean nothing. It’s praying that we can manage to be something other than the pitiful failures we’ve proven to be time and again.

Faith is the courage to stand up after you’ve fallen. It’s the willingness to try even when there seems no point. It’s the refusal to give up even when all of life is fighting against you. It’s the tenacity to try when it makes far more sense to quit. It’s being stubborn for the things that God puts on our hearts. It’s chasing His version of peace with a relentless fervor that will not let us give up even though it would be so much easier and far more time efficient.

The fact is that God’s not pleased with sacrifices. He isn’t appeased by our perfection. He’s not satisfied with our attempts to satisfy Him. He just asks us to be faithful to Him and to whatever calling He’s given us to attempt within the time we’ve been allotted. He asks us to trust that He has a plan and a purpose and a promise that all come together to make all of this worth the struggle and strife that it holds. He simply asks us to look beyond what we can see, because, if we’re being honest, so many times in life all we see are the reasons to give up and walk away back into our comfy little hideouts within our fears.

We’ll never be proven righteous by our own undertakings. Even if I write a 2,000 words daily book report on the Bible for the rest of the days I have here, they won’t accomplish anything. If we sing worship songs until our voices are gone and our lungs are unable to breathe, they won’t make up for all the words we’ve spoken against Him. If we give every second we have remaining to trying to be as perfect as we can possibly be, fall short we shall.

We are human, He isn’t. We are everything He never called us to be. And that’s why we try. Because we have only improvements to make. We have only room to grow. We have but one life and to what else should we give it but to the faith that tells us that we can do better as defined by what He has told us is good?

My point in all this incoherent rambling is that we’re gonna have days like this. We’re going to mess up. We’re going to fall short. We’re going to find ourselves frustrated and incredibly interested in this option that tells us we can avoid the disappointment happening again. We’re going to have wifi go out, cars run out of gas, people be rude, bills be high, friends walk away, and efforts prove seemingly pointless. But it’s never the outcome that truly matters. If it were, then yeah, we’d all be in a really big pickle.

It’s not the outcome of our efforts that define who we are. It’s that we keep putting forth those efforts regardless to how easy or profitable or productive they seem to be. If we could be enough to satisfy God, we’d still find a way to fail. And since we can’t, then failure shouldn’t really be our fear. No, our fear should be agreeing to quit only because the devil convinced us that it was okay to do so.

Abraham trusted in the Lord and it was credited to Him as righteousness. We need that same trade, because righteous is something we’ll never be because our pasts have already be written. But, as we’re told here, the righteous fall but stand again. So maybe righteousness isn’t equal to perfection after all. Maybe righteousness is simply refusing to stop trying to be better than we’ve been. Maybe righteousness is the courage to keep going.

In the end, all we’re doing is either trying or trying to convince ourselves we don’t need to try anymore. While they’ll both prove to be feeble and failing, at least if we keep trying we can say we did. Won’t have that same hope if we don’t.

So while it’s all just a mess we’re pretty much struggling and mostly failing to muddle through, if we stop then we’ll only ever have gotten as far as we’ve already come. And considering that we have both days and breath left, why not put them to use and see what we can try to accomplish. If we fail, we fail. If we fall, we fall. But if we stay down, it’ll only be because we agreed to quit.

And that, my friends, is really the only true failure in any of this.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold