Day 3109 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Mark 4:7 KJV

Growing up and getting older sound concepts one in the same, but a tragic result of modern life is that in many ways all of us complete the latter while missing or mishandling the former.

This whole realization hit me like a demolition crew the other night as my family and I watched a movie I've seen countless times over the years. It's this story of a kid who wishes to be a grown up so that he can have the fun and freedom he foresaw within those who'd already arrived at an older age than he happened to be. Drops a quarter in an unplugged game granting that that night he gets said wish, awaking the next day a 13-year-old in the body and life of someone 30+.

And as I watched this film I now all but know by heart, I found my heart moved in a way that I'd never experienced nor expected. Couldn't help but realize that it had been watched through new eyes now opened to the tragedies of hastening life only because we think ourselves ready to live what we can in no way understand. For the first time I realized that the appeal of this film was found within its applicability to my own story.

Much like Tom Hanks' character in Big, I myself find myself a guy in my 30's looking back at a life lived too fast in some ways. Maybe in many ways. Maybe in fact in most, not sure yet as this one hit me so hard that I'll be thinking it over and unpeeling the layers over the coming days. But the point is one that I feel all of us can likewise contemplate if not agree upon.

We live in this world wherein there's a thin veil between youth and the innocence within which it exists and the limitless sense of freedom found once one reaches a certain age. Depending upon the differing topics one could discuss, this age is 16, 18, 21. But anymore it seems as if life happens much faster than that. Getting your license at 16 is now a rite of passage that's passed over as it’s been surpassed by many other milestones along the list of things already found and figured out by then.

Indeed, by 18 we're doing more than graduating high school and learning of our right to vote in an election which holds a gravity we've not yet learned to fully understand. And by the time all limits are now made legal when one turns 21, well, odds are the illegality of the past has rendered the anticipation completely moot leaving only a mundanity to what many once looked forward to.

Sadly, I know personally the sadness found and felt in looking behind at the hurried pace in which my race was run. I now in fact realize that it wasn’t even me running, nor was it the race I’d have chosen. Something I've kind of hinted at in the past, but at 12-13 I was handed something from someone who I didn't know not to trust as a kid that young finds little reason to doubt in those considered friends.

But sitting here now with the weight of a couple decades of repeated mistakes weighing upon my mind, I now see the danger posed by the gullibility present in the youthful exuberance of a child yearning to be a few years older.

And that's the danger all of us now older can likely agree we didn't know would lead to what it has as we hadn't the opportunity to learn what to watch out for before it came for us. Sin doesn't wait, doesn't bide its time nor give us a chance to learn to fight our fight against it. It just comes calling whenever our ears are open and our minds wandering and our hearts likewise ready to delve into the experience of the experimentation of the freedom of a life without limits.

But what we don't understand and therefore don't care about that semblance of freedom is that the limits in place were placed there for a reason. And no, contrary to impatient assumption, it's not to keep us from having fun or finding the freedom we can’t wait to have when we’re older. No, they're placed there out of kindness so as to give us a chance to grow up while getting older without unknowingly sacrificing the chance to mature in time.

No, down here all we know of time is that it keeps on ticking into the past and we therefore mustn't let an opportunity pass us by. Because we’re told another might not be coming.

But there's a tragic beauty to be found in hindsight. It's this ability to see mistakes made and the wrong steps that led up to them which we can use to not repeat them. But the sorrow held in those opened eyes is that we must agree that we can't go back to prevent them having been made the first time. We have to agree to the past staying carved how we lived it as time doesn’t go that way for anyone. No, sadly hindsight seems to only help us see what we couldn't when we needed to the most.

That's one of the reasons I hate so violently this way of life assumed and expected by whomever dares to keep pretending they're running this show. Because as far as I'm concerned, they're only running it into the ground. Be it politicians/those hiding in the shadows paying those in the position to perform according to their decrepit desires or the devil who controls the hearts and minds of every lost soul happily content with the meager breadcrumbs he flicks off his table.

This world is being run by those who indeed wish to choke out light and love and hope and truth and purpose and virtue and meaning. Men and women in suits and ties that speak all the pretty lies written by the pretender contender only hold such an image of authority because the truth of who we are, of whose we are has been choked to death, leaving inside us only acknowledgment of our lack of power to do anything any differently than we're told.

We've been talking for several days about the selling off of our souls in exchange for the comforts and complacencies offered us by a world that appears to be able to offer them. And as kids who look grown only because of height and experience, we've been lulled into accepting our gullibility as an unmovable or unchangeable struggle we can't lose. But all because the truth got choked out throughout those years we were waiting and wanting and expected to grow up quicker than we should have.

You see, God placed inside of us an identity that He planned and perfected and plotted a pristine path toward the fulfillment of in our lives. He wrote a story meant to be lived out at a steady pace, but this place is too impatient to allow things to work as they should. And so we're told that we should hurry up because it's not only we who wait on our arrival at adulthood.

No, the politicians want our votes. The liquor companies want our monies. The film industry craves our fandom. The sports heroes make their millions off our earnings. The peddlers of pornography and drug paraphernalia need our attention, apparently so desperately that they're excited to risk our health and happiness to get it. Yes, the whole wide world wants our souls, and sadly, we agree to start selling before we could ever know their true worth.

All because this place will never give God or His Word or His truth or His plans or His purposes or His promises or His Prince a chance. Not welcome, and that's something made clear all along this journey. But just in case it's not clear enough, the world hurries us along so we don't accidentally find ourselves time to reconsider what we're doing and what we're losing.

They just want us lost so that we don't try to find out why. Because the answer to that question is one the powers that be don't want to believe.

It's one of these up-and-down kinds of situations where even though it's so incredibly hard to understand once you realize it, once you do realize it so too do you too realize that there shouldn't be the hope we still have. We shouldn't be able to consider the chance of rebirth or renewal. We shouldn't have the opportunity to turn from who we've been told to be, who we've sadly agreed to be in order to be something better.

No, we should simply be lost souls without souls because we sold them so long ago.

But then there's the cross constantly beckoning us to come back. To seek the childishness we lost in the years spent wishing life would hurry up and bring us the freedom we didn’t know we already had. To embrace a childlike faith that leans upon God as a child relies upon their parent for safety and acceptance and provision and the promise of something worth waiting for.

Yes, to understand the gift of a second-chance given to a lost life lived in a world without second chances, and to do so like a kid who once again believes everything is possible as he or she rages beyond the disbelief instilled by a world that doesn’t believe in anything anymore.

His Word exists inside each of us, and it’s the only reason we have that hope of that chance. But truth is that it's likely buried underneath a plethora of impropriety taught us by the world in which we're stuck for the time being. Or maybe it's been drown out by the many lies we've believed we had to believe in order to be what the world told us they knew the way to reach. Or perhaps, as seen here, it's just been choked by the worries and wishes we've settled upon focusing on.

But still, it's there. His Word is there. His purpose is there. His plan is there. His Son is there calling us to come back home. Just turn around and stop running in this artificial race run by those running the world to death. Catch your breath, dare to rest, allow yourself to recover what you didn't know had been stolen or given away. Just consider the cost of things you might not know you've lost.

Not because it's fun to realize you've been had, been lied to, been led off course and away from hope. But simply because God can lead us back to Him where all we want, all we need, all we are has always been.

The heaviness is that no, we can't get back the years we lost thinking time was all we had to lose. We can't go back and unmake the mistakes that made us who we've become. We can't unlearn the wrong lessons we learned too quickly that now form the contempt and malcontent we feel inside. Truth is that many parts of us have died because they weren't given the time or attention they needed in order to live.

Innocence, excitement, happiness, simplicity of simply enjoying life for the gift it is and the fullness He offers us within it might all feel as if they're gone. But that's just it, He's proven the very best at bringing dead things to life.

Now I’m not going to lie because I've promised to never speak anything but the truth in these daily offers, but I sit here angry and sad and wrestling with a whole host of emotions I never expected to have having just watched a movie I had already seen so many times before. But I believe that God works in ways we don't understand according to a schedule we can't understand.

And though many of the lessons He needs us to learn are in no way enjoyable to learn, it's a gift to find the purpose of His plans because the pain they bring reminds us that we're alive with time left to do something about it all. So, what are we going to do about it all?

No, I can't be a sixth-grader again. I can't turn down the invitation to partake of something that would alter my life as it has. You can't go back and unsay something you still feel guilty about or ask out the pretty girl you didn't have the courage to talk to. We can't get back the childhood we lost trying to hurry up and be the adults the world demanded we become before we were ready or able.

But we can learn that this world doesn't run our lives unless we invite them into our hearts through the messages and medias and misunderstandings that they rely upon our having in order to get in where they fit in. We must learn to stop allowing anything to fit inside our lives that keeps us from living them according to God's plans and purposes for them. And so, as far as I’m concerned, this world can kick rocks because it's already taken away a childhood I would have loved to enjoy without having all the grown-up parts being forced upon it.

I’m sick to death of being chocked by this world forcing itself down our throats so that it can get to our hearts in order to keep the hard.

That’s why I wanted to share that I believe that the truth is that it's never too late to grow up, even if we're already at a time or place or age where we think we're old enough to know enough. We can always learn something. We can always change something. And my hope today is that we all learn the risk of rushing through life living it by someone else's schedule or expectations.

As I close I sit here wondering what I could have been had I been given the chance to grow low and slow as He meant for us to do. And though I'll never know who that person is that I would have become down the path I didn't take, I do know now the importance of taking the right path from here on out. And I'll be doing it according to His plans in His timing until my time runs out.

Because I can now see that I’ve wasted far too much of the little time I have wishing I could be what the world told me I should be wishing for. And I don’t want to miss anything else He’s trying to do in the mundane days where I’m meant to be living life rather than urging it forward.

And so I will not agree to choke out what He's doing in me ever again, nor to be choked out by the stupidity of a world that dares think they know something without knowing God. Because while His plans and the path they follow may not keep up with the world we're told to race against, they also won't leave us high and dry, lost and hurting, wondering who or what we could have been or should have been had we been willing to pull out of a race nobody will win in the end.

Who knows but that if we do focus on finding Him rather than finding ourselves comparable to or competing against everyone else, we just might find that He just might be able to help us find ourselves when we're finally done trying to find ourselves in all the places everyone else told us to look.

After all, what do they know? What can they know when it’s clear they don’t care to know Him? No, this world knows nothing, and so this world will not hold me back by shoving me forward ever again. For me, my prayer is that He be my breath or bring my death because I’ve found nothing outside of His plans, and I’m nothing if I’m not inside His hands.

That’s been a hard lesson to have learned the hard way. But still, I am indeed thankful for the years I lost which helped me learn it after all.

Because although it cost me an opportunity to be who I could have been, at least I now know that I was put here to do something other than prove myself able to keep up with a world falling down. I was, you were, we all were created to yield fruit which pleases God.

And well, we can’t do that if we’re in a hurry to please the world which still lives as if He’s not in control.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold