Day 3111 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Joel 2:25 KJV

It takes realizing that you've lost what you can't get back to appreciate the grace that gives back what you shouldn't have lost.

And yet, because that realization is tied inseparably to humility it remains a gift unreceived by the masses so messed up that they only know a way of life spent raging against the Way which brought us life. And deeper still, it's that same path onto which we've all sadly veered as we've stared at the veneer pasted upon the surface of the superficial existence that we've grown accustomed to accepting for ourselves.

Yet still we wonder why we so often feel somewhat empty or off. We wonder why our lives haven’t turned out as perfect as the plans we made to live them. We wonder why the advice we’ve been given hasn’t led to us living the dream we see everyone else enjoying. Might it be because it's all only this hollow outlook sought out by the majority of this world still descending into deeper and darker depravity?

Might it be that all this time we’ve been held blind against the truth of what’s really happening? Is it not that we live in a world merely putting on a performance for which we’ve been buying tickets with the cash we’ve earned from selling off what wasn’t ours to give away?

Yes, we’ve traded away our souls and the truth which sets them free in order to be just like the world that pretends to know the best way to live a life stuck living outside the truth that breathes life into us.

You see, that's the danger in allowing this world to be our teacher. We learn only what's known by those around us. And well, what's clearly known by the vast majority of those around us is that which has been passed down and filtered into this mindset we're set in today. We've forgotten a great many things, vital things, all because the world around us never sought fit to retain them.

And that which hasn't been retained or received cannot therefore be shared with those who come after us. We, if we're not careful and diligent to undertake the daunting task of returning to something entirely new, will merely teach those who come after us to themselves be but a reflection of us. But sadly, that reflection is the one we fight against looking back at us in the mirror.

And so how dare we pass down what we ourselves wish wasn’t real so we’d not have to deal with carrying it ourselves? Our sinfulness and lives thus far misspent chasing after it is not who we’re meant to be nor what we’re here to do. And we know that because He made sure we did. And since we know that, well, then we should know it’s on us to fight against being but another link in the chain that’s kept us captive all this time.

We need to do something new, even if we know we shouldn’t have that chance. Even if we know we don’t have the courage in us to do it, it’s still on us to try. Why?

Because we all know that we've made more mistakes than we've ever let ourselves admit or acknowledge. All of us know that we've not gotten everything right. All of should know in fact that we've likely gotten very little if anything anywhere close to right. No, personally speaking, I fully acknowledge that I've not done much good in my life thus far, because I, like you, have gotten older in a world that's never grown up past the unbecoming mindset of an entitled teenager.

Indeed, down here all we've ever known to be is that which defined the past generation and present indoctrination of this incarceration caused only by our own unwillingness to blaze toward being different. We've just settled into merely repeating the same thinking, the same speaking, the same believing and the same living as those before and beside us.

We are truly a reflection of the societies and situations in which we've grown. We're the culmination of a cantankerous and calamitous nation. All of us have lived for ourselves, and thus we can feel for ourselves the truth of 1 Corinthians 15:33, "evil communications corrupt good manners." What good may have once existed inside is now but behind, left for dead alongside the hope we once had for something better than what we'd been or now become.

That's the tragedy to which I've been talking for a few days now. It's this realization that along this wrong path sadly chosen only for the camaraderie there has been a great loss of ability, opportunity, responsibility, reasonability and yes, even life itself. That's what hit me like a freight train a few days back: That I'm a 12-year-old kid locked inside a grown man who now sees only the decades long since lost to a way of life that looked so much like the world around me that I never got the chance to find me.

The problem is that as we've grown to accept everything the world expects us to agree to, so to have we embraced the mindset that's set upon our remaining oblivious to the obvious. We've learned not only to make mistakes but also to deny our having made them. By the time we graduate from high school, a diploma isn't all we've earned to carry along with us out into the world which we're already lost within.

No, we also graduate with a rolodex of reasons and excuses for the foolishness we've been taught to agree to accept into our lives.

Yes, one of the greatest losses in life is the loss of humility as humility is demanded in order for us to even understand life, let along the true nature of the gift it is and has always been. Because we can't understand the undeserved blessings we've been given if we, like many do, skate through life on these assumptive wheels of raging entitlement so blinding that we become a people believing we're owed everything we have.

And we see this sad reality rearing its incredibly ugly head all around us down here in this hole. We see a society unable to be anything but unaware of the many things being lost as the status quo grates and grinds the gift once given. We see a culture crumbling because they refuse to lose this inability to see the losses already won in a life given away in exchange for the most meaningless existence ever known.

We sell ourselves to repeating everything the world wants from us. We share the tags, post the photos, learn the lingo and embrace the ego all because that's what's normal here. And we all just want to be normal here. And so we all just do whatever happens to become normal for as long as we're here.

But that's the problem, we just keep losing sight of the fact that we're not from here, don't belong here, won't stay here. All because we've both been taught and continue to see a great sea of souls still adrift atop a bottomless pit of indifference and corresponding indiscretion.

And as the weight of guilt continues to grow beneath our blindness, its drape around our hearts only continues to pull them down as they prove unable to outswim the reality we've been taught to desperately try to deny. Indeed, we eventually find ourselves sinking beneath those waves of wanton disregard for the divine who had the audacious love to create us in His image.

But now that the world has tarnished and tainted that truth down to a flickering whisper lost somewhere in the recesses of hearts now barely beating, we look in the mirror and see only the things we've lost because we know the hope we once had isn't looking back at us anymore.

It's a heartbreaking moment wherein you finally find that all you've found in all the years trying to find everything this world claimed to have to offer is a loss of everything you could have actually had had you had the courage to not lower yourself to assuming that this is all there is. But alas, as we've been discussing and discovering recently, we're mostly still merely kids trying to learn how to live life whilst the years we've been given in which to live it tick by one by one.

And once humility is welcomed back into hearts tired of being hard, you realize every year already ticked away is but a tally of time that can't come back and opportunities lost that can now never be found nor felt. And it's crushing. Every thought. Every wonder. Every question and realization that even the answers can't help anymore.

No, all that can help once we realize just how helpless we've become by helping ourselves to the help offered by a world disinterested in being helped up from the darkness into which we've cohesively descended is a miracle akin to literally bringing the dead to life.

But, that's the beauty of the rock bottom we find once we find we've lowered ourselves to losing it all:

We finally find that He is the Rock upon which we can now begin to rebuild all that the sinful standard has torn asunder. No more shifting sands. No more external advice. No more ears tuned only to lies that will always seem to sound nice. No, if we want the chance at change, well, obviously we have to change. We have to do things new. We have to do everything new.

Because it's hard to do. Because it demands we back away from who and what and where we've been. Because it is the first step we can actually take that shows a choice we ourselves had to make. It shows Him that we're okay being emptied of ourselves because ourselves just ain't what we thought we'd become having tried so hard to be what everyone else already was.

And He needs that from us. He deserves that from us. His gift of a second chance and the miracle by which it's made possible for all of us demands and deserves our agreeing to lay down all that we learn has been dragging us under.

You see, that's the thing about an anchor: It's there to hold you in place. And well, if you don't like the place you're in as you're being beaten and battered about by endless storms and swelling waves of the weight of regret blown in by all you've done wrong, weigh anchor and set sail in search of calmer seas!

This world and the way of life it's led us to living has beaten us to death by making us believe that there's life in the death of sin. We're told constantly to try this plan, to buy this book, to follow this person toward the answers they claim to have. And the more we try, the more voices we listen to, the more external ideas we consider, the more of the simplicity of a child trusting their Father we'll be forced to lose.

And friends, we've lost enough.

We've lost years and lessons, opportunities and open doors. We've lost a kind of life we can't know now as it was only there behind a path of choices different than the ones we decided upon. We've lost hope, lost heart, lost help of He who gave us these hearts we've sold off to others. We've lost our innocence in exchange for ignorance painted up to appear wise in the eyes of those who don't care to know the difference.

We've lost humility, honesty, and honestly, we can't get some of it back. Like time and years, once gone, they're just gone for good. Nobody grows younger in age. But thankfully, we've the chance to grow younger in faith. To lose the little we've found now that we’ve found ourselves among and alike the world around us. To let go all that's always asked that we let go of the hands of grace trying to save us from the promise coming for this place.

Yes, He can and will give us back what we've lost along this life lived inappropriately and misunderstood entirely. How? By losing it all once again. Losing all we've become, all we begun to believe we need or still need to become. Losing the hopes and dreams we know to be tied to a world that's running out of time and therefore running scared. Losing the arrogance that still tries to convince us we're not doing anything wrong.

Losing the entitlement that has us considering that if God is there then He ought to prove Himself by doing everything we want Him to do for us.

Friends, He's already done enough, and having always had knowledge of that, so too have we. He taught us the truth, we've still lived a life lost in lies. He promised us the hope of eternal life, we traded it in on a better version of this one we can only pretend doesn't have any limits. He died in our place on the cross while we held the hammer handed to us by those who cheered on His denial.

Time to lay it down. All of it. The hammer. The nails. The crown of thorns. The concrete we've been pouring around our hearts. The confusion we've come to think necessary in life. The hatred of everything and everyone that's just there to help us see beyond us. The rejection of this chance to be given back all that we've lost to a world that will stay lost forever.

Friends, I challenge you to consider what you may have lost over the years spent looking to the world for guidance and input. Think about how much time you can't get back to do the things you now know you should have done instead of the ones that left you only feeling so guilty you can't bear to think about it.

Not because any of this is fun, it isn't. But because along the way you will start to realize what's been done in order to give you the chance to now realize those mistakes. Because the truth is that we shouldn't even have that opportunity. But by His grace He gives us everything we don't deserve in light of all that we've given away of what He already gave.

God is a God of redemption and restoration because He wants to be. And thankfully, we've each lived a life so messed up and mangled by misconceptions and misunderstandings that we've got the perfect chance to see for ourselves who He is and what He can do in light of what we’ve done that’s made us who we’ve been.

But we've got to let Him do it, and to do that we've got to let go of everything we've done or still hope to do. Chances are, as our pasts will prove, what we've done and hope to do is nothing more but what shouldn't be done. All because we've learned how to think improperly by being taught by a world that lives improperly.

Thus the necessity of the changes we never knew we always needed to be making.

We can get back much of what's been lost. But only if we agree to lose all of what we've found down the many wrong paths we've wandered.

In the end it’s not what we’ve lost that tells Him who we are. It’s how much of what’s left that we still agree to lose in order to convince ourselves we’re not who we’ve become that proves whether or now we’re His.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold