Day 3148 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 3:8 NIV

Be it blowing about as a gentle breeze or tearing through like a raging tempest, the very nature of wind doesn't need any advice upon which direction to go.

So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.

Sadly though, we find ourselves passing through this place that's presented this case that's sealed shut our understanding of the fullness of this faith. Down here all you hear is that you can't do it alone. You need help. You need advice. You need a teacher to teach you what you need to know. You need a pastor to break down the intricacies of Scripture. You need your neighbor to help you understand how to live the best life you can.

Yes, we’re told we need to embrace this endless access to advice and worldly wisdom. We apparently need everyone else to do our thinking, our choosing, our learning, our losing, our hoping, our trusting, our loving, our living. We need everyone else there so we can outsource our existence. We need someone else to tell us where to go, what to do, who to be. We need the world to tell us what matters and what we’re expected to do about it.

We need their maps to give us direction, their words to tell us what to say, their ideas to form our opinions, their deceptions to make our decisions. Or do we?

In fact we don’t. In truth we have all we need. But alas it seems as though all we have has been lost, set aside and cast asunder under this incessant noise telling us we can't exist outside the confines of humanity's understandings of how life is supposed to work. Our lives are planned out for us before we even begin living them. We've been ushered into all these expectations that are geared toward experiences that we're told will leave us having lived a wonderful life.

Strange that it just so happens to be like the lives lived by everyone else everywhere else.

But is life really that linear? Are we truly all here for the same reasons, the same purposes, the same callings? Are we all bestowed with the same abilities and understandings that we need to fulfill all those common outcomes? Or could it be that life isn't something humanity is meant to figure out or plot the perfect path along?

No, might it be that we're to be but winds blowing wherever and whyever God so wills?

What truly scares me having lived looking to the world to tell me who to be, where to be, what to be in order to be all I'm supposed to be according to the powers that be, I now be uninterested. Fully. Excitedly. Passionately uninterested in pretty much all of the advice and input that this world is more than ready and entirely willing to give to any and all, especially those who don't want it.

See, that's one of the reasons I tend to find myself so aggravated anymore. The world seems to have this constant need to tell us what we need to know. We awaken every day to these calamities that have already dissolved our hope for peace or contentment or potential before our feet even hit the ground. Every single day is filled with new advice as to what we need to focus on.

Here's my problem: How do they know? How does this world know what we need to worry about? Why should we listen to what this world says we should worry about? Why should we be so willing to listen to anything this place has to say when the vast majority of it is only said due to some sort of hidden agenda that's usually always flowing from a rather dangerous and darkened hidden motive?

In case you didn't know by now, we live in a world that is pretty much everything we shouldn't want to become. This world won't acknowledge truth, won't worship God, won't accept Christ, won't consider Heaven, won't worry about hell. They peddle hatred whilst lambasting the purity of genuine love. They condemn without hint of compassion. They destroy while laughing as if they're building something worth having.

This world is an utter cesspool with absolutely no direction in mind other than downward, deeper into the darkness of deception and desire.

Which leads me to my question for today: If this world doesn't care to know where I'm going nor the beauty of the forgiveness which allows me that hope, why should I let them tell me the best way to live my life if they've no idea as to where I'm from nor to where I'm heading?

And yet, willingly or unwillingly, that's exactly what we're being pressured to do inside all this social maneuvering that's being played out all around us. We're being told constantly to choose sides in the latest social divide. We're asked to pick our team colors so that the world knows easier who to hate. Black or white, red or blue? It's all about them, never about you.

How much longer will you entertain the undoing of all that He both put you here to do as well as what He did to give you the chance to return to your senses having so long lived outside of them, lost instead out in what and where the world works?

We're wind.

We're a breeze blowing through a place we can't stay. We're a hurricane ripping through the lies set up to divide and destroy. We're words and air mixing and mingling to make forth this message that radiates the mercy of our Messiah. We're nothing but breath and ashes, and in truth, both are wearing out and running thin. Because our time here isn't endless. Just like the wind, we're one day here and we've no idea where we'll blow tomorrow.

But that's not considered acceptable in this life. Never was. No, here you have to have a 5-year plan backed up by a 10-year goal which factors in alternate routes should plans A-G turn out too hard, leaving you further chances to reach the same goal that everyone else is aimed for, just with you arriving sooner and therefore with more apparent success.

Yes, success is the drug that drives the masses. Problem is that it's driving them over the edge into oblivion where they live oblivious to the opportunity we've been offered.

That what you want? A roadmap to someone else's idea of a perfect life? A pre-planned flight path that requires nothing of you, but that offers nothing personal to you? Is that truly all this life is about, living according to some standardized expectation so as to appear successful to those we're told we're competing against?

The wind doesn't compete. Time doesn't have an opponent. Space isn't running out of space. The Holy Spirit ain't considering competition. Christ made it clear that we're either with Him or we're against Him, not too much confusing or uncertain there. God made it even clearer in that He alone is God and we shall have no others before Him. No competition welcome.

So why do we welcome it? Why do we welcome the comparison? Why do we contemplate the considerations conveyed by a culture already conceded? Why are we conceding to a life confined to the expectations and outcomes everyone else tells us to crave?

Why do we feel the need to make ourselves known, along the only way humanity says that’s possible: Being a lifeless replica of what the world says we should be? To have a known starting point aimed at a firm finish line found by following a plotted path paved perfectly? To make sure we’re understood so we don’t fear standing alone? To worry about what the world thinks about what we’re doing?

Again, this world has no idea why we're here, what life's about, how best to spend our one trip around this thing. They clearly don't know Christ, don't want to know Him, why do we then care what they know or insist we know? Don't know, but I know I'm done falling for it. And I don't need any reason other than knowing that this isn't my home and that most don't care to acknowledge, revere, respect or fear my Father.

If He's not welcome, I don't want to be. And if I don't need to be welcome, why settle for trying? Why allow the wind of my life, your life, our hope, our home, our Heavenly Father to stop blowing? Just because the world will be disappointed that we have no direction according to the manmade maps they're all following? Just because they'll hate us in that they can't control us any more than they can rope the wind?

You know, I wake up every day feeling a little more out of place. Started a while back but it just grows deeper all the time. I can't shake this feeling that I don't belong here. Now before you resort to worldly worries, no I'm not thinking of harming myself. I'm here for a reason, a reason that will require the number of years He says I have remaining. But I'm not home. Here I have no home. I have no finish line waiting for me on this soil. I have no plans, no dreams, no goals.

I'm in every way a worldly disappointment. I'm everything this world says someone shouldn't be.

Don't have a car. Don't have a full-time job. Don't have a significant other. Don't have a favorite team. Don't have an awareness of the romantic workings of a list of celebrities. Don't have an interest in who's winning whatever award or gameshow or contest that's going on. Don't have a life according to most as I don't care to have any of the above.

But I also don't have roots that are holding me here. I don't have distractions keeping me from thinking about things that bring me hope in what's still to come. Don't have any hesitation to say whatever I feel called to say in these posts or in the random conversation I have with the 2-3 people I talk to the most. I don't fear mankind. I don't fear losing my life. I don't fear pain or punishment or persecution.

I don't fear disappointment because I've placed all my eggs in one basket, which is again something they tend to tell us we should never do.

But they don't know a thing about the basket I picked in which to place my hope, my trust, my peace, my life. No, they don't know my Jesus, and so they don't know me nor what's best for me.

Friends, this world doesn't need to know us, and we don't need to be known. We don't need to figured out nor do we need to figure out life. This isn't about us, where we're going, what we're doing, what everyone else thinks about what we're doing or where we’re going. This is about Jesus as His is the only Name that means anything. Mine doesn't. Why, because I can't do what He's done.

No, all I can do is blow around this ball a bit longer trying to pass on the message He entrusted to me. That's my direction. That's my goal. That's my plan; to follow Him. And knowing that it makes no sense to roughly 99% of this population is as exciting and rewarding a hope as I could ever hope for for my life. I don't need anything else other than living in such a way that leaves this crazy world thinking I'm insane.

Because they don't know me, because they don't know who saved me. Because they don't want to. Understand that this world wants to control us so that we live only how they think we should, but that if we settle for and agree to that, we'll never be able to be free. No, we'll be forever chained to human expectations. And well, human expectations just don't consider the calling of Christ because hard hearts and closed minds know only to think of themselves.

But He proved what a life can mean when given away.

So let go. Pick your feet off the paths you've been placed upon by those who pretend to know the way, and instead let the Way blow you where He needs you. And no, the world won't understand it as they need the assurance of a beginning, an ending and a clearly laid path with road signs all along the way for anything to make sense. That's too boring for me.

But to live just living to speak life in Christ with no starting point or finish line seems the choice with the most excitement. Not only because it doesn't rely on me or my ability to please people, but also because it allows me to do something that most don't understand. It allows me to live my life outside their design. It gives me the freedom to hope in more than a home here. It opens up everything when we don’t need anything.

I don't want to be understood by a place that's so well versed in hatred and shadow and selfishness and vanity and immorality and idolatry as this world's become. I don’t need to world to agree with what I’m doing. Don’t need them to approve why I’m doing it or how I’m trying to get it done every day. No, I don't belong here, and so here has no hold on me. And so too can you have that hope, that freedom if you can just break away from the blindness that’s crippling the rest of humanity.

The wind blows wherever it pleases. It asks not for permission, seeks not attention, requires not appreciation. The wind simply lives, going wherever God sends it without question or concern. Doesn’t need the world to understand it, to like it, to approve it. It just does what it’s here to do.

So let them hear you, but don’t stop to worry about trying to make sure they’re okay with what they hear as they can’t see what we’ve been shown out here in the light of life.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold