Day 3253 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 19:2 NIV

Missing the majesty of ordinary miracles.

Mid-day middle of the week found me in a rare air not ready to rush through the hours as I'd done in all the days before. That's been my life for years, a hurry aimed at nothing but assuming the haste would prevent the waste of any more moments made into mistakes laying misplaced in the past I've come to regret all of the sudden. A seemingly endless season of so many moments missed simply because I had to hurry up onto my next scheduled stop.

Planning a life plotted along a path I personally perfected, never once noticing that I wasn't living in the process as none of my plans preferred peace or patience in the present.

No, just a rush back into the routine setup set as such to keep my eyes set upon the only prize for which I've come to assume life is best found worthy of living. A preconceived opinion that my best intentions are so worth pursing that I'd best pursue them in a hurry so that they don't dare change on me like my interests have been known to do so many times before.

And yet there I was grabbing a bit of garlic powder from the store shelf. Wednesday afternoon, colder than normal, neck sore from Monday's fifty-fifty push-up mishap. It's in those moments where you're not at all expecting God to move that maybe He moves most. Maybe it's in the mundane that He moves us the most. Maybe we're meant to be moved by the ordinary miracles we miss most often.

This new year has found me in quite the so far long-standing confusion. Seems every day brings a new reminder of things I've gotten wrong inside this speed I've felt was of need in years past. Always hurrying to get back to the normal, afraid to miss a moment I planned, willing then to miss the ones I didn't.

And I sit here, like many a sleepless night of late, terrified at what all I've missed because I was in such a hurry to not miss my carefully scheduled appointments and their expectations. What sunsets will I never see? What jokes didn't I hear my weird little sister try to tell? What problems could I have helped someone with had I not been so lost inside my own selfish tragedies?

What could life have been had I not been so sure that I was making it into what I could only assume was the best direction to take?

That's the scary part of life that we're usually too busy to think about anymore. Or maybe it’s the part that we ever really did as I don't think we'd ever really wanted to. Because we're sold this plan of existence in which we're always in a hurry. Life spinning so fast that we can't even slow down to cook a meal or sometimes even take a lunch. No, things to do, people to please, money to earn and a few days left to burn to ash as we just run right past the narrow door from which He whispers.

Can't hear His call when we're crying out for a chance to stay in this race of life we've been entered in against our will. No, seems that it's one thing to be born into sin and an entirely more deadly decision to keep buying into the game that's convinced us all life is nothing but that, just a game. A time to not worry about time, years meant to give away to everything that can never give years in return.

Grains of sand so small that we feel them unworthy to consider though deep down we know they’re only piling up on the wrong side of this hourglass.

No, we give our health for wealth and then use said wealth to try and retake our health once it begins to fail. We sell our days to the lowest bidders simply because they tell us that what they offer is all we need, and we agree because it's the same thing that the rest of the world seems to want. And over time, our own wants and the wishes which make them seem so wonderful become just copies of the negatives for which this lost world has negotiated.

Running right past Him countless times every day, never seeing His patient promise reaching out for us, let alone hearing the acceptance He's never once asked us to race for or pay off as if nothing but another lease on life like these cars we drive. Maybe that's the spark that's ignited this insanity, this idea that we owe everyone something, and so we must then owe something to the Savior as evidence of all for which He saved us.

Bank accounts and unbudgeted time taken away and given to all that only knows to steal and kill and destroy all that He made for us to have and love and appreciate.

I'm unspeakably ashamed of the undeniable realization that my life recently has consisted of only one or two priorities that I assumed proper and thus properly placed. But as such is beginning to unravel into now begetting a basis for second guessing, well, I don't know but that I yet again just hurried to a decision simply so I'd have something upon which to stand as evidence that I'm trying to find my way toward where I assume I'm supposed to be as proven inside a life I think I can find in this world within which we still so often look.

Problem is that I don't look for blessings in the spice aisle while grocery shopping. And yet, had my neck not slipped into yet another week of inability to turn all that far to the left without feeling a blackout begin, I'd have missed this one too. I'd have been so impatiently insistent upon just getting the errands over so that I might hurry back to another afternoon spent scraping through the motions of an assumption of growth simply because it was something I've come to enjoy more than life itself.

How many things have we let become more enjoyable than this life we were given? How many blessings do we daily take for granted simply because they're otherwise expected, and too because our personal expectations seem to us more important? How many more miracles will we miss just because to us they've become ordinary enough to blend in behind our blindly misplaced priorities?

I've rushed through life and found too soon this death inside decisions that I've come to question so much that I fear making another. Terrified of getting more wrong knowing how many conclusions I've jumped to only to come through the aftermath and see that I was more wrong than I ever could have imagined.

And what scares me more than anything anymore is knowing that now that I know I've gotten so many things wrong, how many more mistakes haven't I noticed because I didn't know how wrong I could be?

Having just turned 36 back on the 8th, maybe all this is one of those crises of midlife we're told to expect coming our way at some point as this hill gets steeper and the hopes and dreams begin to roll like stones unwilling to fall away slowly enough for moss to gather. And yet, these weeks aged since adding a year to my stay down here have come with a strange interest in patience, wondering at what that moss I've been too hurried to welcome might have given.

Because here now looking up into the face of a stranger’s most hopeful peace, to say that I've missed the way is an impressive understatement. Been living so fast and so insistent upon my own way that there was never any way to have enjoyed or appreciated or even noticed the magnificently beautiful blessings marking the majesty of Christ’s narrow invitation. And to say that all of us have done the same inside this rat-race life is an equal albeit communal understatement. Because such is the expectation.

Yet within the alien courage to set aside such preconceived presumptions, question becomes how much longer will we live to not let down a broken world that lives as if life is best lived planned rather than appreciated?

I think that it's perhaps just a matter of this mistaken misunderstanding having taken root so deeply inside hearts drown on vanity and vitriol. That we need to hurry up and do as everyone else does so that we don't miss whatever it is that this world promises to those who lose their souls trying to win this game of life that life has become.

And that therefore the best way to go at it is to mime and mimic the mundanity of a mankind so lost inside themselves seeking something better than any of us can be on our own that now none of us know the peaceful simplicity of the life we’re not living.

I look back, which I know is something we're always told never to do as it just slows us down and anchors us to a past we're supposed to light as we run away, but I see now that the things I've always appreciated the most are those that I couldn't have accomplished alone. The blessings I could have never bought. The memories I wouldn't have made had I been running back to some schedule or assumption of an expectation of my own will being more important than that moment in which such memories were made.

Like the spice aisle on a cold Wednesday afternoon running errands.

A split-second opened door leading me through into this saddened eagerness to know more now of what I would otherwise plan to miss up ahead finds that I don't want to miss anymore any more of those smiles. Don't want to let slip anymore of those chances to see something beyond my impatience. I can't bear the thought of the ones I've lost, and so going ahead, I'll ask Him humbly every day for the humility to live it slow so that I just might see more of what my ego would insist I ignore.

Because I've missed enough that I know now I'll never know. And that brings inside a tearing that I've come to see I have alone chosen to chase. And I don't know how much I have left that I can allow to be torn apart by all these plans and perfections I've so long assumed gave my life its meaning. Because maybe it means nothing if I miss the moments that don't ask me to make them.

Maybe all this only means something inside those moments He made for us. Maybe it's that He's made the way for us marked by those often missed moments that means the most.

Friends, I've started to see that perhaps hurrying through life testifies to an immaturity of faith. Because if we truly trusted in God with all our hearts, we'd not be nearly so quick to keep giving them to all these contrasting ideas that keep Him at a distance, left behind as we rush ahead to find what we either assume we need or are sure we want, hoping He will be proud of our haste.

A hurry that's caused us to have given away our attention to all that isn't Him rather than our giving Him all we are as shown in some small way by our following humbly and slowly the path He paved for us to walk patiently knowing that it is indeed so narrow that we will in fact fall off should we even for a moment lose appreciation.

For too long now I've appreciated only my own undertakings and this mistaken misunderstanding that’s had me standing so assuredly upon my own understandings. Lost in the numbers and nuance of all these nifty ideas that I've allowed to outshine and overshadow this time I've been given for nothing more important than finding Christ in deeper measure every day. Because I've always wanted to look like enough, to feel like enough, to somehow come up with something that would show Him, say to Him that I've done enough with my life to earn His well done.

But can we ever do anything at all, let alone anything well if all we do is done without His will leading our way along the Way toward the Life that demands we face and embrace the Truth that we are not Him nor in any way able to please Him outside of a fumbling and feeble faith that knows we need to look to Him every moment of every minute because we're sure to miss it if we don't.

Because it's great to want to please God, but if we're always in such a rush to find the next idea that we believe will accomplish that feat without leaving any time to pursue wisdom, then all we can possibly find is a mountain of effort leading to nothing. The simple fact is that we’ve become so quick to live a desire-based life that we’ve sped right past seeking a knowledge of the only One who knows best how life is meant to be lived.

And out here so lost away from Him all we’ve found is a list of things we want without any idea as to why we’re so certain we need them.

I guess we’re just in this hurry to find something of evidence of either our existence or His. But friends, as we learn in Scripture, God isn't always in the storm. He's not always in the winds that blow with such ferocity that they physically knock us off our regularly scheduled performance. He isn't best seen inside the earthquakes that shake and shatter our little castles made of sand. Nor does He always arrive in between the fire and flame burning all these bridges we've been building.

He's most often in the whisper that follows the chaos we conceive. He's in the little moments where we remember to watch the clouds roll by knowing that they'll never paint the sky to look that way again. He's in the rain that falls upon our plans, washing away our wants and asking us to stay bored inside for moment or two. He's in these reminders of all we've missed, meant to make us stop being so willing to miss even more.

And so if our yoke remains heavy and the burden therefore unbearable, chances are we're still in the lead. But maybe that's why we should love what we need to lose, this insistence upon winning at some wasted way of life as deemed victorious by those many who’ve already lost all reason to appreciate the slowness needed to meet Him. Because while so many will chase their dreams until they're forced to come true, those many will miss the moments they can't make happen again. Those many will miss the days they didn't design as they designed instead the days they demanded.

No, those many will miss looking up and seeing a rare peace upon the face of an otherwise ordinary blessing that we'd usually be too busy to appreciate. And having been stuck inside a life spent in so much hurried frustration to stay ahead, seeing that shine now reminds that we need as much of His simple kindness as we can notice.

So slow down my friends because we don't find a fuller life by running through it. No, we find life in all its fullness only when we're able to let ourselves live it according to His will for us, as it’s only within that will that we’ll find finally the reason to want to soak up every single second of all He’s been doing that we’ve sadly not been seeing.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold