Day 3262 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Samuel 14:14 NIV

Does God not indeed make a way?

Has He not truly made a way by allowing us to somehow come away as if to do away with what's become our way spent always away from His will for our stay? He in fact sent the Way who brought us the Truth that inspires, ignites, invites us out here in this dark night to race back into the Life wherein His love is made perfect for all who've become pointless, aimless, lawless, hapless, helpless, loveless.

A mass of miscreants still meaning to make our way toward more of the nothingness we've been and still often show a desire to further become.

I think it an understatement to say that the ego which has laid out all our most pitiable plans has inspired inside such a gross lack of interest to live that we've each all but become so dead within that we've left no desire to die to the death that we've designed inside a misspent life. Simply because it's ours, a, to us alone, passing replacement upon the perfect into which we were first made. A company of hope as if a cloud of creation created to praise God with every breath He granted us the blessing to breathe.

But instead, as if single drops wanting to fall both alone and away, from down here we peer up to see that the cloud of His most hopeful will from which we came has blown on by leaving us now no home here to know. That is in full what we are as well as what we’ve become. The creation of God, made at first in His image and thus in His presence, He placed us, scattered us as if rain upon this ground. Sent to soak up all else He made, but still yet His to stay.

And yet such is not at all what we’ve been. No, we’ve traded His peace for this parched, His design for this dried to death, His will for this well of well, nothing.

All because we’re a short-sighted sort, sort of somehow always unable to see anything or anywhere beyond the here and what we assumed we might make of it all. As if it’s all within us to make this life what we’d delight it to be, a deception so deceiving that it still has us believing that He will indeed be receiving all we’ve been conceiving instead of what He poured so much mercy into making.

And as we’ve been poured out, and since poured out even more of ourselves as if offerings to every false god and full gluttony, we ourselves have felt this drying, this dying, this arid thirst of mistrust as so much of who we’ve been as a result of all we’ve sought has left us in a spiritual drought. We’re single drops of His design who’ve forgotten who we are.

The clouds of His creation have passed overhead, and yet we’ve only overheard every lie telling us to not try to remain in Him, for Him, of Him. No, we’ve come to ignore Him, deny Him, refuse Him and reject Him. The Christ still hanging upon the crosses of all of us who in varied ways leave our own lying on the ground in these lives built on those lies we've come to love more than life itself.

Indeed, can any of us say in truth that we truly do love life and this exceedingly gracious gift to live it? Or do we not rather spend most days in complaint, charging accusations against the Father who felt so much love for us that He chose to create us to be His, to stay His, to stay at home in His hope of a home not our own so that we'd know to never need anything but all that He is.

But what is He to us? I've shared in many posts this sort of visual perception that I feel we most tend to share as to who God is as well as what His existence might mean. A vending machine, waiting for us to earn a wage from our wayward works in which we stuff into His face our earnings, demanding in return the fulfillment of our desired requests as if punching a button through prayers offered only in preference or panic.

Is that all He is, a request line? Some magic outcome that always makes our diluted dreams come true? Is that what life is to be, to mean? Just a time, a few years collected into a chasing after always something more, something new, something easier and thus more personally rewarding? Are we truly here merely to insist upon reward as if we've actually done anything worth recognition?

Well, I reckon that in some ways indeed we have. But I fear it's not the notice we should have sought. It's more of a fearful fate, this falling and failing, a furthered futility flung into the face of our Father. That's what He sees! Raindrops settling for the puddles, staunch upon the top of a hope so dry that, again, we don't even seem to care to live anymore.

No, we exist. Forget His call to thrive, we just survive. We accept this idea that our greatest hope is something up to us to decide, to design, to demand from a God we see as nothing but the One who exists to make sure our plans are as perfect as we've imagined.

And yet as it's turning out, seems our understanding of our role in existence is as mistaken as our ongoing attempts to undermine His existence. As much as He is not there merely to grant our goals, nor are we here only to make them. These lives are not our own. We didn't fashion for ourselves this idea of life we’re living. We didn't create it, didn’t create us. We've not bought the rights to our lives as such is an expense we cannot fathom let alone afford.

But having lived as if our own for so long, we've become so lost here in this land of lunacy assuming that as we've found some success insisting upon our satisfaction, well then perhaps life is of our own making. Meaning obviously then that we might as well continue ahead planning and plotting, praying only when needed to meet our wants, as if, again, our wants are all that matters to the One who we've wanted to wrong.

Yes, the One we've wanted to wrong.

We've known only that from the start of the fall apart that began before we became who we are. Adam and Eve the first to trip and like the taste. Doing as told to avoid is our understanding of what we're here for as such is the demand of this human arrogance which inspired us to listen instead to the enemy rather than our Majesty. Yes, we chose to hear the lie instead of enjoying the life.

And here we stay, still apart and falling further from that good Father who made us to enjoy His will, a way we lost when that fruit was first taken from those who were then taken away from the Garden to which all of us can only hope to someday return.

Back to peace from these pieces we've become.

And yet, for such to be the outcome demands we understand what truly we've done as seen not through our stagnant blindness but rather through the eyes of truth as told by the Way that God made for such a hope to become a promised home. We cannot return to His reward unless we first realize that we've been seeking and speaking our own replacements from the beginning of this way called ours.

Because we can't feasibly pursue forgiveness unless and until we understand what all we've done which needs forgiven. We can't repent from our sins if we can't see the stains they've left on these souls we've ignored. There is no way to ache for Heaven if we're still settled for staying perfectly at home down here at this rock bottom we've built for ourselves, of ourselves, in ourselves.

No, we cannot possibly be His again if we remain convinced that any of all we are or all we do is of our own.

Because such a disgusting lie is the basis for the death we've come to love living. It's that we've long missed God in so many moments, choosing instead to focus on, to serve alone our will, our wants, our wishes, wishing only for Him to either agree and go along or just go away and take that last remaining awareness of our eternal responsibility when He goes, wherever He goes.

No, we don't care where He's been or where He calls us to be, who He calls us to be because we're busy right now. Busy making plans. Busy enjoying life. Busy making a life we can enjoy as defined by and designed in these ideals we've set out to sculpt for ourselves out of ourselves and this selfishness which somehow survives every disappointment that we find out here in our way.

And yet, oddly, it's those disappointments that seem to somehow inspire our infrequent fumblings of faith. It's strangely only when we're disappointed, let down, stuck watching a dream float off into impossibility that we remember God, but not as our Father, but rather as the reason we didn't get whatever we wanted. Entitled to a fault, finding fault in God for not stepping down to our level so as to ensure our pleasure.

Shame on us!

We’ve so clearly asked for this hopelessness we’ve made a home within. We craved it, carved, chased and chose it as it this halfhearted half-life is the best life we can live. Shoving God so far from our lives that we’ve left no basis for what life even is, was meant to be, can perhaps possibly still become because of the beauty of a benevolence that wishes not for any to remain banished in this bleak blindness bewildered by wickedness and wanting ever more of all that’s wrong.

2 Peter 3:9. “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”

So you see, somehow despite our soulless losses of a love of life, still His grace meets our disgrace. Amazing! His mercy makes our misery and mischief into a testimony of His victory. He sent His Son to take our place, to become our sins so that in such an undeserved exchange, then might we become His righteousness. Made a way. Became the Way. Remains the only Way that leads us away from our having so far fallen away the will that has always been so far above our own that it chose to make us knowing we'd try to break Him.

Have you ever thought about that? That God, knowing what we'd become, chose to create us anyway? Having foreseen our fall, still He wanted us to exist, even knowing that we'd take this gift of our existence and shift it into an insistence upon everything that isn't Him, so far from Him that we'd smile as His Son hung in our place?

And in that most eye-opening display, can we not now see just how broken and depraved our way has been? And if we can agree to see our lives for the messes they become, can't we also agree that it cannot then fall on us to find a way to make it back?

Because as He is truly the One we’ve wronged in these lives wrongly lived, is not He the only to then decide what must be done for us to be made right, if we’re to be made right? Since we’ve so vastly shattered His law and become then so entirely ghastly in His sight, is it not now then His sight which should define how we see life going forward? I mean, if our way has led us only away from the Way, should not our way need die if we’re then to live life anew, the gift He came to bring?

Indeed, such is exactly all we need, to die to the old, this life we’ve lived apart, so that then the fractured and disheveled might be done away that the new might have now room to grow in its place.

Because, if we’re to be honest, does there not come a crumbling in or along our way when, again as if drops of hope fallen upon a hopeless land, we look up to wonder where it all went so very wrong. Where do we belong as this wasteland hasn't managed to become anywhere we'd ever call home? If our way were to be as wonderful as we wanted, why isn't it?

And since it isn't, why stay knowing now that He was made a way, a promise promised through the Old Testament, centuries before Christ were to come? God has proven all He is and all the good that defines in sending Christ to invite us back from this banishment we've become down here in these blasphemes we've been living for, living in.

He fulfilled His Word in sending us the Way by which we can go home!

And so again, does not He, is not He the only One who might then determine if we’re to receive such grace? And if He is truly so gracious as to extend such a gift, does He not retain the right to demand whatever response He might feel due? Such is the purpose of the Gospel, to at first instruct us as to who we’ve been in light of what we’ve lost, and then beyond that truth to then speak to the truth as to what is required in exchange for this change He’s so kindly allowed.

Repentance.

Yes, He who defined our design, a design we've denied, has now designed a Word defined as truth, the Truth which is the Way that He has made back toward the Life for which He first made us to live. And so He has indeed made the way for us to no longer stay banished down here in this most blasphemous basement of our moral debasement.

He has cleared the air as it were, and so it then falls to us to step into such a mercy and refuse to lose this one last gasp of what’s only ever been our one chance home.

Friends, we've lost more than we can ever imagine along this path paved to living our way. We've let go of love, of light, of purpose, of the might of what’s right. We've given away hope, surrendered our honor, tarnished our treasure and treated the Truth with such an utter disdain that we deserve nothing but to waste here in this wasteland we've created of ourselves.

But that isn't what God wants, a mercy proven in the Messiah. Much like the father of the prodigal just wanted his son to return home, so too does God just want us to be His again. He just wants us to live like we're more than we've tried to imagine on our own. He just wants for us what He created us for. To be His, to be home, to be whole.

Alas, it takes us seeing the holes inside to realize that we can't alone find the life He created us to live. No, we need His mercy, and amazingly, we've been offered just that.

Now it just comes down to us seeing what our blindness has never wanted to admit. That we are dying out here in this worthless life lived without the Way that is the Truth that is the only Life that can lead us home and save us from us.

He has made the Way, but we have to be the ones who take it.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold