Day 3289 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 10:17 NIV

As if Andy Dufresne, seems all I’ve left of life is a wall against which to work with freedom waiting on the other side and nothing but time to get there.

God does strange things out here inside this fringe upon the hem of a world apart from home. So many almost maniacal mindsets mixed with and manifested within these seemingly misplaced missives making a way for me to be again who He made me to be, a hope marching me toward a mission meaning more and more as mayhem sets in. Seems anymore that nary a second slips by without a thousand thoughts leaving me almost as if grasping for straws praying that none get lost here within my inability to keep up with all He’s teaching me.

This faith brings this new existence as if it’s a sudden resurgence of every dissipated awareness not seen alongside the sins I seemed to choose in those many moments that all added up to leaving me here in this hope of a new opportunity to be what I always should have been but never had the courage to be. Indeed, it’s like He brings to life within every breath every thought that I never knew to think in all those years I wasted thinking I knew what I was doing.

I didn’t. I don’t.

None do. But since now I see that’s a truth contrary to all this world says and does and further expects us to, well, seems I’ve finally arrived at the wall this call has asked me to fell with seemingly nothing but a chisel of these feeble words so entirely unable to capture this chance we have at something we’ve already lost as well as however much time it might take to make the dent He believes I can be.

And it’s in that beautiful belief that He for some reason believes in me even when most days I won’t that I find a faith that keeps finding me, finding then for me reasons to carve a little more today in the hopes that out there somewhere is someone who sees something in this that heaps home that hope that I feel within every keystroke on this keyboard plucked by fingers again unable to keep up or capture all He is and all He’s giving me to say.

Because the truth is that somehow the truth has found my heart despite my living so long convinced that I had left standing enough assumptions to prevent my being moved from doing this my way as well as my having lodged enough accusations and anger that I thought He’d do as I thought I wanted and leave me alone to do only all I wanted. That’s what we know to want in life, an independence that invents in us this idea bent toward our broken inclination to assume ourselves our own nation in which we exist as the only voice to which we’ll ever answer.

But that He broke through that blaspheme has left in me nothing but a hope that I can somehow play some role in the same thing happening for someone somewhere out there inside this world so lost that for any to be found is entirely the only evidence we need that miracles still happen.

This is by and large so undeniably a day of such intense mockery and immorality that I both know why the fear of faith as well as the common failure to find it. It seems that all we know of life anymore is alliteration and rhyme. Profit, politics, popularity and platforms perfecting a preaching from people persistently pitiable. Health, wealth and a hearth at the heart of this home in which we roam. We’ve in every way become always lost inside the simplicity of socialized assumptions assuming for us all the same approach to a shared outcome.

So long as it seems to work without too much risk or cost, we buy. But then should anything ask anything, we bolt.

And inside this incessant turning from trial to trial rather than trying this glory to glory as told in His story is a solidity so stagnant that we don’t even notice the blinders or bars holding us hostage in bondage to the blaspheme we’ve become. Because all we know to do is what was done by the majority yesterday, always a day behind trying to keep up with the wrong direction. That’s what we get, and what we’ve got, out of falling in line following behind a world that doesn’t know where they’re going.

Blind leading the blind gets everyone nowhere other than where they think are. And as for me, I’m personally tired of trying to keep insisting that I know much of anything, let alone enough of everything that I’m capable of finding what I do know isn’t here. Because I don’t see streets of gold. I don’t feel unending peace. I’ve not found a freedom from finding ways and reasons to fail or fall short. Yesterday didn’t produce rest, much less the sort of such that seems to revive. Today doesn’t seem to hold the whole measure of hope either as the news is still on TV and the distance brings the noise of car horns shouting the sound of someone voicing their disapproval of someone else’s driving skills.

This isn’t Heaven, thus I’m not home which means therefore I’m still at work and if He’s not yet let me leave then there must be something still to say to someone else along this way toward where I unashamedly want all to arrive. Yes, I want Him for everyone as in Him is this hope that keeps me going when this world proves daily there just ain’t really all that much reason to try anymore. As we talked about yesterday or maybe it was the day before, I don’t know, they blend friends, but either way as we talked recently, the odds are high and ever stacking.

Thus the wall against which I’ll work with nothing but time.

Because again, I know there is freedom on the other side of everything this world assumes. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it, even if but for a moment. There are again these alien ideas and persistent preachings teaching in me a reason to war for more than everything this place claims is enough. Because freedom isn’t the ability to do everything you want or have everything you desire. True freedom is finally realizing that nothing of this world matters, especially the excuses to waste so much of our fleeting time pretending otherwise.

That’s all I feel I have to give anymore, all I have to lose or leave or get or gain. I’ve not the time to stop to figure out the finer frustrations as again it’s to this wall of this world’s wrath that I’ve been called to stand and work and war and want for all on the other side of such socially shared confusion to find this freedom that’s freed me and still freeing me from everything this world has become. All the hatred and hardship, hustling and hassling, this wrestling with one another as if we’re neither sister nor brother but instead comparisons caught in competition against one another for what we’ve been told isn’t enough for all.

Because this world can’t have everything that everyone wants in the measure in which we’ve come to want everything we can see, let alone enough for all to have the same amount.

And that’s the impossible beauty of the truth that’s found me. There’s plenty to go around, so much so that each of us might drown before we dare near the bottom of His benevolence. In Him cups only runneth over, a spring of living water so alive and quenching that He leaves us only clenching for that chisel of His Word with which to work this wall praying it might for at least one fall that they might find themselves inside His hope of falling into the hands that stretched wide to hold them rather than those of the Living God we’ve long lived against.

That’s the dire death I contend He’s saved me from and alongside such a trust is coming renewed every single day with something new to say that speaks to the truth of what He’s done so that someone else might hear in Him a reason to walk from this world and shake in every way every way this world has left us living so lost as we’ve become. Because that’s the wall that we’re up against in this place. It’s all this prideful assumption and arrogant insistence that tells each of us that we know it all while knowing nothing but what this world has taught us to think.

And having been there long enough to only having been now broken even a single step toward His brand of eternal freedom, friends I know there’s a hope that is worth giving every second of my time remaining if such means that even one other finds this same urgency to speak the truth that ignites a faith that burns away every bridge that would only allow us back to the broken ways of this crumbling ruin.

This world is falling apart, and while the speed and degree are perhaps up for debate, that sin is growing more widespread and wealthy is undeniable. And that’s exactly why He calls us to continue what He came to begin. He calls us to the spreading of the Gospel because He knows that this world needs to hear the truth that came to set captives free because the truth is that we are all captives held inside so many mistakes and misunderstandings that we can’t stand hearing the truth as it confronts such a grating reality as this headlong fall into a love of sin so deep that we almost dare anyone to plunge down here to these depths of depravity as if to save us from what seems so satisfying.

Indeed, the darkness has designed in us a deranged indifference, almost a despair that demands we deny anything which might risk our attention being turned toward the truth we’ve walled outside our sin-stained souls. We don’t want to hear the truth we already know because as every human is indeed aware thanks to some fruit plucked from where it shouldn’t have been taken, we know without question that we are entirely and eternally guilty of every form of malice and immorality against our Creator as one might imagine.

And yet we’ve come to assume such fun inside such foolish and frivolous filth that we’ve found only a resolve to refuse anything that speaks that we need to lose these chains that seem almost jewelry at this point. Yes, we’ve gone so very far in the entirely wrong direction that the chains that hold us in captivity as slaves living in service only to sin and self now seem like priceless jewelry that we not only refuse to lose, but instead we insist them heirlooms meant to pass down to the generations which have the sad misfortunate of following behind a generation so foolish as to repeat the moral indifference as designed by those who fell before us.

That’s why Jesus came, to put an end to these domino lives that keep on tipping and tripping over temptation and this trite and tired assumption of responsibility being somehow unreasonable. Indeed, we today are every bit as fallen and faulty as those we read of in Scripture. We are Sodom. We are Gomorrah. We are Pharaoh. We are Babylon. But yet we are loved, and in that we have a hope that ought to inspire in us, invoke in us, ignite in us a cruel resiliency to refuse turning either back to our past or away from this task.

Because if we don’t speak the truth that we claim set us free, are we really free at all?

Or rather is not fear holding us back as if a snare stealing our opportunity to live for more than comfort and acceptance in this place? In fact, seems I recall a clear warning against such foolishness. Fear of man is indeed snare as it keeps us from sharing His sovereignty as seen in our shouldering the unshakable burden of being who He called us to be, carried crosses and all. Because this world doesn’t need to see us living afraid of their hatred, ashamed of His salvation. No, they need to see us dying to such selfish consideration as that of worrying about our temporary comfort or perishable gain as such is such a blatant oddity that there’s no way it can’t make an impact.

Faith comes by hearing, and friends, we here to help with that hearing as He still stands calling us to keep standing upon the Word this world needs to be hearing. Get what I’m saying? He calls us to call out His message and all it means for all of us. And do we dare think He won’t make a way for us to do all He calls us to? Nonsense! If He calls us to do it, He will most definitely, most defiantly make a way for it being done. Even if, even when this world hates whatever He may call us to say.

In the end it doesn’t matter as His truth still needs to be heard by every ear that’s willing to hear something other than someone else telling them to stay where they are. We all need to move, to change, to try. Because for long enough we haven’t, thus defining our need of salvation to begin with! But friends, the whole point, as we kind of discussed yesterday, is that where our salvation begins is too where our work begins. To go and share. Do a little fishin’. Try our hand at preachin’. Get to teaching and speaking and serving and fighting this good fight as if our lives depend on it.

Because every life does depend on it.

Indeed, such is the only pursuit worth pursing as it both honors God and helps others learn to live lives that seek to do the same. And so perhaps we can someday become of the same mindset shown in Habakkuk 3:18 and rejoice in the Lord, to be joyful in God our Savior. Yes, to rejoice in our salvation and it now opening unto us a chance to tell everyone else all about it, all about Him. But to do so needs us to first let go of this need to rejoice in applause, approval, acceptance. We need to stop chasing acknowledgment and validation of our efforts and simply do them as if working unto the Lord rather than for man’s agreement.

Because, “if I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” For too long we’ve sought man’s glory as if such is our gain. But no, to live is Christ and to die is gain, and so let us die to everything that keeps us from living for Christ as done only by doing as He’s called us to, the sharing of His Word evidenced in our testimony. Because His Word achieved the truth of our testimony, and so the world needs to hear it all. No matter what. No matter what.

This world has built a wall of unbelief around itself, walled off inside a most deadly insistence that ‘He gets us”. Because while He does understand us, He died because of that understanding. And because we believe that He did give His life that we might get Him, if we do indeed get Him then we should realize that everyone else better get to the getting of His goodness before that gate is closed. Because that is the truth of the outcome of every life lived without Him at the center of it, as the chisel of it.

To die without Christ is to die forever inside a hell filled with a horror that all will only wish to die from. But for the few who die fleeing into Him with such reckless abandon as to live out this life seeking nothing but the sharing and serving of Him, such are the few who find the life lived in the peace this place cannot begin to pretend. No, we strive not for streets of gold nor gates of pearl but of peace for all, felt forever. And simply put, if it means living the rest of this stay inside a war waged only against us, earning for us an unwelcoming resistance from all to whom we’re asked to try, so be it.

Because as it turns, out, once a soul has been set free from sin, they then yearn to exist as slaves of Christ with nothing but a wall to work and the rest of this life to keep trying for the freedom of everyone else who can’t yet see the wall keeping them apart from Him.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold