Day 3349 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

James 4:8 NIV

What if the unseen duality we’ve all but come to insist upon in life has left us doubling the distance between here and hope?

For this life anymore seems the longest of roads. An ever-twisting tempest of trial and turmoil always triumphantly trying our temperament and tranquility. Each day arrives in a violent sort of haste that seems only to lay waste our best intentions already invented for the day ahead that’s all but already passed us by before we’ve even begun. Such is the confounding curiosity of life as we’ve lost it, for whether we’ve the gall to agree or not, that is all we’ve done with our time down here.

Just lost it to loving the life we’re losing, leaving unwelcomed our awareness of the wrath which we’ve earned for all this wandering into only wondering without the willingness to start walking.

That’s become a rather confusing contemplation around my head of late. This idea that I may have had myself roundly convinced of something that I’ve never been doing. Almost this sort of stagnant assumption of progression always moving ahead while my feet remain firmly planted in the same place they’ve always been. I guess that’s the danger in allowing our minds to lead the way, they’ve no trouble leaving our feet unchallenged as we investigate ways to assume we’ve moved forward without any change in sight.

It is an impressive feat we’ve managed to find. Always able to think up excuses or assumptions that allow us to believe ourselves better than we’ve been and further than we’ve found while having no real proof of anything anywhere near productive or profound upon which to build such evidence of a life truly changed. No, I fear we fear change so very much that we’ve resorted to imagining ways to make ourselves actually believe that we’ve moved forward into the better days for which we’ve long hoped, just without actually having to hope in said betterment enough to actually move.

No, we’re a people entirely content in the present, almost concreted inside ourselves and their current standing simply for the sake of not needing the humiliating humility which would allow us to move toward the opportunity to stand elsewhere with what we’ve always known would be a far better view. Nope, it’s rather the rose-colored glasses for us, looking longingly through blinded eyes filled with disbelief in our ability to play a part in the growth of our lives.

We’ve even managed to wrangle a religion which affords us the same affront of piety without self-pity.

For we are truly of all people most to be pitied, we who insist Christ present in the present only to present us presents we’ve picked as if some list created by our best imaginations could actually achieve the full life for which He laid down His. Yes, we live our days wasting away inside of want and wish, oddly not realizing the distance such selfishness demands between us and hope.

Because the truth is that if our hope is always in the next idea we have for the next thing we desire, well then hope will forever be always out of reach just waiting for us to confine it inside another manmade assumption of something worth wanting.

But the question I find myself considering more and more as days drift by and peace continues to dissipate is just how more can I want of a world that’s filled my life with all I’ve wanted so far only to still leave me feeling so far from what I always wanted? For my wants and needs are in no way all that much different from anyone else’s, or at least I try to imagine they’re not. I mean, are peace and purpose truly too profound to be proven in a life? Is the opportunity to see happiness supposed to be so fleeting as it so often feels?

Are we truly meant to be content with the content on screens showing scenes of ‘best lives’ we’ve never lived?

No, I think that I believe that life as it was always designed to be is still as simple and easy as He meant to be. Man in Garden, tending away at the enjoyment of all that’s so clearly been God-given. And yet we’ve come so far into this wrong direction that we’ve become the very for-granted we’ve always managed to ignore. For all of life anymore is taken for granted, so much that we find new ways to whine and want when our needs are no longer sufficient evidence of God’s goodness.

And down that line we’ve all walked for years is found only distrust, distaste, disappointment and disquiet as our minds reel and race for ways to want more of what we’ve become convinced we need for life to mean something more than we’ve made it to mean.

A people perfectly lost inside everything a wayward heart could want, and yet too a people entirely empty inside despite lives so filled with frills and thrills from a life that’s become lived inside an excess that’s choked our appreciation for all we’ve been given in blessings that have been overflowing since before we began down the right road in the wrong direction.

For the reality of life is that there be but one road upon which all of life is lived. Each of us, though we try to blaze our own blasphemes into this belief that we can be or become a better idea than that which God breathed into our existence, no, all we can do is remain upon His path, just running it away from the purpose for which He paved it.

Because you see, we live as if life is linear, a mostly straightforward assumption toward all we’ve yet to crave. We exist inside this endless stream of things to see and assume we need. And inside that mindset set upon seeking something next to want and win, we’ve come to all but insist that life is truly what we can make of it. Yet beyond that selfish blindness is found the fact that we’re all incapable of getting out of this alive. We came from nothing with nothing, and we’ll return to the same with nothing more.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s but to God what is God’s.

For this breath we breathe in this time we waste inside the lives we’ve stopped living now lived according to hearts that race always away from what our souls know we need more than these wants can provide, it all returns to God. He created us in His image, souls started off in the right direction of the most real righteousness that we can no longer even imagine. He knit us together in our mothers, planned a life for us to not waste as we have anyway.

He gave us this treasure of His reflection inside these clay vessels meant to bend and break in ways that this world insists, not to destroy us but rather to help us see that the world has in fact destroyed us. He planned for our mortal fragility so that we might come to understand our futility in trying to find a way that we can be enough or want enough or find enough to measure up the worthless expectations of world excited to believe in nothing.

Because that’s the distance this place has inspired in us. We’re surrounded along this road by a few billion others just like us who too have given into the wicked ways of a world wishing and wanting and warring to prove that God isn’t there so that He might not hear all we’ve said and hopefully hasn’t seen all we’ve done to this gift He’s given us of His image in these souls we’ve sold to afford the soil we stand on so that we can have a foundation we can feel without faith.

No, none of us want faith because faith is foolish to us. It’s a child’s game, always hoping and trusting and believing that there’s some sort of best that didn’t rely upon our imagining it. Nonsense! A most preposterous presumption to be sure! For how can an ideal exist if it’s outside our ideas? How can perfection be proven if not by our trying to be the ideal of perfect that we’ve come to no longer believe in simply because we haven’t been it thus far? How can truth exist outside of us and the need to protect the lies we’ve lived?

How can there be a God when life is a battleground?

Distance. So many questions considering only our perspective as demanded by eyes that cannot see and ears that will not hear anything that anyone else has to say or tries to do to help us see and seek the life lived beyond our inabilities. No, we stay solemnly inside ourselves and our insufficiency simply for the sake of not losing what we’ve never found.

It’s a matter of fear again, our having to admit that we’ve truly wasted so much time to the wrong side of right. We’re a people entirely unwilling to admit we’ve been wrong, and so rather than take that truth on the chin and learn the lesson it’s meant to teach us, no, we’ll confine ourselves to waking up again into the tomorrow we assume to come already adamant to keep pressing deeper into our disaster, just so we don’t have to admit our lives are a disaster.

Because we can’t bring ourselves to admit that we caused it all.

Not God. Not the truth. Not hope being always hard to catch. Not Jesus for asking us to do what’s hard. Not even the world is to blame for inspiring us to follow along down all these dead-end roads of filth and frivolity. It’s our fault alone for our being the ones to always agree to the path of least resistance toward what our minds always imagine the best possible profit. Comfort and excitement, our being always entertained and never having to refrain from partaking of the parties we see people planning.

It’s on us, this distance we feel between us and God and the hope we’ve heard He alone embodies.

Because we’re the ones who continue to not only allow sin to remain a friend, but we actively yearn for, burn for ways in which to delve deeper into that darkness assuming greater safety in the shadows found just a little lower than we’ve already gone. But friends, how far gone do we truly want to be? How much deeper into darkness and despair are we truly willing to try? Is one more day spent running away from reality for the responsibility it demands truly worth waking again tomorrow into shame and regret all over again?

That is in fact that life we know to live, always doing today what we know we’ll feel bad about tomorrow. But what we need to understand is that again, life isn’t linear. We can’t just keep throwing our responsibility to get ourselves together onto tomorrow. We can’t continue to unload our unwillingness to change for a day ahead when we might feel like dealing with it. We can’t keep doing as we’ve always done and truly expect something different to happen.

Doesn’t work that way.

If we’ve not found hope or joy or peace or purpose as of yet, it’s not because they’re not there! It’s simply because we’re looking in the wrong things found always in the wrong direction followed sternly by the wrong desires demanded by a heart beating to the wrong tune of life. We were not meant to live this all alone for only our own desires. We were created in God’s image to be His hands and feet carrying His message to those who, like us, have so clearly forgotten who they are as a result of forgetting that He is there.

And yet what’s truly amazing about that chance to make that change as we repent from our stupidity is that God is gracious beyond our understanding. He loves us with a love we cannot fathom. His mercy reaches to depths we’ve never fallen to, yet. And that’s the point for today. We, as a fallen creation, can find always ways to fall deeper into depravity. We can follow the world into deeper depths of darkness and disdain. We can always, always, convince ourselves to want more of this world no matter what this world offers us.

But that path of agreeing to the wickedness and hatred and malice and misunderstanding that this world so clear enjoys, it ends in the same place, just with a far different outcome.

God has given us His Son to lead us to the death of us so that we might, in Him and in that tomb we share with Him, find the courage to adjust course and turn back toward home rather than continuing to assume that our home and our hope and our happiness and our health and our wealth and our worth are waiting somewhere down here. They are not! We were created in His image and it’s to His image that we will return. It’s to Him that we will return.

Do not wait until that day to find a reason to change your life and stop following the world in the wrong direction. Because when each of us is bowed before God, our lives and how we lived them will be weighed. We should then seek to be found so filled with Christ and hope in Him that nothing of this world is left of importance. For if we’re found filled instead with this world and its ways, we’ll be only empty of all that matters.

And while we shouldn’t have this chance to make this change, that’s reason enough to give it everything we have left. Because we might not have much left to offer Him. We may have indeed given away so much of ourselves that we don’t even know who we are anymore. Let Him remind you. Let His Word teach you. Let His truth refine you as it finds you for you so that you don’t have to anymore. Let Him lead the way and simply do your best to keep up.

For that is all that we can offer, and yet it’s the least we can give. Because God gave us Christ who gave us His life, can we not at least give Him our attention, our intention? Can we not at least look for our hope in His promises? Can we not try and find a little bit of joy in His redemption, even if it hurts as the world is torn away from our hearts?

Sure, washing our hands of the filth we’ve found and purifying our hearts by purging them of all that’s wrong and worthless, it may indeed be hard, harder than we can handle. Let it be. Let this road back home be long and difficult and at times all but impossible to understand. Because it’s in those moments when we’re reminded of both all we’ve lost and how that’s become now our inability to follow Him perfectly, it’s those moments that help us see that it’s His footprints in the sand and that ours aren’t always meant to carry us.

Embrace the distance my friends, not so as to welcome it to remain but rather to allow it to become in you a joy that grows brighter with every step He helps you take in the direction of that hope we shouldn’t have after having sought it inside everything but God’s will and His Way made for us to return from what we’ve long rejected.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold