Day 3350 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Acts 3:19 NIV

From peace to our life’s purpose, what if all we’ve long been searching for has always been as close as turning around?

Because surely life wasn’t meant to be as convoluted and confused as we’ve come to consider it. I just can’t seem to wrap it around inside my mind to where such a good and gracious God would design a life meant to be spent always seeking the necessity while surrounded by and engorged with the mundanity of extravagance. How can the One who wrote wisdom into existence be the basis for the almost maniacal miscommunication of mankind’s many misunderstandings as to what life is and thus how we’re best to live it?

Or is it that God’s hand has always been clear, seen brightest inside the simplicity of life that we’ve come to miss behind our many misgivings given unto chasing always after more of what we’ve never needed at the expense of our never finding more than what we’ve always wanted?

Because it just seems to me that we’ve all found more than our fair share of things to want, and yet we always seem entirely unable to find the most basic elements of life’s meaning.

Indeed, I’m beginning to become more convinced by the day that God’s design is the purest expression of a life’s meaning, man in a Garden, grateful for the gift of a life to live so filled with a most perfect provision that has sadly come to meet our needs so very well that we’ve left hours, days, decades in which to devote our time to preference as opposed to praise. For we were made to be His people, a creation content with the content of God’s intent for us and these lives we’ve borrowed from the One whom none can repay.

And yet rather than allowing ourselves to appreciate that simplicity as seen and shown in His great goodness always achieving for us the overabundance of our most basic needs, no, rather we’ve taken such grace for granted and leveled our appreciation of His provision so that we might erect a most erroneous ego that seems fit to always assume that our wants need more attention and dedication than do the needs we’ve never needed to work for, want for, wish for, wander toward.

No, God has opened our eyes to every day we’ve thus far lived to the promise of our needs provided. And yet despite the time He has saved us in not having to seek out such sustenance as air to breathe, food to eat, water to drink, clothes to wear, no, instead we take that time saved and spend it as if greenbacks upon greed and gluttony for as much of life’s excess as we can become convinced we can’t live without.

But the confusion seems to arise whenever we accidentally stop chasing some golden calf and find ourselves with a split-second or two to realize and wonder what it is that we’re actually living without here inside the life spent worried about not going without.

What are we living without?

What has our money and mannerisms failed to afford for us so far? What have our friends and fellowships proven unable to provide in our lives? What all have all these nitwit networks and this nauseating need for networking netted us that we truly cannot continue without having had? What has all our plans and priorities never managed to find or figure out?

What are we still living without?

Peace? Purpose? Courage? Contentment? Humility? Honesty? Happiness? Direction? Discipline? Worth? Meaning? Reason? Have we found our reason? Do we know why we’re here? Do our lives have a reason for being, us being in them, being given them, our giving them away? What are we giving away for what little we seem to be getting in return?

For if sin and the sickening selfishness which fuels it are truly, as we all apparently contend, able to fulfill our lives, what are we still looking for? We are sold, after all, this most depraved and deceptive idea that says that to do as we please is where we find peace. Freedom from reality, responsibility are supposed to usher in a life’s meaning, allowing us to make our life’s meaning mean whatever makes us feel as if we mean something.

So what do we mean? What is my life adding to the story of humanity? What is my time achieving for anyone else? What is my time and how I’m spending it actually accomplishing for me? We have no problem whatsoever being so incredibly self-absorbed, so let’s look at this quandary from that direction. What is what I’m doing, wanting, worrying about achieving for me?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve almost forgotten what happiness is. Would you believe me if I said that I don’t quite remember peace either? My purpose wavers within every day as some new idea grabs ahold of my heart and won’t let go until I give in. What’s my worth? Couldn’t tell you! For so long it’s been measured in pleasures and treasures that I don’t know how to weigh the wealth of what’s left of what God gave me. I don’t know what’s left of that image in which I was created.

But I know my sins. I know my desires which led me to them, lead to them. I know the dreams I refuse to lose no matter how much time they take to find. I know the cravings that create inside this oddly satisfying sense of self-service that allows me to focus on me, forgetting everyone else and all their problems for a while. I know the fears I feel and the failure to care about facing them. I know the goals I had at one time and just how foggy they seem today. I know the priorities I’ve pursued and the passions they’ve become at times.

And I know that such passion for my preferences and opinions always posed upon protecting my past have done only that, saved my past from helping me see that I couldn’t help the present nor afford to absolve the future.

So where’s all the foundational basics of life in my life? Where’s my peace when my present is so torn between ignoring past mistakes and pretending I couldn’t possibly repeat them in days ahead? Where’s my meaning found considering that I apparently find today of so little worth that I’m more than content to waste it scrolling through social feeds feeding upon living vicariously through everyone else? What joy is there in my time when my time is spent focusing on forgetting failures and finding friendship with those who encourage me to believe that I’m just fine just as I am?

Yes, maybe this person I am, just as I am, maybe this is all I was meant to be. Lost, lonely, scared, scarred, confused and so conscientious that I can’t take a breath without wondering if I did it wrong.

A life spent wasting away wrapped inside of want and wishing I had the means to make my wishes come true. Chasing after every wind that blew by, just certain that should I catch the drift then I’d drift away into the dreams I dream as the night allows me the only escape I can find from who I’ve become. Or is that the only escape? Is that the only way to find something better? Is that the only way I can be something better?

To merely exist in some fleeting happiness found only in dreams I see only through eyes closed to the life I’ve agreed to live all this time?

I think we’ve not only accepted this fear of walking away but we’ve almost become that fear of walking away. We’re so afraid of failing ourselves, of forgetting what we’ve wanted for ourselves, of forfeiting what we’ve won for ourselves, by ourselves that we know only that as ourselves. Just this idealized image of someone that looks familiar without the faintest semblance of anyone we’d ever have hoped to become. Strangers passing in the night as if two ships cast upon an open road headed the same direction without the courage to admit they’re one and the same.

That’s exactly how I’ve seen my life for some time now. It’s as if I’ve agreed to exist as two people, two ideas, two directions aimed eternally away from each other, mortal enemies wondering each why peace is so seemingly impossible for either.

It’s because we’re headed the wrong direction. All of us are, in some way or another. We’re all strangers in a strange land we’re starving ourselves to make feel familiar. We’re all so desperate for something that allows us to feel a life that feels alive that we take hold of anything anyone else might suggest from the smiles shining upon faces as if those grins couldn’t deceive us again as they have so many times before. Yes, we’re a people dead inside deception’s indecisions deciding for us that today should be a sequel to yesterday without a change to any character or story line.

But that’s the problem friends! While we may have listened to this world inspiring us to become terrified of changing our lives, our priorities, our plans and goals and dreams, even to the extreme of letting them all go so that we can’t mess this up anymore, if nothing changes, nothing changes.

And if nothing changes then peace will remain distant. Hope will stay hindered beyond the horizon that we never seem able to reach. Purpose and worth and our reason for being will become what they’ve all already been, fleeting ideas that seem too fantastical to fight for. Because that’s the whole challenge of life, it’s a fight. It’s a war waged within, the truth being battered and beaten, almost to death, at the hands of these lies we’ve come to live in life. It’s a battlefield upon which none escape without bruises and losses and sorrows so deep that we cannot swim through them at times.

But we can try.

We can try to fight for more, the better we once believed in. We can take stock of where we are, who we are and ask ourselves if such is enough. Am I good with me? If today is my last, can what I’ve done allow me to leave with a smiled hope hanging upon the chance that I didn’t miss what I once dared to believe was waiting? Are the things I’m doing, the things I’m allowing allowing me to believe that I can be better, that I am better than I once was, even if that once was just yesterday?

Or is life headed the other way? Rather than a joyous hope, is life but a calloused catastrophe?

Mine has been for as long as I can remember. So many unreasonable confusions inviting me to consider never changing as if collapsed and corrupted is actually who I was meant to be. But if that is the case and sinners are all we were ever supposed to be, how then can we explain the imagining of hope? How can any of us explain the glimpses of something better than we’ve been? How can, why would any of us ever agree to anything we’ve done or wanted being wrong if, as the world says, nothing is wrong?

Does there not have to be some objective truth, foundational reality, undeniable design to all this that our fears and failures only testify to our knowledge of being there? Is not my ability to admit my many mistakes only evidence that God’s not done with me, and that nor should I be either?

I think so many times in life we’re none too content to just keep our foot on the gas and blow right past any sign or sound that seems to sing a warning against where we’re going. Because we don’t want to be wrong, because to be wrong demands we do something about it. And to be honest, the thing we most want to do about our being wrong is to just look for ways to feel better about not changing it. But that’s just not good enough. Because no matter what we do, what we say, what lie we try to imagine, Christ still died for us, and I just don’t think we can actually turn that off.

No matter how much our arrogance and stupidity might want to!

Because God isn’t willing to quit on our lives, even if we already have. That’s the message of the cross. That even though, even when all was lost from our perspective, even our courageous humility being willing to imagine that we might be mistaken, He didn’t give up. Because He knows who He made us to be while we just see who we’ve become since. And while the two most definitely do not match, the blood He shed says they can again if we’ll just try.

Try to change. Try to reconsider. Try to imagine what life might be like if we stop trying to fill it with all that’s only frivolous. What might our lives be like if we turned around and headed in that one direction we’ve never wanted to go?

Sure, in that direction all we see is a grave. We see a tomb with a stone waiting to roll back into place, sealing our insanity inside ready for the horrid judgement we know without question we’ve earned a million times over. But even if that stone were to roll back in front of that tomb and trapped us inside of the loss of this life, what are we losing? For if there is no peace, no purpose, no passion for anything other than whatever we want that always only tarnishes and ends up in the trash, what are we losing?

On the other hand, what might we find? Because after all the years of trying all these other things, you’d think we’d have found our peace and purpose and worth and meaning by now. But what if all those things we’ve never yet to find, things like hope and healing and happiness are only found in that grave where we lose what we’ve made of this life? What if freedom is found only in the forgiveness we’ve always been afraid to ask for? What if mercy is the outcome of our courage to come away from a wasted life that we’ve lived doing everything wrong?

I don’t know about you, but personally I’m tired of trying to find what I’ve never found. And while we’re welcome to keep going the direction we’ve been going and to enjoy as much sin as we can imagine, I just think that at some point we have to ask ourselves what it is that we can possibly get out of doing only more of the same. I’m tired of the same. Sick of the standard. Fed up with normal. Because this world’s same standard of normal has no peace or hope or purpose. This world has no life, just the death of sin is all we know to live for anymore.

But I want more than that, and I truly hope you do too. I hope, no, I pray that we still have just enough alive in us that we’re willing to turn around and fight for life again. And yeah, we might lose a lot of things in that fight, probably will to be honest. But forget what we’ll lose and imagine what we might gain. Because losing complacency or fear or hatred or confusion doesn’t really sound all that bad!

Especially when we just might find peace and hope and love and mercy and the promise of eternal life waiting just after the end of this long walk back to where hindsight says we should have stayed to begin with.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold