Forged By Faith

Romans 5:8 NIV To prove a demonstrable love able to accomplish all He’s said He intended demanded He do what none other would in the surpassing of His own definition of a greater love than any might have. For His very Word defines in John 15:13 that “greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And yet alongside such truth God chose to come along and prove Himself entirely and thus eternally better and higher than our best might ever become. For greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends. And so that Christ laid down His life for we who still at times tend toward enmity in our words and actions taken far too lightly, in that He proved who He is by showing us who we’d become. Because He knew, knows still that without such a graphic display of undeserved love, none of us would ever be able to imagine anything but our deserving it. For sadly our sense of entitlement has bred such an audacious imagination as this we’ve all but come to...

Ezekiel 36:32 NIV I fear we’ve become a people so blinded by self that we assume that all that anyone else does, everything that’s ever done is accomplished only to suit said assumption of the success of such selfishness as defines us. For indeed there seems a right discrepancy between our desires as designed by delusions dividing our dedications into the death of disbelief and the demand of a pure devotion driving us toward the only Way to overcome our utter disregard for the death we deserve. We see not anything from any perspective other than which caters to and cares only about our illusion of some ivory tainted triumph having achieved for us this engrained ability to assume that everyone is to be so amazed by us that they seek to do all they can to serve us. Christ Himself even being tossed in alongside this world of wants and wickedness we wish would revolve around us so much as our every understanding does. It’s no real quandary as to how we got here nor why we’re so inclined to...

Romans 8:18 NIV Seems to me that the present isn’t the promise as surely His fullness isn’t limited to this lifetime we’re destined to leave behind. Rather, as the darkness of these darkening days closes in all around and presses us toward the pressures of persecutions we’d prefer we not endure, might we simply remember that what truly matters most is not what we go through but rather where we get to go to. For this life as lived in this world as lost as it’s finding so many reasons to irreverently remain, it isn’t going to the endless sunshine and simplicity that we’d otherwise like to imagine into expectation. No, in this world we will have trouble. But to that let us remember to take heart for in His overcoming this world we find the ticket to where we’re going. And in that hope of going home we learn that to go is to leave what home isn’t. And as days do indeed descend deeper into the disquiet of desires demanding fires finding futility without fail to be the only faith to which mo...

Colossians 3:4 NIV Caught up in a life lived within waiting for life to begin, such is the substance of this stance in which we struggle throughout these days which fly by ever faster and thus never fast enough. For just before dawn the weight of a night's darkness drones on in a way in which we feel this fear that the new for which we’ve yearned might never be known. There comes in these waning hours an almost extended curiosity as to whether or not we've weathered the worst of our wearisome worries or if more are waiting for us to wade through before we get to the hope we’ve held always out of reach. Indeed, will said promise of our hope fulfilled be fulfilled today, or will we walk still through a thousand tomorrows before the rest for which we wait? Seems to me that it’s questions like these which come to become us in ways that we’d have never known to imagine before that door was ripped off its hinges, heaving hope into hearts that had already given up holding onto such an...

Ephesians 4:24 NIV If we’re to have the hope of being something we’ve never been, well then we’ve to become something we’ve never begun: Willing. For willingness is the very outermost aspect which allows for all of life’s intrigue. We must be at first willing to be curious, to be cautious, to be considerate, compassionate, at times perhaps somewhat confused and potentially chaotic even if we’re to ever know what life is. Because life is lived counter to these complacent considerations chased by this cancerous culture alongside whom we’ve died to life thus far in these lives lived toward the here and now always being all that ever mattered. And thus the new. Yet also the nuance. Indeed it seems that this faith unfolds in a sort of gradual and graduated manner that allows for both our growth as well as hurried anticipation of more such improvements always waiting just out of reach, inspiring us to perpetually reach toward the impossible. Such as Christ on a cross, life in a tomb, hope af...

Ephesians 4:23 NIV There very well may be little that’s more daunting that denying these dreams we’ve been designing inside minds we’ve always thought able to do so. Then again, there might also be little that’s more eternally freeing than our fleeing away from the disasters our dreams have designed in exchange for the hope we’ve never managed to fully imagine. For much of life seems to incessantly insist upon our feeling as if we’ve the need to wrap our minds around something in order to shove it toward making enough sense for us to believe it enough to walk it as wearily as we know we will. We’re a people perfectly prone to struggle at sight’s insistence upon being the king of our senses, leading us thus far into a way of life in which we’ve lost our minds, leaving our souls barely hanging on these days. Yes, seems that when we agree that we must understand something before we’ll try or buy anything enough to believe we should, well, a whole lot is left lost while our minds take thei...