Day 3376 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Galatians 6:14 NIV

Down here much of life is lived as if life’s a gain, a gift given for us to keep and/or give away to whatever we deem worth the waste of a life lived as if there’s something here worth losing what isn’t.

That’s either the hope or the horror of His holiness. It’s a truth which either confronts or comforts. It’s the realization of the reality toward which we’ve grown irreverent at times. The understanding that where we’re standing as lost within a world in which we’ve sought our hope and seek it still after having found none thus far, while heavy-handed it offers the hope we’ve yearned to have, just promises that it’s always waiting for us to have less here to hope in so that we might hope for what’s not here.

And upon a hill some years ago a grace was given that bridges this gap carved between us and reason, and now we’ve no reason to remain where we are other than the fear of what the ride home will cost.

You see, such is precisely why so many still deny the undeniable hope of the Gospel. Because it’s hard to admit we need it. It’s hard to confess that we haven’t found it anywhere else. It’s by all accounts the hardest thing we’ll ever even consider as it asks that we consider that we’ve conceded these lives to this way in which we’ve ruined them. Yes, the Gospel asks that we finally see and understand that all of life as lived in this world in which life is nothing but a miniseries of miseries, every single failure and frustration is found for the sake of our foolishness still thinking it’s on us to make this mean something.

Yet we’ve solemnly come to assume that the only way to make our lives a meaning is to make them something that seems amazing to minds so scrambled as to assume that we know anything about meaning having made only the mistakes the Gospel asks us to admit.

And even further, we look up from heads hung in the shame of this game we’ve made of life and see the cross as hung upon that hill and see then only a furthered price to pay in light of the price that was paid.

Indeed, the cross is the cost which covers the loss of a life lived as if a life’s not worth living for anything which may ask a price be paid for our play of pretend proven alongside a pretense’s purpose of personal profit posed upon proving a person perfect via power or popularity or whatever other prize that’s stolen our eyes away from the promise as proven upon our place on that cross.

And we fear that cost more than anything else in life as it’s the undeniable altering of a life to the very tune of a death demanded at the hands of everything we’ve desired. And having gone so far as to assume our desires add to the designing of this life we’re otherwise destroying despite our trying to give it a better meaning, we assume now that only our desires can have the sort of meaning that might make life worth living. And if then we cannot find or have or keep our little pitiable prizes of plans and profits then we’ve left no reason to consider that direction.

For what is there found in that tomb other than the immediate leaving behind of absolutely everything we’ve come to utterly hinge our very existence on having?

Sadly such is exactly what we’ve done. We’ve built a life on a foundation of finding something in this world so filled with things to find, things to like, things to love that love us not in return. Indeed, we’ve become a people who know only a starved existence in which nothing gives us anything no matter how much we give to the hope that something in this world will make our lives in this world look or feel more meaningful.

No, we know only to rinse and repeat, stumble and fall and turn to the next best idea in hopes that our intentions and inventions don’t disappoint us all over again.

But they always do.

Because that’s all that all of our ideas can do. For all that we imagine, all that we desire, all that we design, it’s based upon this life we’ve come to settle for in which there is no joy, there is no peace, there is no place for hope, for healing, for happiness, for us. We’re living a life so focused on what we want to have that we’ve lost sight of the fact that we are alive, always waiting for something outside of us to come alongside of us and give us what we think a life should mean.

Thus we exist only in idols, our lives becoming the life and breath and beating hearts of the inanimate ideologies we’ve come to idolize. We crave what we cannot create and so we craft an idea that we carve into a demanded desire to become what we’ve never been, and we then pour ourselves into those plans as if our lives depend upon those desires coming through in the end.

But friends, having lived my life making my plans and winning my prizes at the hands of these hands that have stolen the pen from the One who knows better than I who I was meant to be, I’ve come to find that life is only lived when we live it not for things nor ideas but according to the truth which tells us that this life depends not on us to figure it out nor give it a meaning. No, this life only has its meaning when we’re willing to admit that nothing we do, nothing we want, nothing we have can ever possibly make it mean more than it already does.

And it already means more than enough because Christ came to this earth to restore us unto the hope He gave when at first He made us in His image. For there is nothing in this world that can ever be worth the joy which comes in knowing we’re here for more than what’s here. And while that truth is found only beyond the realization that we’ve lived a lie that’s ruined such joy, it just happens to be that the cost of admission back into that peace is the admission that we can’t purchase or produce it.

But also that neither again can we spend it as if it’s worth so little as to let our hearts wander back into the wanting of this world or anything in it.

Friends, salvation is worth more than this world and everything in it. God’s mercy as made manifest in the Messiah is worth even the laying down of our lives in a shown share of what Christ did, even if He didn’t call us to follow. No, we should want to share in His sacrifice whether or not He’s asked us to. For if our forever as found in the Father is worth enough that said Father came in humility to be humiliated by the inhumanity of humanity, then is it not worth our leaving behind the inhumanity we’ve too come to embody?

Perhaps the problem is that we’ve become so very worldly that we cannot think or see or even believe any other way anymore. As we’ve sold ourselves, our souls, little by little and piece by piece of the peace we’ve lost in this place, this place has come to own us and our peace and our idea of a place, a name, a life lived with the meaning this place insists a name should mean. And thus we’ve become but replicas of the ruination of this fallen nation called creation.

But how much further are we willing to fall considering we’ve already lost it all in the flood of this fall, so much in fact that the flawless had to die for us for us to have any hope of having any hope ever again?

For that is the weight of the cross He carried. But the weight of that for us to carry is that He chose it.

Yes, Christ chose to lay down His life, but not so that we could remain in our way of life lived so light and loose as to lose this chance to finally care about something more than what’s here. No, He gave His life so that we might find the courage to steal ours back from all the belittlement and blaspheme to which we’d sold them which sold us into such enslavement as the enjoyment of the very sins which cost His choice to carry the cross which is still the cost that every sin owes.

For nothing will ever change that sin is death. But neither can anything change that to repent from sin is to run toward life.

And thus we find the price we pay for the peace He brings.

It’s found in the leaving behind. Walking away. Letting go of all we’ve gone after. And yes, such is the biggest ask of all as it’s the request that we no longer acquiesce sin’s insistence that we settle still for such a shallowed existence as this we’ve given unto the substance of things desires as opposed to holding fast to the hope of things believed. For that is faith, and faith is where life is found. Thus life is not held within our desires nor our dreams nor our dance through this disaster as if we’ve not helped light the fire.

No, life is found in our leaving our misunderstanding of it behind as we fall in behind the Shepherd who came to lead the blind into sight, the chance to see for once that we were always meant to be alive for more than this death we’ve died at the hands of sin’s delight.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s not much all that inherently enjoyable about this journey spent losing all we’ve long tried to win. It’s entirely contrary to who we’ve come to be. But yet, friends, therein lies the beauty! It’s found in the hope we find when we leave things behind, because as we let them go we find this space in our hearts now barren and cold, the desert drawn by these desires we’ve been all but willing to die for.

And as we walk that wasteland of these thus far wasted lives, yes, it’s tragic. It’s trying and tumultuous and a sort of testing that none of us want to endure as it’s a trial none of us can survive, this seeing endlessly all the mistakes we’ve made, the mistakes we make still. It becomes this sort of pain too miserable to be felt physically. It’s a pain in the marrow, a sort of heaviness lain upon a heart that leaves it heaving for help.

Right where we need to be.

Why? Because it’s only when life is too heavy that we’ll seek the One who we know can carry a weight we cannot even imagine. And when we begin to imagine what He might help us to become, only then can find the joy that’s not bound to this earth but rather to our excitement to leave it behind in exchange for that hope which has only just begun as it’s a hope that bridges unto forever and builds into a crescendo upon the closing of this chapter of life we’ve tried to write only to watch it all go wrong.

For in Christ we come to see that it’s those wrongs that we leave behind, not the wins we’ve long assumed them to be.

And in that most merciful kindness as His choosing to lay down His life for us, only there do I find anything that means anything anymore. Because I’ve tried for all my life to find something that could do something to make my life meaning something so that I might feel something that I could again consider as being alive. But no, I’ve found only an emptiness alongside all this junk I’ve gathered around and the dreams I care not to dream anymore as I know they were based in this world I’m leaving before long.

No, in Christ alone is found the only thing that can give my life a meaning, a feeling worth feeling that finally leaves me feeling alive as it’s a life not lived in some set amount of time. His gift of this new outlook on life is one that looks into eternity with nothing but awe and wonder as I wonder as to what all He has to show me when I’m not looking to this world that I’ve let own me all this time.

Thus I cannot boast in what I have nor in seeking out what others crave that I might beat them to the boasting in that either. I shall glory only in the Gospel of Christ and seek then to give all the glory to God for saving me from a story I wanted to live, a story in which I was never alive.

For I trust that I am alive in Him and so I needn’t seek again any way in which to make this life work in this world for all this world works to make of life. That cross is both a choice and a cost. He chose to give His life that I might agree that mine too is worth more than living in accord with the ways of a world in war against His hope.

And thus, in that cross, I too have found only reason to leave this world and its ways behind, even if I know the cost that means. For I don’t care to be understood just as much as I no longer care to stand where I’ve stood. I’m moving on, and I pray others too can find that hope in their loss of a life lost to sin and the world that makes such seem somehow commendable.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold