Day 3379 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Peter 1:3 NIV

As weary eyes scratch across the uncertain expanse of this new life we’re now called to explore, we will indeed find ourselves in the midst of a right impossibility at times.

For we’ve learned that it all relies upon us and thus we’ll come to such a crossroads as the cross holds more times than we’d otherwise want to welcome. Because we’ve become rather content with the content of life as lived within the pretense of arrogance. We’re used to how we live, how we love, what we love that’s become to us how we live as a people perfectly at peace always seeking for peace without the ability to have it proven inside something certain.

I reckon that’s because peace isn’t exactly a matter so easily contained as to be held in a place or had in a prize or even hoped for in a promise.

No, perhaps peace is a person, just One who’s at times a bit harder to find from inside minds melted into such a maniacal misunderstanding as our assuming that He’s always waiting within something we’re not doing in a place we’re not standing as defined by these confusions we’re holding. As if He’s not already knocking, waiting not for us to find Him but rather for us to find that He’s found us, ushering us into a retirement from trying the wrong ideas of faith in exchange for feeling finally that faith is as it always was, simply a matter of trust rather than trying.

This is perhaps one my biggest problems personally as I’ve always been one to try and find the way to do something, to fix something, to find something that means something that I think or hope or just beg to bring my life some semblance of something that makes me feel less guilty for living a life I’ve thus far done so very little with. Indeed, I’ve long believed that it were on me to be the one who understood where to stand, who knew what to do, who always said what we’re supposed to say, avoiding then the void of not knowing something.

Because I always thought that such violent insufficiency would likely be the death of me.

For such is exactly what we’re shown and told from this world of weirdness wrapped around us. It’s that it’s on us to find what’s in us that is supposed to define us within the lines and lunacy of what this world thinks life to be, love to mean. It’s our job, our duty, our purpose to perfect this path of existence in such a way that proves always the substance of something this world says makes life worth living. And it’s just always changing, and so we’re always seemingly reeling as we need to find or figure something different or differently than we did yesterday.

And such is the cycle of life, a two-wheeled catastrophe that lost traction some time ago and now exists in a slow roll downhill unto the disaster God promised would be waiting for a world such as this, one so rife with wickedness and revelry therein.

But such revelry as defined in and enjoyed by the rebellion which we’ve become has become only a matter of the most intense confusion as the way of life we’ve lived becomes now the way of life we’re called to lose amidst a world not doing the same in any measure whatsoever. No, we look still through the eyes we’ve always leaned upon to understand life and see still a people perfectly at peace within the warmth of this place that’s strangely feeling colder by the day.

Yes, we look out the window of these hearts He’s changing and see a world not changing, a way of life not leaving, a kind of enjoyment we’re now feeling this need to keep fleeing, and it’s freeing while also freezing, freeing us to the hope of a better promise waiting than the prizes for which we’ve been fighting but all the while freezing us in a fear found by our sudden awareness of the sheer madness into which we’re now racing.

For there is little about this newness that makes any sense to us, all just so novel and nuanced that we seem now to know only that we don’t know what we need as we’ve just never been this way before and nor do we have anymore the luxury of looking to the world around us to help us.

Because again, our trajectory has changed and thus our investment has altered as well. And well, thus leaves us learning little by little that we’ve not what’s needed to make this journey into these unknowns we’re seeing so alone that we know now that nobody else would understand where we’ve come to stand. In fact and to be honest, there are even days when we don’t or won’t understand why we’ve come to this stance we’ve somehow chosen to take against the way of life we once knew and see still so many still enjoying.

But perhaps therein lies the beauty of this stance He’s led us to lean upon. Maybe it’s proven in that it’s not us upon whom we lean anymore. Maybe it’s a matter of the Messiah being now the lead in life, letting us fall in behind the faithfulness of the Father who sent His Son to come for us. Yes, maybe that’s the joy of life now as found in losing sight of the enjoyment we once knew and know now only to refuse for sake of the fear of falling away from this Way we want with all we hope we have left to follow to the only hope we know we have left.

Yes, maybe this path narrows so suddenly, so assuredly so that we’ll finally be able to see that we can’t see it all and thus could never come close to convincing ourselves that we could know it all. No, maybe this faith is far less about what we know and more concerned that we know. That we know Christ not what we know about Him as if studying again for the tests we’ve come to assume always taken on paper with pencil just in case a mistake is made.

Perhaps this test is one taken on the run as we come to understand the gravity of shaking dust as becoming now for us the only way to admit mistakes and move on rather than remain in.

No, that’s the heaviness of this path laid out before us. It’s that we’re called to remain in Him, something done only when we can see and agree that neither can we stay where we’ve been nor thanks to Him would we ever want to anyway. It’s a vast letting go of all we’ve known so that our old understandings can’t keep standing in our way along what we know will prove already a path more than impossible for us to understand. For there just isn’t much of what we’ve thought we knew that can help us through all this new that we’ve never known.

Only Christ can do that as He’s the only One who’s gone this way before and thus He’s the only Name by which we can be, must be saved from the symptoms of a life lived so lost that we thought and think we can both find the way and walk it well.

Well friends, maybe we can’t.

How’s that for a little slice of humble pie upon this fine Friday?

Maybe we can’t do this well. Maybe we can’t follow this path as perfectly as He so clearly deserves. Maybe we can’t become the righteousness He’s always asked of us. Maybe we can at best ask Him to get us as close as He can with what’s left of this bucket of rust and regret that we’ve become out here in the rain of a way of life we feel the need to only let go. Yes, maybe all we can do is let go of our tendency to try as perhaps such effort is given only in effort of our staying involved in what we can’t help Him accomplish.

We cannot save ourselves, and maybe we shouldn’t try anymore.

No, perhaps we should come to lean so faithfully upon Jesus that all that frees us is the hope that He is enough. Because honestly, if He isn’t then it doesn’t matter what we do or how well we assume it done anyway. No, if that cross cannot cover the cost we’ve charged against our souls and their eternal peace, then nothing we do could ever possibly help undo all we’ve already done. And thus we find the simplicity of our Christian hope:

Lord, “lead me to the Rock that is higher than I. For you have been my refuge, a strong tower against the foe. I long to dwell in your tent forever and take refuge in the shelter of your wings. For you, God, have heard my vows; you have given me the heritage of those who fear your name.” Psalm 62:2-5

Psalm 62:2 actually begins with the clarity of a heart calling out to God as it grows faint, finding an inability to make it any further under its own power. And such is who we are, merely a people who pretend such power as to imagine that we can make it despite having no idea either where we’re going nor how much longer we’ve left to get there.

That is life. It isn’t a time best spent in worry about what we want but rather one best focused upon where we hope to be going. And simply put, if we, as many do and will continue to, assume only that hope is held or had within this world, then this is all we can seek. This world is all we will know. This will be our home, and I couldn’t possibly fear anything more than that outcome in which this life as ruined as I’ve lived it is the very best I could have hoped to find.

No, I refuse to accept that, and thus I ask too that the Lord lead me to that Rock for Christ is indeed higher than I and I know that He alone knows the way through that grave, this grave I’ve craved, this grave of a life I’ve carved as I’ve caved into caring always only that I could when the truth always been than only He can. Only He can atone for who I’ve been, for all I’ve lost, for all I’ll fail as I stumble forward along this path I can’t see and thus often fail to understand.

Thus if my faith relies as my life has, all on me, then I will only find myself falling short all over again when my best proves so incredibly worthless as it always has so far.

And I find most days that the humility which allows me to admit that I can’t do this on my own is the best thing that I can offer unto the One who already knows that. And friends, we know that He knows because that Bible is still sitting on that shelf. That cross still calls out to us from a couple thousand years ago. That prayer line is still open and waiting for a little bit of honesty to boil to the surface of these lives we’ve set on fire. Yes, that hope is still alive and active, ready to cut through all the nonsense we find to make sense and show us something we’ve never seen before:

That God has given us all we need to live a godly life despite doing so in a world without that same fear of God. And it’s not done via what we know or how well we can prove that we know it as His path isn’t one paved with facts we’re expected to recite at a moment’s notice. Nor is there some paper and pencil exam waiting our exit from this temporal existence.

He gave us all we need to life a godly life in this chance to know Christ as our Lord and Savior, the Shepherd behind which we follow, the Shelter within which we find solace. Yes, we have all we need to do all this that we’re called to do, which is indeed the veritable antithesis of all we’ve known of life thus far, and it’s all held in the knowledge of Christ who is the goodness we cannot be, the glory we do not have, the righteousness we cannot prove and the hope we just don’t deserve.

I know instinct tells us to try this all on our own, but friends, if we don’t do this with Christ, then we’re doing nothing that can ever amount to anything worth doing. Either He goes before us or we may as well not even try. For without that knowledge of His being our Salvation, it simply matters not what else we do nor what we assume we know.

If we don’t know Christ as our Savior, then there simply isn’t any salvation to be found. It is Him or nothing, and while that is indeed as narrow as it could possibly be, thankfully we know He knows the way and that all we can do is let Him then lead us into the unknowns we’ll come to know of a way of life we’ve never wanted to know until now.

Let us leave the trying to please or impress behind and pour all that effort and attention unto knowing the Son rather than trying to make up for what we’ve done and thus what we now do not know how to do. He doesn’t need us to figure out the way home as He is the Way home. Just needs us to let Him be what we cannot become.

For in that is the kind of faith that gets credited as righteousness. He will guide us along this path into the unknown, and we just can’t afford to make it harder by trying to pretend that we know anything along this way we’ve never walked before.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold