Day 3381 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

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 their time trying to imagine it all.

Which is oddly enough the one thing we take for granted more than just about everything else in life that makes life. Time. We wade through the wake of hours and days being blown into the past as if the present is just a memory waiting to be forgotten, as if nothing we do is so vital as to care to do it well enough to maybe convince some of those memories or efforts to stick around a while. No, we just keep the pedal pressed to the pavement as we plan a perfection we cannot even see and yet remain convinced we’ve everything we need to find, to feel.

And thus life has come to barely exist inside minds so warped into wandering after all we’re wondering about that we’ve left no want for worry about all that might weary or wear. No, we seem quite content with the content of this pretense which sells us these selves sold for something we’ve eagerly agreed to believe is worth the hope that’s inevitably lost alongside our trying so hard to figure out everything in life as if life is a means only meant for us to understand, even if our efforts to understand keep us from ever even standing, let alone moving.

Indeed, life’s dissolved into a rather stagnated state of self-deprecation designed inside desires that demand we declare we’ve the ability to know it all despite those many disasters defined behind. Alas we care not to confess such a mess as to do so would be to also admit that we’re not really any better here in the hereafter. No, that’s one thing we’ve always managed to miss, the one demand we’ve always found a way to avoid. For to confess our concessions would be to concede that we do indeed need far more help than we’ve ever been able to offer ourselves.

Or get from anyone around us either.

Sadly even that seems about as far as our foolishness is willing to lead us. We’ll go so far as to maybe ask for some hints or a bit of help from someone we trust, even then knowing we’ll likely not do whatever they say to. No, it’s almost like these minds of ours that we’ve always thought of as ours have become so mangled that we actually believe that we still know what we’re doing and that we can eventually figure out how to do it so very well that everyone who sees the outcome of our life will be so absolutely blown away by our successes that there’s no possible way that even God would be disappointed.

As if He’s only able to appreciate the depreciation we’ve settled for assuming isn’t unfolding inside lives spent unraveling ourselves in search of what He’s already said does not exist inside a person.

No, we may have been made in His image, but let’s just be honest, that’s about the last thing any of us have cared to care about. We’re far too busy trying to make ourselves into something else, something of our own design, something we can put our name on as if our name means anything. So many selfish misconceptions becoming for us a blaspheme in which we believe ourselves the gods, leaving our God an afterthought thought about only after we’ve ruined yet another attempt at what we though would be our very best yet.

And you see, there’s the whole problem. We’re a people who seem to legitimately think that we’ve any ability to factor, figure or find something that can be unequivocally considered the best. It’s almost as if we have indeed managed to actually perfect something, only it’s only the ability to ignore so violently our many mistakes made in those many efforts given unto designing our ideal of whatever we think ‘best’ might be that we might be eternally unable to even know what’s good.

Which is precisely the problem.

We have no idea what good is as we’ve spent our lives thus far on castles made of sand assuming them cathedrals of accomplishment that we alone have created, masterpieces entirely deserving of everyone’s applause and appreciation. Even God’s. Pay no attention to the faulty wiring, the unfinished basements flooded with water pouring from some leaking laziness we’ve yet to address, the broken windows letting in the darkest of light shining from neon signs calling our names nearly every night of the week.

No, don’t worry about the many rooms filled with the cluttered considerations of idols thought ideals we needed at the time. Pay no mind the many misunderstandings swept underneath every rug of rebellion we weave as we wave to God from a distance, insistent that He not be too close as He might see all this mess we’ve made of a mercy He gave in order to save us from such dilapidation as this habitation caught between here and thinking still that home is supposed to be here somewhere.

Yes, thinking, seems that such has always been our most trusted attempt, and yet one only ever able to convince that we can be the ones who imagine a way out of this mess we’ve made that we just can’t admit we imagined.

Sadly it seems that most days all we care to do is deny just that. We give more effort, more concern to figuring out more ways in which to ignore our unraveling than we do seeking some help to stave the suffering we can’t begin to start showing. No, keep it all under wraps, hidden from the world around us as they too live as if such misery as our fleeing from His mercy is truly the most beneficial way to waste a life. And well, we just don’t want to be the ones who ruffle the feathers or inspire any others to maybe reconsider what we’re losing in light of what we can’t get back.

You see, that’s a rather poignant point that I don’t know that I’ve ever heard discussed, one that I’m fairly certain I’ve never even considered myself. Losing versus not getting back. For there is a rather big difference between the two. We can lose things, we’ve done it countless times so far in life. All of us have lost our keys, misplaced our phones, can’t find the number to that one person we were supposed to call back to set up that one thing that we were really excited to do.

Yes, we’ve all lost many things, but why do we seem to worry less about what we can’t get back?

Because things lost can at least theoretically be found again. Keys will show up. Someone will send us a message or ring up one of those worrisome phone calls we’d prefer to read in a text, helping us find the phones we brazenly allowed out of both sight and hand for a moment. Might even run into that person we wanted to call had we not lost their number, a second chance to that dance as it were.

But what of the things in life we can’t get back? Time. Someone’s trust. Confidence lost in a petty argument. Effort given unto winning something we didn’t really need all that badly. The hope of a home in Heaven not cared about as we carved out our own ideal of a home held here, one far closer and thus much easier to imagine. Peace, something always given away at pride’s insistence that we prove ourselves to someone who literally doesn’t even care that we’re here.

We lose so many things thinking that we can’t afford to let the moment or the meaning of such a rare opportunity pass us by. We need to make the most of every chance we have to prove our minds these machines able to manhandle life into the outcome we want to achieve for ourselves, by ourselves. Yes, and thus life has become us lost in ourselves, minds so mangled by misunderstandings that we have no idea who we are, whose we are, just left to worry about wanting a way to prove that we are.

As if we are not already enough to be evidence of our not being enough.

That’s become a rather great fear in my heart. That I spend so much time thinking that I’m only letting my ideas become idols that I give my life to making come to life so that my mind is pleased by the pride that’s long lived inside that says I need to be the one who does this so that I’m the one who gets the glory of the gain from it being so amazing as my mind thinks I can make it all seem.

Only then leaving Jesus on the horizon in the distance, waiting with what I know I need, waiting only for me to see that I need only what He offers as my offerings mean as little as they always have.

That’s one of the biggest points of the cross I think. It’s that we can’t possibly do what was needed to achieve what we’ve never really wanted. Because our pasts have shown Him that we’ve never wanted Heaven, just to build our own ideals down here instead. Past choices have proven that we’ve never wanted a relationship with Him, but rather one built on being best friends with a world living in perpetual enmity against Him. Our every word, every action almost have all painted this portrait of pride that says we don’t need Him.

And thus we think we can do this without Him. And thus we’re still nothing but slaves to minds so warped and wrong that we still think we’re in the right fighting for our rights to do as we please, as if that’s truly how He ordained this thing we call life.

No, it seems to me that our rights are just ideas that we get to worry about, fight about so that we needn’t look upon the many wrongs we’re doing in life. Just another distraction that we’ve designed so as to keep us divided from pure devotion to God alone. For the simplicity of God’s design is that we’ve been given the right to life, a gift given to each of us who are here. But beyond that, rights aren’t really all that worried about.

Turns out that the bigger concern is our wrongs as our lives lived in light of our rights have left us doing things that people think are okay, important even, all while ignoring if not denying that we are here to honor God rather than serve ourselves.

And since we’ve so clearly never understood that, thus the need of this change noted here: “To be made new in the attitude of your minds.”

An example perhaps-

A few years back God finally got through me as I sat on a couch eating garbage weighing more than anyone could rightly consider a healthy life should. Convinced me to hit the gym in our apartment’s tiny workout room. Why not change the diet while you’re at it, maybe learn to think of food as a blessing given as a necessity rather than an experience to glutton oneself upon? Why not try to think differently?

Left me with something that I truly pray will stick with me until He says I can leave here:

If you can change your mind, you will change your life.

Not that it’s on us to do said changing. Not that it’s our part to figure out what changes need to be made and how to make them successfully or smoothly. No, just that if we can allow ourselves to see things differently, to open ourselves up to not being right, to consider that we might need help if we’re to ever be something better than what we’ve become, we have to listen to a voice that isn’t ours. Because friends, it’s always been our voice, our thoughts, our wants that have left us always wanting something better than we’ve become.

But we can never experience such better as He calls us to be inside this belief that believes that it’s all from Him and thus that we should live only for Him, we’ll never understand that if we keep allowing our thoughts to stand in our way. We need to be made new in the attitude of our minds as our minds are the ones who’ve imagined all these mistakes we’ve made and the regrets they’ve become.

What if we didn’t look to ourselves to help ourselves anymore?

No, what if we instead looked to God? What if we let Him teach us, lead us? What if we surrendered us to whatever His will for us might be, wherever it might lead? Might we find something different, something better? Have you read the Bible? What we’ve earned in light of what we’ve lost isn’t anything anyone could consider better than anything. But what He promises to those who lay down these lives we’ve lost to the wrong side of right is better than everything we could imagine.

And again, as we’ve been talking, while it might be a huge request, laying down our lives and letting go of our thoughts and plans and dreams considered perfection, maybe we’d only lose something we didn’t want to get back. And maybe we would find something we couldn’t ever lose to take the place of all those shames and sorrows we surrender.

I don’t know but it just seems to stand to reason that if you want something new you’ve gotta do something new. And well, what’s more novel than our not being the ones who figure this out? What’s more new than asking God to do what only God can do, make us new? Indeed, what might change for the better if we let Him be the designer for a change? He always has been, and He done a much better job than we ever have.

After all, His thoughts turned a grave into a gift whereas ours only turned this gift of life into a graveyard filled with mistakes.

Yeah, maybe we can step away from our selfishness and allow ourselves to see what else He can do when our minds aren’t in the way.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold