Day 3383 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

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 outlook.

For what we know of life is lived looking for something sight can see to bring us something that might make our lives a meaning that means we’re not wasting them wanting along with everyone everything that is here at the eternal expense of the patience which provides the promise of the peace this place can’t provide. We’re heartbreakingly a people broken away into a blindness that binds us to disbelief in the beauty of the many blessings we’ve already been given.

Leaving us to easily forget the many which He promised are still to come.

No, we don’t see them as they fly underneath the radar of our rights reading into life these expected entitlements we excitedly follow our arrogance into assuming are supposed to flow overflowing into our following of everything and everyone with any hint at all we’ve come to assume we need for life to mean anything. And thus we’ve become a people so blinded by sight that we can’t see the sovereignty of salvation sitting beside us.

Because to us it’s that sort of necessity we’ve always understood as so impossible for us to accomplish that either another will on our behalf or we’ll just never know it at all. Indeed, either Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient or our insufficiencies define us as eternally undeserving of such forgiveness. Or, and oddly enough the case, both combine into an understanding mistakenly taken into a certainty in that we needn’t do anything, change anything, go anywhere or let go of anything.

For either He is enough to overcome our undeserving or our undeserving couldn’t be helped no matter what we do nor what we lose, and so why do anything that might ask us to lose anything such as that arrogance which tells us that we’re entitled to skip the struggle?

Such is our understanding of life anymore. That this is supposed to be a time of endless gratification, just nothing but a stream of success so fully enjoyed that nothing with any hint of hardship or hazard is welcome to interject itself into our assumption of life itself. Indeed, life to us is merely an assumption anymore. It’s a matter taken so for granted that we simply assume that our wants and wishes are the upmost concern of our Creator.

As if the One who came to carry a cross and lay down His life to save what the lost had lost is of the same mindset we share in that we can’t care less as to what we might win should patience be prioritized. We don’t want to be patient. We don’t want to wade through waiting for a hope we can’t see as thus to us it’s also one that we can’t expect to feel fulfilled. No, blinded by sight always assuming that what we’re seeing is where we’re best left believing.

Thus leaving us never knowing what faith is nor what it does as it does not confine itself to the simplicity of our chosen reliance upon sight to define what life is meant to be. No, faith is life because Christ is life, and since we cannot see Him for sake of this darkness we walk in, nor should we allow ourselves to sit inside these sickened assumptions that He’d make it all so very easy as to die for us and live for us while we never have to weary ourselves with either.

For alas, a people prone to the impatience of sight seeing all for which they’re believing, we’ve become eternally uninterested in anything we can’t see, and too forever unwilling to wait for what we’ve no evidence convincing us to expect.

No, we want that evidence, we need that evidence as to us evidence is the evident experience of something we then needn’t trust in. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of our trust having been so tried and tested all this time by those who’ve taken it as lightly as we have His. Indeed, we walk a world in which we want friendship, fellowship, relationship for the gravity it gives a life, and yet we walk amongst a great many, most in fact, who do not themselves care toward that same consideration of the sheer value of a companion or two upon which to lean when this ride gets heavy.

Rather folks have come to find friendships in their number of followers splashed upon some screen showing us the statistics of our existence, evidence that we’re alive without having to live for any of it. And thus we fall once more into the ease of our chosen simplicities as defined by a life we’ve for so long felt unworthy of being lived that we’ve long since retired from trying to fight for the more the cross says is waiting just beyond this life we’re losing.

And once again we circle back to the necessity of laying it all down in order to find something new, something more than we’ve allowed ourselves to settle for.

That’s the calling of the cross. It’s the promise of the Christ. It’s this gift of new life waiting just beyond the darkness that we’ve insisted define this one. It’s the story of a glory that gives itself in greater measure every day unto only those who seek the Son and scorn the sun’s insistence upon still defining anything in life. For we needn’t that radiant heat to keep us on our feet following these ruts we’ve run to death. No, for the cross courses life into our lives in a way that all we’ve known to look to or lean on could never imagine.

But again, it’s only given unto those who want nothing else anymore. To those who give away what we’ve gone to gain along this path of pain proven in mistakes made and regrets held. It’s a gift of grace pouring from inside a grave asking us to come in and make ourselves at home, our souls at hope. Yes, to find hope in something not held here as we should know by now that if we can have it or hold it or hear it even then it’s here temporary. Fleeting, finite, fixed for a good night as we wave goodbye from hearts moving back home at the end of a hardship so many assume their hope to be hidden in.

Yes, so many so sadly assume their hope hidden and held inside this side of forever, and we like them have also hastened ourselves to hurting our hope as we ask it to come now in a fullness that a passing life cannot possibly hold.

See, that’s something that continues to strike me increasingly odd as days go by and hope draws near. It’s that things such as hope, healing, joy, love, they’re things we’re consistently insistent upon finding here. We want them inside things that we can buy so that we’re given that assured evidence of our having them. And so we look for them as if love or peace are held in a piece placed someplace nearby, or even far away. We don’t really care the distance so long as the time needed to find them is short, as we know we’re short on time.

And because we know we’re short on time without souls able to admit we’re running out of that fleeting opportunity find the faith that is the life that is the Christ, we resort always to looking around us for something within the immediate vicinity that might prove at least a portion of whatever we know we need. Thus again things such as hope or joy or peace or purpose, they’re things we’ve sought to confine to this remaining time we have and we seek them here as if they can be found in such emptiness as a world we’re leaving behind.

And maybe we can find them to some measure, a certain degree. Maybe we do stumble upon them in certain situations or odd occurrences in which we catch a glimpse of something uplifting or encouraging. Maybe we do see little flickers of light in the smile of a strange shown for no reason other than they must know something that all the angry and offended have forgotten. Maybe we do feel faith at times when we take leaps of it into decisions we’re thrust into without the benefit of planning it.

But I personally refuse to imagine them all only so temporary or hollow as to fit within the shallows of this fleeting life spent in a world spinning us out of it.

No, I want those things and the many like them in as full and as lasting a way as a heart might imagine. I want healing that isn’t hastened away by hardship or hurting. I want a joy that isn’t jumbled or jaded in a world jarred by adjacent adjustments that anger and aggravate. Indeed, I yearn for a love that isn’t lost upon the lost looking for love in losing places as assumed upon lost faces looking away from the Light of love.

I cannot anymore settle for something so simple as whatever might be here and now. No, bring me the horizon of this life for that is where I know the greatest things of life to be waiting in full. For how else, or rather why else would any yearn toward them? If something like hope or happiness is really as fleeting as falling away behind us when we leave this world behind us, why do we want for them? Why do any war for them? If they can be lost, then are they worth trying to find?

No. But rather we believe them worth losing everything to find, and thus they must be at some point available in such depth that we need eternity to experience them. And such is exactly the offer. To experience things like hope, like healing, like joy and understanding inside a forever from which we don’t fall away again. That is the hope of Heaven! It’s a life lived without all we’ve lost in life so far. It’s a time in which we don’t have to try to enjoy things for enjoyment is everlasting in the presence of our Savior.

That is why He is our life, and too why His promise is worth waiting for.

Because while it might take a lifetime for us to find said promise, once found it never fades. While we may walk through times of trial and turmoil along the narrowing road home, once home we don’t have to fear falling or failing anymore. Once we are in Christ we are at rest from all this revelry and rebellion that’s all but ruined life as we’ve long assumed we’re supposed to live it.

It isn’t supposed to be so hard and heavy as it’s become down here. All we see are the symptoms of the sins we’ve assumed add meaning to life. Friends, sin only steals from life. Dishonesty only steals from life. Impatience and arrogance, they stifle life. This ongoing and potentially unending upending of ourselves at the hands of our sense of entitlement, friends it obliterates belief as it inspires us to insist we get what we want, never then knowing anything beyond our cravings.

I can’t agree to that sort of shadowed and shallowed existence anymore. Not now that I’ve heard of Christ and find myself learning to trust in Him alone. That He would die for me just tells me that He’s got something waiting that’s worth dying for. And thus why should I worry that He might let me down? Why should we fear that He might fail to be faithful to His incredible promise? He laid down His life to get us through this night, and in doing so sent unto us, into us a light that just asks that we let Him lead the way away from what we want toward what He won for us.

So hold on. Hold fast. Sit tight and expect His light to shine in the fullness for which He came for us when this life is laid to the past and we're pressed into the promises of every goodness He's given us. For He is our life and when He returns, new life begins! And when that forever begins, friends, forever has no end. And thus every good and perfect gift which came down from the Father of Heavenly lights, in Him is the life for which we should all be willing to wait, to search, to struggle and suffer and sacrifice and lose if we need to.

For in Him we’re promised to find everything anyone could ever hope for, both in life and beyond. So please don’t let the current current pull you under and hold you here. No, keep instead your hope held upon the outset of this life, for if our treasures are stored in Heaven, well then there’s really no reason to either look for them here nor grow impatiently worried when we then fail to find them in full.

Leave the fullness of goodness for the forever in which we’re offered to enjoy it. For He will come, and when He does we will go. Let it be that we then go home rather than thinking we’re leaving our home behind.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold