Dy 3380 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ephesians 4:22 NIV

Turns out I’d rather live an emptied life than to live one so filled with this world’s emptiness that I never find the courage to chase into the tomb the only hope that isn’t here.

For indeed, just such a strangeness seems to have found me yet again today, this idea that it’s not my ideas that can ignite nor inform nor in any other way help me to investigate the impossibilities of this faith that feels more real than life itself seems to be anymore. Yes, I awake each day only to find myself more confused by the current contentment concealed inside a culture congealed inside themselves. Nothing makes sense, much less enough to form any fragment of some reason to restrain from the letting go into which we’re all called to share.

No, such an invitation as the insinuation that I need to shed these misunderstandings is the only reason I’m still standing.

Because honestly without that hope, none of this can mean anything. And that’s what I just don’t understand anymore. Everyone runs around so consumed with this consolation of our being the bringers of our own best and most beneficial. It’s like everybody has just won some race that nobody else was running against them, just one they’d run against themselves, outpacing then only their own identity as it were. As it is.

Indeed, as it is, we walk a world in which none know anyone else as they don’t even care to know themselves in light of the realization that we cannot possibly know ourselves as we’ve long since lost sight of such substance behind the belligerence that tells us that we can be what we’ve not managed to become so far. Just give it a little more time. Try again tomorrow. Sit down and reassess the currency of these asinine assumptions that seem as if they can always leave us affording this assuming that we know enough to do well enough to be better than we are.

And therein lies the confusion I find in life as lived so lost in this land of those so lost inside themselves that we’re each taught to try only what seems best for us. If we did indeed know so much about life as to at some point actually live it well, well then why haven’t we? Why is life still so rife with regret if we’re the ones who make the calls that avoid the falls so as to not feel the fails of chasing our tails into a life spinning down the drain?

Yes, if we could become what we’ve not yet been then both why and when?

When will we finally put the last piece in place of this puzzling life we’ve imploded into nothing but problems and pride? When will we finally be who we’ve set out to be, assuming obviously that today’s intention is still in line with yesterday’s many inventions as given unto our being today what we apparently couldn’t have been before? Why couldn’t we have been better back then before today if we knew then as we assumed we know still now?

Is it not merely that we actually know nothing, perhaps even less than? For it seems that all we’ve seen as shown from inside lives lived color-blind is a lack of courage to color outside the lines of what most agree is more than fine for an outcome of a life well lived in this land on loan. Don’t think about that do we? Never really factor that into our figuring it all out.

No, seems that instead we scream at Heaven that “we’ve got this!” “Leave us alone and look at all we can accomplish without the assistance.” “Sit back and be ready to be blown away at how well we blow our lives apart all over again today!” Yes, we give God a proper show to behold as we hold still the reins of these reigns we’ve ruled into ruin at the rejoicing of a rebellion that’s been building only a life torn down into the dregs of these dreams of mediocrity as if mansions fit for the kings and queens we pretend we can be.

Still not there though, on the way I guess.

Yes, seems our best is always held up ahead, a desire not yet identified, perhaps another piece of this puzzle we’re playing with. Indeed, such is all that life has forever been to us. It’s just a game of gain and glory found in avoiding the pain of standing in the rain of this ruin that pours into today a more audacious affront to our arrogance having always said we could miss this misery we’ve managed to find anyway. Guess that’s what happens when you play with fire insistent you’ll not burn yourself.

For indeed we’ve not only burned ourselves but we’ve all but obliterated our lives in such a violent conflagration that God came to show us the only way out of what we’ve always believed we couldn’t live without. Yes, we’ve always contended that our contentment in these concessions was worth the risking of all that is simply too big for us to believe, too good for us to go after. No, we find no reason to go after the grave as to us we’ve still a lot of life left to lose to this idea that we’ll not lose our lives.

But what if we will? Because we will!

Such is the severity of life as lived on loan from the One to whom which we’re all returning. Just a matter of when said turn begins, and too who begins it. Alas for most that turn will come at a time wherein this time we take for granted has run out and we’re left standing outside the castles of sand we locked ourselves in. It will be at the insistence of the Father who we couldn’t hear knocking on the doors of those castles, far too many rooms and rebellions inside them to hear anything or anyone outside of them.

No, that is what we’ve come to know of life. It’s just a party so loud and raucous that the racket of our own revelry has left us so spiritually deaf that we would indeed be better off dead.

Wonder why we’ve managed then to miss the mercy afforded us which offers us the chance to welcome just such a change toward that chance to choose now what we lose so that all of life isn’t lost when we come to see that it was never ours to keep anyway.

I guess we’re just too used to the way of life we’ve come to live. Entirely accustomed to assumptions assuming that all this self we’re consuming can actually become something worth having, so worth having that perhaps we can keep these trophies we’ve won and these idols we’ve become forever. Yes, maybe, if God’s okay with it, and the way we see Him, well, we’ve clearly no courage to consider that He isn’t, but maybe He will just let us live without considering Him forever.

And the problem is that He will, except that we can’t.

Nope, that’s yet another cold hard reality of our existence. It’s that God will be glorified through either praise or pain. Just, kind, compassionate, many would argue it’s not. But considered against what we’ve done, who we’ve become, I dare say that the case could be made that even hell is too nice a place for us. Be a hard case to argue I guess as it demands a humility largely lost upon this inhuman humanity to even agree to the very existence of such a well-earned suffering.

Another time perhaps.

But then again, as they say, there’s no time like the present! Because the truth is that the present that is the present is present only to provide a moment that we might dare to use to see past the pretense of all our pretend and see finally that end such a foolishness has always promised. That following ourselves anywhere can only lead us toward wherever we’ve both the belief to believe and the ability to be. And thus something so perfect as Heaven is entirely, eternally off the table as there is no perfect in us.

Shame to miss it, especially considering we just don’t have to.

No, that’s the calling of the cross and the value of the life lost inviting us to lose what we thought, think, we know of life. It’s a request to join Him in retiring our trying against His will, aimed against His way, walking always away from everything we want toward everything we think we want more. It’s the very epitome of insanity. For we seek such things as peace, hope, mercy, love, right? Each of us want tranquility and triumph, do we not? Every life is lived looking for something priceless.

And what it more priceless than forgiveness?

Because you see, we can’t earn it, can’t buy it, cannot even beg it. It fits not in a grocery bag, far too heavy to sit up a shelf, entirely too large to even fit within the fathoming of these minds now so incapable of logical thought to even understand that we’re standing outside of a fire we’ve been promised we’ll enter, still living as if we don’t even feel the heat.

But friends, do you know what a consuming fire does? It consumes. It engulfs. It rages against everything in its path until everything it wanted to destroy is destroyed. We cannot stand against the Consuming Fire. We cannot contend against the Almighty Father. None of us are getting out of this life alive, and so why do we live it otherwise? Is there truly anything we’ve found, felt or favored that is worth clinging to what we’ve been promised we cannot keep?

And if we have been promised that we cannot keep these lives, this time in this world, then why are we waiting, warring against the welcome into the very hope that we claim we seek?

Makes no sense. There is absolutely no logical foundation to our remaining in a way of life that is lived against the Way that is the Life. That’s just the Truth. If there is no Christ seen or shown in our consideration, our actions, our understandings, then we’re still at home in the old for which He died to atone. And thus, if we’re still doing what caused His dying, then the death He beat wasn’t beaten in us, still owns us. Yes, the death of sin still owns us in so many ways.

All of them entirely unnecessary for He came to offer Himself as a sacrifice meant to save our lives by turning a tomb into a refuge wherein is found the only saving grace able to save us from these flames we’ve lit of a life we’ve lost to thinking that our fighting God’s fire with a fury of our own could in any way accomplish solace somewhere in the middle.

Friends, there is no middle. There is no good enough. There is no close enough. There is no nothing when it comes to this contention we’ve called contentment. He will destroy us, or, and it’s a really big OR, or we can destroy our own destruction in surrendering to His help overcoming our desires so that we set no more fires to this life we’ve already lost.

That’s the beauty of the cross. It lets us, He lets us lay us down at the foot of that loss and in doing so helps us see the victory found just behind it. But we have to lose something, no, we have to lose everything. And yes, that is a big request as we have indeed given hours, weeks, years, decades to designing these dreams for which we’re dying. And then Jesus just comes along and says to let it all go, leave it all behind in exchange for the chance to walk into a grave.

His path is one which looks to us as if loss upon loss, an entire absence of the substance we’ve assumed life was supposed to be lived for. It’s a desert with a tomb right in the middle of it asking us to walk away from everything we’ve come to know, chosen to love, only to lose our very lives in the end.

But, in Him that end isn’t the end at all. No, that end is merely where real life begins, and thus, everything we’ve always thought we knew of life was never anything we should have been afraid to lose anyway. Because life as we’ve always assumed it was never life at all, just an existence scattered across idols and ideas we thought would get us close enough to happiness that we could feel happy for once.

And while happy may have been good enough up until today, once you hear of something so amazing as joy, not even happiness is worth chasing after anymore. No, desires make us happy, but joy brings a sort of appreciation that cannot fade as happiness so often tends.

In fact, nothing this world offers nor our way of life as lived within it has accomplished can possibly outlast any of what He offers in exchange for our accepting His change. And while such a radical altering of life is hard, friends, that’s why the promise is so impossibly beautiful. Because He’s not just asking us to lay down a way of life we don’t mind keeping, He’s asking us to let go of a way of life we’ve absolutely loved!

But if we can agree to trust Him enough to take that risk, He will not fail to prove the reward worth far more than whatever we lose or leave behind. And honestly, it’s really not even all that hard to believe. Because if my way of life has brought me any kind of sorrow or shame or regret or any other personal misery, then what have I to lose that’s not worth the hope of the hope that I will gain?

And honestly, even if that hope as found in Him were all we ever found in that tomb wherein we lay down our old lives, that’s still a win in my eyes. Because friends, I’ve looked my whole life to find hope in this place, only to still be looking having never found it yet.

So if He says hope is held in that tomb, I know it’s the one place I’ve not tried to look, and if He’s right then it’ll have been worth everything I lost of a life I’ve lost looking for what I haven’t found.

And considering He laid down His life to show us we can trust Him, well then I can’t think of any reason we shouldn’t.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold