Day 3391 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 6:11 NIV

Seems there comes for us all a day within which we finally agree to give up and get to living.

Just wish we’d agree to let it come in this life so that the best could then be indeed up ahead.

For sadly, most of life here is like this maze of mirrors reflecting mankind’s mannerisms and imaginations that become before us this hall of expectations, each one hidden behind a different door of uncertainty that we’re otherwise certain we’re supposed to open so as to continue looking for our peace and purpose assuming that such substance can somehow be standing them behind, within them, within us as such sure seems the only picture painted within the reflections of such irrationality and irreverence as we’ve come to assume are what give a life it’s life.

Yes, we walk within a world so lost as to contend that this life is the only life, and that death is but the end of it.

And yet as we go along opening that which should have stayed locked and looking upon all that we shouldn’t have seen as those mistakes blossom into mistaken priorities which paint dreams that become scenes screaming memories we can’t forget despite how hard we try or how much we cry, we just become another tumbled stone tumbling throughout life as if we’ve no root, no anchor, no outlook other than that which is so solemnly shared by everyone else down here. We’re content with the present as if our presumptions of our life being nothing more than an echo of everyone else’s outlooks is the epitome of a life’s purpose.

Thus we look no further than friends and favor for our hope of finding why we’re here, who we are, what we should do, and the vast limit of what all of it apparently means.

And so we find down that line that this life has no meaning. How can it? That’s a question I find myself pondering quite often anymore, just never in quite such blatant terminology. It’s asked rather in a billion other quandaries as each of the differences seems to better define a particular problem, a specific misunderstanding, a current confusion that’s otherwise confined my mind to imagine what I’m losing by just not caring. And that’s the part that I seem to always return to, that I just don’t care about how life is supposed to be down here.

Because when did we usurp the right to decide such gravity as a life’s worth?

And considering all of society is stuck inside such insanity as this communal assumptive of our having such authority mixed with an apparent power to prove it proven in platforms posted upon the profit of public applause, well then why’ve we settled for such a lackluster and lukewarm line to fall in behind? Heavy questions indeed, leaving me only now a validation as to why my ongoing summation seen and shown in my honesty saying that honestly I just can’t care anymore.

For to me this can’t be it. I can’t agree to that anymore, any further than I already did in a past now left behind with this great big smile on my face and a gaping hole in my heart from the hope that’s been all but ripped out of it in exchange for more keys to more doors I heard and believed held my meaning, my purpose, my worth even. I look back upon a path paved with those best intentions we hear about so often, and I must concur that such are indeed the very seed which sow the row we routine into these ruts that leave us racing toward ruin.

Such is the outlook of hell, just a ruined hope, a ruined joy, a ruined life which found to the full all that we here hear that a life is supposed to hold, only to reach that inevitable, and for all we know imminent end anyway and be left waving bye-bye to the best life we’ll have ever known of the only two we’re promised.

Yep, two lives. One is to be lived in peace and prosperity, hope and happiness, joy and the enjoyment of all things considered the cumulative accounting of a life’s entire currency. Don’t see life as currency though, no, we’re alas too otherwise caught up in the current of the current and thus is always nothing but incongruent to the first life promised. For the current of the current consideration is that this world holds all we need to know what life means. That here is where we’ll find hope and healing and joy and meaning in their most foundational and fulfilling forms.

Which leads then to the promised other life, the second shot as it were, or rather as it is as it is a promise to be proven provided upon our leaving this world thinking that we’re leaving life itself, and thus living as such. For here we live in a rather apparent measure of the peace and prosperity, hope and happiness, joy and enjoyment of all things considered the cumulative accounting of a life’s worth. We walk alongside folks having so much fun and apparently enjoying so much selfish fulfillment within it that we often think something must be wrong with us as we don’t see it the same.

Thank God for that my friends!

Indeed, this was part of my prayer last evening, another time spent in wonder as I try every night to wander closer to God as both the day and the world fade away from the forefront for a moment. Am I doing this anywhere close to anything right? Because it honestly seems so often anymore that my outlook, my understanding, my path and the steps I’m taking so arduously upon it look, and for all I can assume feel nothing like the way of life I see and hear so many others living. Am I just entirely misunderstood, or is it rather that I’m finally standing period?

Because the truth is that my mind doesn’t work the way this world does anymore. The things people enjoy, I only find more confusing by the day. The shows folks are fans of, the music blaring out of the cars sitting next to me at a stop light, the messages I see posted on social media, the comment sections strewn with such hatred and vitriol as if that’s helping anyone. I don’t get it!

But the beauty is that I don’t want to. I don’t want to live that way, even if that is the commonly agreed upon best way to spend a life. I’d rather not live at all than to live for only what everyone else around here seems to care about.

Thus I won’t.

For along this jaunt it seems we’ve all just become jaded to the jeers and sneers showing an utter indifference to one another, to the curiosity of hope, to the joy of just being alive. Such things aren’t apparently enough to anyone anymore. We’re living instead like we agree that we need cell phones and celebrity status for us to have a life of substance. We walk along with our heads hung inside an endless stream of things to see from screens in which we’ve enrolled our lives so much that we don’t even know what the world looks like anymore.

No, we’re blazing through this rental as if we’re not supposed to care that we’re here. And that’s what I don’t quite get because this life as lived here is one that we’ll not get again. We don’t have another chance to get this right, to aim for righteousness, to embrace responsibility, to welcome the difficulty of all the above and allow such to lead us to living like we’re heading for more. And though such seems a mindset of mediocrity to most apparently, I can’t comprehend how the hope of Heaven is so mundane that people still ignore the path there and fight against the stringent narrowness of it.

Rambling, yet another rambling post that I know few will read. And yet again, that’s fine because I know in my heart that I’m walking a line that’s leading me to leaving behind the little that everyone else seems satisfied with. And I can’t embrace that anymore, all because I did before.

I’ve lived that life so filled with friends and fun that everything was simply awesome under the sun. Not a day went by that I didn’t awake without a care in the world, just excited to continue the enjoyment of living my life my way, according to and adopted from the way that everyone else was doing it too. But then something beautiful happened, and it sucked at the time. I woke up one day and the friends were gone, all of them. And wouldn’t you know it but they took all the fun I’d had with them. And the joy and enjoyment stopped as the fun faded while the friends fled.

Because I became weird. The outlier, the outcast, the freak down the street who didn’t do what everyone else wanted them to be willing to keep losing. I couldn’t keep throwing my life into the flame of falsity and frivolity, because I found this line that I just couldn’t cross.

And for some reason this crossroads looked like a cross.

A life lost. A confession given. A cost accounted. A hope opened. A grave filled and then turned as He burned out of there into a new path filled with a new life so alive that this one as I’d lived it just felt dead to me. Yes, dead to me and me to it. Paul in his letter to Galatia spoke something of the same substance. “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

Oh the truth in that as defined in the hope he must have found in such a violent letting go as to go into the grave in search of life, something only done by those undone from this world’s rampant misunderstanding of life and its meaning! Because again, this world seems perfectly content to have their best here and now, impatient to a fault that will find for all a fall away from having the best of and in forever. That is the outcome I want for my life.

Yes, I want my best always ahead, and thus I confess and I agree that I’ll have no best here.

No, my best here in this world and in this life as lived upon it is knowing the Name that is above all others, above mine then as well. For in Christ exists a hope that even the whole of this world cannot compare with, compete with. Because I know what it’s like to have gained what I could only assume to be the whole world. And alas because of that I know too what it’s like to look back and realize that you lost yourself to please people who are no longer around, to gain prizes you no longer keep polished, to win the fame and fortune of a following that left you following only their demands so as to please those who fed you this idea of a life worth so little as to lose it pleasing people.

And I know in my heart that such is the imminent promise of Judgement Day. For upon that day when this life ends, our every action and every word and every thought will be weighed, and whatever is found wrong will owe a death. For again, and yes I talk about it constantly, and no, I don’t care that people don’t want to hear it anymore, because the wages of sin are death but the free gift of salvation is given unto all in only the Name of Christ.

And so yes indeed, I do count all things as loss for the surpassing glory of knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I need nothing else, and so I want nothing less.

Thus is my life. Hammering away on a little laptop perched atop a hope that somehow this might mean something to someone. Because I know that my old outlook on life meant nothing to anybody, not even to me. No, all that my old way of living seems to have accomplished is now just a measure of everything I don’t want to ever be again. I do not want to be popular. I do not want to be wealthy. I don’t want to be welcomed here. I don’t want to be willing to stay here.

Because this isn’t my home, God is. And where He is is the only place I hope to be.

And I hope with all my heart that such a mindset is as misunderstood as possible in this place. Because I don’t want to be understood by a world that refuses to understand that sin is death and that thus we should be fighting against getting and doing what we want. I hate what I want, a little more every day. Why? Because if it’s in this world then I know it has the audacity to ask me to focus on this world, and with Heaven on the line, I cannot think of a more wasted effort, worthless outlook than looking again to a world I’m leaving behind.

No, this world as lost to sin as it insists to remain is not where my focus shall stay. The only time that I’ll agree to look again to this life as lived in this world is to be done only when He shows me something else here that I’ve yet to walk away from. Because I want nothing of this world to keep me apart from the only hope I have. I’m just dead to the death I’ve lived, and I will give every day to the hope that He can somehow use me to inspire someone else out there somewhere to wake up and see the beauty of leaving a life behind.

Because friends, a life lived in sin isn’t a life after all. It’s just death wearing a mask that looks just like everything we assume a life is supposed to be. I implore you to walk out of this hall of mistaken mirrors and find the courage to look beyond the horizon, for that is where hope has always been waiting for us. Just waiting for us to care that He’s still there, patiently encouraging us to shake some dust and reevaluate our concept of what home really is.

For the truth is that it ain’t here, and we’ve only so much time left to learn to stop looking. And while He died to help us see that we’re just spinning our wheels, reckon we have to be willing to look beyond our disbelief before we can find the sadness in all we’ve thus far assumed life was worth. Because how dare we assume that He died for nothing more than our having a little bit of fleeting fun in a world that killed Him and would happily do it all over again if such meant their fun didn’t end.

It will, let it now. No, we may not enjoy the idea of living a life so empty as that spent following Christ and leaving behind all we’ve come to love along the way of such a narrowing path. But I want to live this life hoping to find life unending. And if that means this be hard, let it hurt. For He heals, and so when this sucks, His gift only seems more crucial.

And when His mercy feels more crucial, well, we just might be willing to fight a little harder to stop considered conceding to a world we’re leaving. Because if He didn’t, well then how can I?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold