Day 3394 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Colossians 3:1 NIV

Perhaps it’s the change of heart that otherwise seems to perfectly define this path paved toward the hope of Heaven as not found down here within all we’ve done to try and make this rental feel a home.

For that is indeed the standard outlook shared among every single one of us at one point or another. It’s this effusive effort given unto infusing our grandest imaginations into the soil upon which we’re presently standing. This idea that the entirety of our existence can somehow be made up of and thus measured by the materials and mannerisms and machinations and misunderstandings of this world in which we’re currently waking and walking and working and worrying that still we’re missing something that might mean something to our life’s meaning.

And so we settle in behind those likewise blind, those lost looking for hope in a world that’s so undeniably temporary that we have to convince ourselves that time’s not running out despite our days driving us near an age wherein our mortality will prove itself the inevitability that we’ve only agreed to deny and debate alongside a society assuming safety inside only that opportunity.

Indeed, we’re a people perfectly pleased and impressed with this side of forever simply because we’ve bought the biggest lie that’s ever been sold.

That lie is that our lives are meant for our making them into whatever we might find reason to want in them. Our very identity is so intrinsically tied to time and tide that we have to break away from believing beyond the transitory nature of this temporary venture so that we’re not constantly reminded of the gravity of not getting to living for a life beyond the here and now. And yet rather than appreciating and ingratiating ourselves to that understanding, no, rather we set our focus unto all that’s otherwise worthless.

For we see no value in confessing our lack of virtue as found so victoriously in our ongoing loss to the lie of sin saying we’ve the entirety of a life’s meaning held within the wants and wishes for which we work and worry as though our lives might somehow be empty should we fall short or somehow fail to find every measure of every misadventure given unto our getting and gaining of the whole world at the clear and obvious, and perhaps everlasting, expense of the souls we assume not at all worth the weariness found in waiting for a reward far too big to fit down here.

Rather we seek instead those rewards offered to the impatient. We come to crave those trophies touted by the apparently triumphant against whom we’re somehow both competing but also from whom we’re clearly learning both what to want and thus what to do with this life we’re all collectively not living for anything anywhere near worth anything.

For what worth is there in trinkets or treasure? What gain do we get in seeking pleasure and adventure? Of what lasting benefit is our bereavement as found within fleeting hopes letting us down? Indeed, how are our lives, as even lived here, ever any better when we’ve built them so highly upon personal expectation that the vast majority of all we can possibly find therefore is mere disappointment? What lasting worth have any of us found in anything we’ve found upon or within this now hollowed ground as mined by these minds that seem to actually think we can either carve or create our purpose from the temporary makings of this life we’d made out to be our own?

I ask questions like these so often because I too am trying to learn from them as I didn’t know to ask them in the past I now see as being so very wasted that it’s mind blowing that He can see in me anything not worthless. For it seems to me that nearly all of my life as lived in accord with this world of wickedness always wanting and winning and wishing for more even still, I lost only far more than everything I thought I’d gained. Because, and as I talked about a bit yesterday, I now sit here upon the cusp of forever and find that I feel only a rich excitement in watching all I have ebb out of my life.

And I know that such a conception cannot be of my own invention or inclination as I can admit without question that my past was paved with this perfect assumption that I needed to have things, to feel things, to know things to know that I was something. So how can I now find such a rude appreciation for all that He’s removing from my life as once lived to have and hold all that’s now being sold to whomever finds still worth in what I know now to have none at all?

That’s what’s so incredible about this faith and what a calling the likes of this one found in Colossians instill in our minds, our hearts, our lives. It changes everything from how we see life to what we therefore seek to do with it, in it. Faith finds for us a willingness to yearn for the end of us knowing that that’s where hope has always waited as hope cannot so be trivial as to exist within anything our futility can assume we can imagine.

For the truth upon which this faith resides finds for us inside a boldness to now only deny ourselves having spent so long serving ourselves only to arrive at this aftermath in which suddenly all that once was allowed to help form our very identity is now of such little concern that we see in it all only a fearful distraction that’s long kept us from the finding of all we’ve looked for and yet never known here.

And yet therein lies the point and purpose of our being asked to set our minds and hearts on things above and thus at the same time scorn the insistence of things down here to keep our attention from the gravity held in the grace that invited us into that place He’s prepared.

But the problem I fear is that this is all so nuanced and new that we do find ourselves likely to struggle with the severity of it all. For the entirety of the promise He’s proven worth dying for is found in just that, a share in that sort of struggle as shown our own willingness to now surrender, in whatever measure, whatever pleasure or treasure we’ve otherwise allowed to blind our eyes to the belief in something so undeniably better.

No, we just can’t at first understand how anything might possibly be better than this heartbreaking belief that our best is some figment of our imagination always assuming we’re able to imagine big enough to arrive, by following our own leading, at some perfected ideal of a life that’s then lived in such glory that even God wouldn’t argue with our having given ourselves unto doing whatever we needed to in order to find what only we can assume might somehow outshine His will for our lives.

For sadly, that is exactly what sin sells us, and thus what we’ve bought a lifetime supply of assuming. That what we’re doing is worth doing. That what we’re doing is so worth doing that we don’t risk dying and thus feeling the ending of all we’re doing. That there can never be any undoing of all we’re doing since all we’re doing is being done only for us, which is exactly what the deception of sin wants us to assume. Because the truth is that while everything we’re doing may be done for us, it’s who we’re potentially hurting that tells the second half of this story.

And yet by some strange glory there comes in that this radical hope that there might come a time in which the tide turns and we too turn and return to an understanding of that as proven so perfectly upon the cross which held the Christ, not because He couldn’t have moved but rather because He chose to endure that debt so that we might be those who move.

Which I wholeheartedly believe to be the simplicity of the Gospel’s meaning. To move us.

Because you see, this faith as strange as it begins when compared to a life lived in lockstep with a world lost in such confusion as all this delusion we’ve designed that’s defined the downfall we’ve drown in, it’s only proven stranger still in that just beyond the particular peculiarity of belief is found the beginning of an understanding that affords us a newfound and yet somehow entirely courageous insistence upon the finality of our share of that otherwise socially accepted downfall into what will prove an utter and eternal spiritual dishevelment.

But then it also incites this sort of rampant reverence that inspires us to seek, instead of doing everything everyone else is doing, a grasp upon the grace that is the gift that pulled us out of our share in that sinful grave into which the King of Heaven chose to go so as to chase us down so as to set us free from a way of life we’d lived within such void of life as one given to living as if sin is all we’re living for.

Indeed, this faith becomes a line of clarity found in the consideration of questions we never knew to ask before. For instance: Why might I find such a gift of His undeserved and yet somehow still unending grace of such comparatively little worth to the worthless life I can agree I’ve lived without looking to Him that I could anymore ignore the loss of that way of life that I lived lost in love with the sin that His love chose to absorb so as to absolve my debt by His paying my cost on that cross?

Yes, how can I now ever again look unto what I know to be sin and find in it any worth that’s worth the weight of wrath that He took on my behalf? No, such is now a growing impossibility within me, and while it’s left me watching my whole life pass away while I smile at the hope of holding the rest of my time here so loosely that I know not when it’s finally finished, that finishing of that wasted way of life becomes for me a deeper hope every single day.

How could it not?

Because you see, that His love and mercy saw in the thought of my eternal salvation enough worth and meaning that He found it reasonable to redeem my life from the brink of the unending condemnation to which I'd sold it leaves me to question only why I still sometimes worry that I might lose something here that He can’t offer in greater measure later. For that is the basis of all worldly worry is it not? That we’ll miss something in this life that we’ll not find once this life is lost? That we might not end up having all those things in which we’ve been hoping to be found holding before all of this slips through our fingers as we slide into the rest of forever?

Truth is that I’ve spent a large part of my life fearing just that sort of insanity. That I was missing something because my life didn’t look like everyone else’s and thus couldn’t possibly feel as full as everyone else’s always seemed. That I wasn’t worth as much, capable of as much, doing quite as much as others seemed to and that thus my life must have less meaning as it couldn’t in any way compare to the lavish lives lived by those around me.

And yet the debt I incurred that He absorbed and then absolved was found only in this frantic willingness to do whatever, say whatever, buy whatever, build whatever, be whatever, become whatever I thought I needed to in order to make my life look like it had the same meaning as what this world says is meaningful. And in that pursuit I purchased only an endless stream of sickening sins that left me so calloused within as to never near that willingness I have now to wonder as to why my life was believed to have no worth when that cross has stood all this time to define differently.

Indeed, as it turns out, all I found in fearing such futility as my disbelief and lack of faith found for me was nothing more than a violent indifference as to His undeserved decision to descend from Heaven into my life lived as a heathen in order to save me from what I didn’t at the time want to be set free from. No, we love our lives as lost enslaved to sin because sin is fun, sin is easy, sin is cheap and sin is comfy. It allows us to err without regret, at least up front. It grants us this guiltlessness that assumes no wrong is done in anything so long as we win whatever we wanted going in. Sin tells us that the ultimate freedom is found in the form of forsaking reason and responsibility.

Just never mentions the utter lack of eternal meaning nor the plethora of internal turmoil it leaves in the fallout after the fun’s run out.

Because friends, that’s the truth of this life. It runs out. The fun ends. The laziness and laxity will be ceased as we crease that line between life and death, a line we live with either a hope beyond or no apparent understanding of. Indeed, that line as defined by the end of this life is as unavoidable as our pasts are unforgivable. And yet just as He came to overcome our death as deserved within these irreverent lives we’ve lived, so too did He prove that He will forgive whatever we can confess.

And yet it’s only because of that, that ability to admit my mistakes, to recognize my rebellions, to finally feel the foolishness as found within shame and regret combining into a weight I never knew I was always winning within the way of life I can now say I so entirely wasted, yes, because I know that God is helping me understand such an underwhelming outlook as that I've settled for in the past, no, I can never again settle for such a violent indifference as to do wrong without admitting at least that it was wrong.

For this faith as defined, at least in part, as this sort of self-erasing introspective reflection allows me to understand where I've been so I've a better courage to chase after something far better than what my sinful ways have made me become.

And that is a gift we can find only when we do indeed set our hearts and minds on things above. Because that is where Christ said we’ve a place prepared. And as far as I can figure, since that place is now ready and waiting, seems to me that all that’s left is our racing away from all that’s kept us so unwilling to wait for His promise of something so much better that we’ve instead settled for all that’s lesser.

I can’t do that anymore, simply because again, if He saw in the thought of my salvation something so priceless as to lay down His life for the mere possibility for me too to hope in Him and the promise of salvation leading me to that place He’s made in Heaven, well then what on earth could I possibly want that could ever be worth anything close to what He was willing to die for me to have?

No, there is no hope here as held within something here we can have or hold that can come close to that hope I have in that home He’s opened unto us all. And so I’ll look no more to the things of this world to bring meaning to my life as I know now that they cannot do such a thing, not now that He’s proven the worth of my eternity.

For nothing here has any meaning when I think about all He did to help me see beyond this life as we’ve known it within this rental we’ve long assumed it forever confined.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold