Day 3401 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 1:13 NIV

Because hope cannot reside within the usual human tendency toward partiality but rather must hinge within the promise of perpetuity, elsewise it’s nothing more than a fleeting attempt to feel something within a life already lost.

And wouldn’t you know it but that is the gravity of our existence as defined by the mortality which is now demanded in light of our immorality. Because the reality is that at first, as a creation made in the image of a Creator who exists beyond the boundaries of time, space, matter, material, we too were of such substance to consider without effort the infinite. But because we did as simply asked not to do, so we’ve incurred these limitations which define our temporal habitation of a world we’re leaving.

Leaving us living a life already gone.

Which then seems to be leaving us to find only a choice as to when we agree to the already accomplished, for His mercy is to be magnified when upon the coming considered here in 1 Peter, every knee will have found itself bowed and every tongue in unison singing inside a blanket confession that He is good and that since He is, we then are not as we have not considered Him as Lord, honored Him as God, treated Him as Sovereign nor even contemplated how we are not. That is the confusion which defines all of man’s delusion.

It’s this idea that we are gods who’re due the life we idolize through eyes so blind that all we seem able to see is that which burns inside hearts so heavily laden that we work ourselves to wickedness simply for the sheer sake of something that satisfies without our selfishness needing to be despised.

Indeed, we’re a people of such vastly clouded considerations that our current contentions are always caught counting only all we might gain in a life lived in accord with the wayward wants and deceitful desires which have come to all but define life down here and thus all that’s done within it. We live lost inside such a day-to-day existence that we’ve come to actually consider only that this understanding is actually of some sort of substance simply because it’s proven in what can be seen, what can be held, what has been known.

And thus our only outlook upon the entirety of life, as even now defined as being unending for all who’re in Christ, we see it only as far as our eyes can see and so we see nothing of hope as again hope cannot be so mundane as to be housed inside something temporal or transient.

Nor should we be so dull as to have settled so far for just such a diluted ideal as a best life lived within a life that ends.

Do we just fear death so direly that we’d rather deny it coming so that we can live as if we can maybe find a way to avoid it? Are our lives here lived known in such grandiose manner that we cannot bear the idea of something better? Perhaps so, what with all the material and mammon, the money making meaning into the meaningless as if something so simple as a price tag can be pointed to in order to prove our prominence, a sort of personal provenance of our own personal providence.

I’ve known myself to live that way, can’t seem to find my way back as easily these days though.

Because instead I find now that my mind wanders toward contemplations such as whether we can honestly say that we can actually assume beyond any semblance of anything anyone could even accidentally consider doubt or uncertainty that we’re worth so little as to let our lives be lived within the frameworks of a world working itself to death inside a war against the Giver of life?

I don’t personally know when we crossed that line as it was done long before you or I began to follow such foolishness. Indeed, it began back when life began, back in the Garden of Eden as Adam and Eve got to eating the fruit that I personally wish so many times anymore I didn’t know the taste of myself. For it seems to me that the more I know here, the more I wish I didn’t. For knowledge is perhaps the heaviest of burdens as it becomes unto all who know a responsibility to live according to such growth.

Because knowledge is power, the power to grow or to destroy. It’s the power to prove or cast doubt. It’s the ability to understand or rather become more confused. Knowledge is this undertaking of our saying that we ourselves are capable of handling something so objective as reality and the truth within which it’s written. And thus we become the guardians of whatever truth we come to say we know. And when we say that yes we do know, as we do when seeing or saying that we’re ourselves gods within these lives we’ve ruined, we then become the only blame to be for the ruination we’ve become.

And such is why I seem to find this almost impossible escape hidden within every day God offering me another chance to consider His Word, seek His will, try this His Way. Because only then am I able to let another become the Savior I could never be.

See, we’ve become so drunken on this idea that we can save ourselves with what we think we know that we seek not to know the One who’s already saved us from us. Perhaps it’s because we don’t actually think we need to be saved from ourselves. Maybe it’s because we know what’s required should we admit we probably really do need help in that regard. Or it might be merely a matter of all this make believe we keep allowing to be the epitome of belief.

As if our imaginations, the same which seek to deny our guilt and avoid our death, could somehow be the same to save us from the mistakes our pride can’t agree we’ve made.

No, such is the foolishness against which we’re now called to war if we’re to know the truth which sets free indeed. You see, that’s the beauty of the Gospel, it’s a gift of an entirely different kind of freedom. Down here we know freedom as this idea of doing whatever we want, right up to the point of potentially fracturing a law or harming another who’s likewise living only to suit their own ideals and ideologies.

That is the ultimate freedom within life as lived here, just the chance to do whatever you want to do today, and to even then do that with this assumption of tomorrow bringing already another chance should what you choose today end up proving what you found yesterday, just another empty hope as held inside of us as if that’s where hope is best found.

But yes indeed, that is exactly where we’ve come to look, and despite our not finding it within us or our ideas again today, well, we’ll just try it all over again tomorrow. Rinse, repeat, rehash, reset, refigure, reconfigure and right back to the routine. That’s life, and since that is in fact what life is to us, that is sad. Because that is not at all what life is, at least not anywhere close to what God at first created it to be, created us to be. No, He didn’t design us to quit so far away from halfway toward hope as to resolve to assume it must revolve around us alone.

For that idea leaves only us alone, the only source of substance in our existence, and even that not worth our suffering for.

Isn’t that strange though? That our ideas are of such importance to us as they’re to us these little individual assurances of our assumptions assuming correctly that what we want is what we need, and yet even then at the first sign of struggle or strife, we just come up with a reason to quit and chase then something we readily convince ourselves was better anyhow. And thus we’ve become the dogs chasing our tails so cloud-minded that we reach for the stars up until we struggle to reach them.

Then we just paint them upon the walls of our dreams and live convinced that such ideals are indeed close enough to the hope we want without the suffering needed for the hope we’re needing.

For just as the difference between freedoms, there, again, is a grand difference to be found and thus understood between different hopes. For it’s this kind of knowledge that does indeed set us free indeed. Because it’s the kind built on truth, and yes, the truth will set us free, just a little freer than the freedom we assume means only to do as we please. No, this freedom as found within the Truth is one that grants us the ability to believe in something far bigger and thus undeniably better than our best intentions as planned toward our best inventions of what we’ve long consider our best existence.

Because it’s that sort of selfish nonsense that’s become for us a vile disbelief that’s otherwise chained us to living as life is bound forever on this side of forever, unable to even see that the death we fear is the line which separates practicality and partiality.

Yes, we’re a people only partially alive as we’re always most partial to our part of our story as written unto our glory, and yet within that chase all we can gain is merely the chance to say we were wrong when our ideas turn out to be less than the ideals we’d dreamed them up to remain. And friends, that is indeed a right certainty as nothing we do as mortals locked within the mortality of life as lived within a world passing away can bridge beyond the disbelief that’s needed for us to continue settling for all that’s here at the endless expense of fighting toward all that isn’t.

That is what our faith now calls us to do. To believe. To look beyond as far as our eyes can see. To consider further than our minds can contemplate, for there alone is where hope has to begin. Because again, if hope is to be had here, then that means hope must die too.

And personally, I just can’t agree to that.

Not when I agree that the Christ came and gave His life for us to have hope in His resurrection. And that is indeed the only I have, for it’s the only hope any of us have. Because there is no other Name by which we must be saved, because there is no other Way along which we can find a path that actually leads through the grave, for all paths here lead only to the grave.

The problem is both that we ourselves have walked and wanted a fair amount of these paths of futility, and too that we walk alongside others who will live their whole lives wanting only that which is found on this side of the tomb. And when you add those two heartbreaking realities together, all you get is one giant cloud of doubt and confusion that is none too happy to take up room in our hearts, our minds, our lives. And when it does, as it has, we become only able to be whatever everyone else has already become because we’ll come to want only whatever everyone else has already settled for.

Yet therein lies the beauty of a call to sobriety. It’s a chance at clear-headedness. It’s the opportunity to have wiped away our preference toward the partial reality of partiality as proven always within a life lived as if this part is the best part, or as some seem to assume, the only part. It isn’t, and in Him we get to not only learn that, but we then get to experience a better kind of freedom once such truth is known for the certainty it is. And it is a most undeniable certainty indeed, for He’d not have died if He couldn’t prove that such is by no means the end.

No, in Him we know that that is just where hope finally begins.

And so yes, let us set our minds to getting and then staying in a state of complete sobriety wherein we’re never again clouded or confused by the gleam of that which is going away nor the glow of all that’s only for show. No, let us live for what none have seen, because if you really want to hope, hope in what no one else can imagine. Yes, hope in Jesus as that is the only way to live this life in a sort of freedom that waits expectantly for the best to still come someday rather than trying to hurry up and find it before we can’t anymore.

Yes, I cannot agree anymore to thinking so confused as to consider this life the one in which I’m to find the best of life possible. Because what can best of all that ends anyway? And no, I’m not saying that there aren’t things here for us to enjoy or appreciate, far from it. I’m only saying that we cannot agree to loving this life as lived here so very much that we forget all about the promise of a life permanent that’s still to come.

Friends, please do not forget about forever, especially for this part of it that still has an end in sight. Because while we might not see that end now, I cannot imagine a more miserable existence than one spent living afraid of that end simply for the inability to believe beyond it.

And if that makes me crazy, then bring on the white jacket and padded room. Because I would rather spend this life cold and lonely, locked in some house for the looney, than to assume I need to find my way to my best life before my life ends. I cannot agree to that anymore, because I know without question that there can be no hope held inside such a shallow and selfish assumption.

No, hope is held only in knowing that Christ is coming once more and that after He does, only then can my best life begin. So yeah, I’ll wait, right here at the end of myself. And I’ll watch as all my dreams and ideas float and fade away into the tides of a world trying to find what isn’t here. And I’ll smile as they smirk and sneer at the oddity I’ve become and will become only further. Because I know that this isn’t the part that is supposed to be perfect.

So I’ll not seek here a hope perfected. Rather I’ll merely keep my heart holding that hope just beyond the horizon, and I’ll watch as best I can through eyes still healing for the One who’s coming to finish this good work I know that only He could have begun in me.

And I know it must have been Him because I know only to a live a life looking at, looking for what I’ll one day leave behind. But in Him, no, in Him I can live looking for what I can’t possibly imagine having, such as a life beyond this death we know to be coming.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold