Day 3393 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Galatians 3:26-27 NIV

And all at once I look up from all these plans I’ve been making toward a perfect life I thought I was always already living only to see that where I’m standing has instead built an entirely unbeatable vantage to the watching of my whole life wash on by.

Indeed, all of the sudden it seems that in fact our losing a life is without a doubt the biggest of blessings as within such loss of all the old that I’ve tried to hold as to me it told of my life’s purpose as proven in the perfect accomplishment of all manner of material accoutrement, no, no as it turns out all this new that He’s began on my behalf has become all I never wanted which has always been everything I always needed. For that is perhaps the direst of dangers to our way of assuming that in life we know what we’re doing:

The rampant misunderstanding of that drastic difference dividing the defining of want from need as so entirely misunderstood from where we’ve stood atop only our assumptive opinions preferring only the gaining of our way rather than the gleaning of the gift that is His.

I cannot quite seem to find the words with which to define how much I hate any and all manner and matter of my personal perspective anymore. My way. What is my way? How is my way of doing this living thing any better or bigger or otherwise in any way capable of leaving me more able to boast about what I’ve become and done than anything anyone else has decided upon for themselves? Because it’s my life? Because I have the audacity to actually have believed that this is my life to live my way as if I could do whatever I wanted to so as to be the best I could imagine for myself?

As if a person so blinded by all our fears and failures to find faith might instead find for themselves the very furthest plausibility of our purpose?

No, how dare we venture so very far from reason to as find any gravity to this idolized false reality in which we know what’s best for us having not even lived our own lives yet.

For that isn’t what’s done down here. None seem to live their own life as living has instead become a conglomerate. It’s merely this congealment of some random culture’s considerations mixed with the mannerisms of mankind’s self-perceived definition of applause-worthy achievement as defined by whatever common accomplishment is agreed upon having the most poignant proof of a life’s worth. Life anymore is found, apparently, in factors and figures and followers and favorites and other figments of frivolity and foolishness.

That’s all we care about. It’s all numbers, both having a big number of followers and digits in our bank accounts as both amount to the only number we know to care about, number one. That’s the entirety of the foundation of this existence as we’ve erased it.

We’ve exchanged the gift of life for the making of a living that we all seem to communally agree is truly able to account for the fact that we’re here and make that fact something that we don’t feel have to guilty about having done so very little with life outside of watching it roll by as we wave hi to a life we’ve always wanted but never had the courage to chase into the uncertainty where life is actually held. No, we think instead that life is held inside what we hold as there’s an undeniable certainty to such vanity that provides for us proof that we’re powerful or popular or profitable in some way that we hope will give us something to point to as evidence that we didn’t miss this opportunity.

And so we line our walls with things we’ll leave behind and we stand in line to buy more so that we have more of this store of things to show to whomever might ask us who we are as if all we are is defined by the substance of things worked for that are thus always held by this hollowed hustle to have something of physical presence to overcome the lack of any spiritual substance in our miserable existence. And most miserable it is indeed!

Yes, as I always try I’ll be the first to admit that I abhor what I've done with this beautiful gift of a life. For I’ve exchanged it for knickknacks and networks needing me to be the one to keep them updated and dusted off so that my identity as placed within them isn’t as tarnished or torn as they tend to become. I’ve chased this ideal of my existence that was merely always the substance of assumptions assuming that what I wanted was all I needed to have in order for my life to have some sort of meaning worth the time I lost to getting everything that I’m now losing.

And that’s a truly confrontational experience!

To wake up every day knowing that in some way I’ll ahead find something, hear something, see something, feel something that demands I do something that means I lose something that I’ve already lost so much time to getting and gaining and having and holding and pleasing and keeping. It’s an everyday occurrence anymore. I catch myself suddenly realizing how much I’ve come to idolize something, and that’s something I can’t abide by anymore and so that newfound old idol is thrown out the door so that it doesn’t steal anymore devotion away from God than it already has.

Or I hear myself say something that sounds a saddened repeating of something someone else said that has no substance, no meaning, no truth and thus no worth and I realize that the gravity of this gift of language as likewise taken for granted is something not so discountable as wasting my breath to repeat something that doesn’t help anyone in any way whatsoever. I catch myself reaching again for old habits as if my life needs that sort of rutted repetition to mean something.

And the fact that careless words and confused patterns and unnoticed idolatry have apparently always come so easily as to become part of who I am as defined by all I do is in truth all we have to lose.

Yet we fear the perishing of the perishable which must precede the putting on of the imperishable. That’s what we talked about yesterday. It’s this gift given in our faith in God’s grace that turns the grave into a gain. For inside that share of His Son is found the new beginning that we truly need, but it comes only after the ending of all this wanting that we don’t quite see the need to agree to. But that’s just it my friends, if we’re to gain something so great as His grace, then the way of life we’ve lived that’s earned the grave must go.

The only confusion in any of this is founded upon our hesitancy to lose what we just can’t keep.

And simply put, we’ve sadly amassed so much that’s so pointless while absolutely convinced that we needed every bit of it to add up to something that will give us something to give our lives some meaning that we’re now terrified that we’ll mean nothing if we lose anything.

This worthless worry finds me quite frequently these days. I’m reminded every now and then of something I’ve lost along this way away from wanting this life my way. And at the time, yeah, I too thought I wouldn’t be the same without whatever God asked me to let go. I was convinced that I couldn’t be the same person, wouldn’t have the same life, wouldn’t know the same joy or pleasure or purpose should I actually surrender something that I wanted to have, wanted to keep. Yes, I was adamant that I wouldn’t have the same life if I lost something that I thought added to my life.

And for once I was right!

Because I don’t have the same life. I’m not the same person. My happiness isn’t at quite the same level as it once was when surrounded by things I leaned upon to keep my happy. It’s better. I’m better. Who’d have thought?

God did.

That’s why He asks us to walk away from things. It’s why He helps us hear words we say that leave us feeling ashamed of having said them. It’s why He opens our eyes to seeing something in a show we’ve watched a thousand times that makes us question why we ever liked it in the first place. It’s why He reminds us of our many mistakes, it’s not to make us feel ashamed but rather to inspire us to just stop doing what brings us shame.

Indeed, that is the entire point and purpose of the Gospel! It’s there to help us see that this life we’ve lived our way has left us nothing to look forward to but the death all these sins have earned. Not to remind of us of only our great guilt but to meet that gravity with the giving of His grace that took our place to wash our stains so that we could be entirely new, eternally new.

And so that’s the necessity of this opportunity to watch our old lives wash by. It’s so that we can leave behind the perishable pettiness of it all and step into the imperishable as achieved by Christ on our behalf. Because He is our life now, in fact He always was for without Him all we’ve left is the death we’ve loved. But in Him, in Him is found life forevermore. And the beauty is that for once it’s not a way of life that hinges upon our having something that someone else says is valuable or important or in some other way temporarily necessary.

It’s rather a life lived knowing that He is enough and thus we needn’t anything else and can thus lose everything else that we’ve settled for all this time.

For as it turns out, that is all I’ve lost, all we have left to lose, just this lesser life we’ve found only by always leaving God behind while we set out in such selfish search of a sad assumption that we could possibly both know better than He how our life should be lived but also that we somehow had the ability to prove as much within so little as everything we wanted in and of a world we’re leaving and all the fake and foolish meaning this place places upon things that have no eternal meaning as there has simply never been any eternal value in something of worldly distraction.

And it’s all these manmade distractions and decisions and devotions that He came to save us from. And it’s only those divisions that we’ll watch wash away along this journey toward joy that isn’t assumed but is rather forever promised.

And along this ride back toward life I’ve found that it’s not what I lose that I worry about but rather the mystery as to what I’ve missed within a life lived looking always around rather than to the blessings from above. Indeed, what of His blessed benevolence have I never noticed, have I always ignored, have I insisted upon taking for granted? Yes, what all have I looked at only to look through onto the presence of the preference I’d picked and planned for myself instead?

That’s the only I fear I feel in this life as lived in this world anymore. For I’ve begun to become accustomed to loss as I look around and see things I once liked or enjoyed and thus thought I needed all leaving in a most frantic fleeing from this apparent freak I’m becoming. That is what this world thinks of us. Called Jesus freaks, outliers and outcasts cast apart from a world that won’t and thus can’t see that their way of life is too coming apart.

Suppose then we’re merely the freaks for agreeing to find faith in the fallout while the vast majority only forsake the fact that He found us in order to save us from holding tight something we never actually needed despite how bad we knew it wanted.

For friends, truth is that these lives were never ours, and so nor is their purpose or profit or popularity or even the proving of providence a matter for our pursuit. No, we are here rather to pursue Christ alone as done through every word we speak being something that lends itself to the mutual edification that we’re called to care toward and done in every step we take being one taken along this path that only opens eyes to see the beauty of a life lost as such only begins the very beginning of a life gained.

And while part of that rush back to reverence does indeed define a measure of humiliation and regret in regard to what we may have missed not having turned toward Him sooner, even that shame seems just to inspire a soul to never again settle for something so simple as thinking our lives our own and thus to be lived only within the width of our wildest imaginations never imagining life after death.

No, we’ve merely lived a life of a million missed opportunities to experience life. And so if that’s all that dies as we are in Him baptized then I can think of no greater victory than such a loss of me and the mistakes I’ve made of all I’ve tried to achieve in order to accomplish all I’ve wanted that’s become all I’ve had of a life I’ve never held in a way that could ever be even accidentally confused as having been as beautiful as those billion blessings I missed while I was busy making my way to my way which is nothing but this less now lost.

Because again, that is in the end all we have to lose, just this loss of a lesser life lived without the courage to consider God and the faith that knows His will was always better than our way.

Thus all we’re at risk of losing as we’re found finally sharing in His surrender is but the remnants of a ruined life washing by. For just around the bend and a little beyond the breaking is found the coming of our becoming something far bigger than we've been, much better than we've ever been able to believe from within the disbelief that's defined that ruined life now washing by.

And so let it go friends, whatever He asks you to lose of this life. For while the loss may hurt for a time, what He gives in its place is so eternally perfect that once home we’ll not be able to remember what we lost of a lost life forever left behind.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold