Day 3417 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 13:14 NIV

If home is where your heart is then I guess I really am out of place as mine doesn’t seem to beat to the tune this world sings anymore.

For as a faith, our faith, this faith begins to grow it seems only to show that all this reflection is ripped off to reveal the real of a reality we've never run for before, and in that I fear we find ourselves within a failure to find within ourselves an ability to endure where we’ve come to know we’ve nothing that can endure, nothing that is to last, nothing that we can lean on or hope in or hold to, other than that faith which finds for us the depths of this mess we’ve made without the means to make it right, or even at times to make it through.

No, it seems that this road is one paved through a perfectly persistent rain which falls as we fail to feel the way we’ve felt back when we believed that this was home.

For let us again, as always, be honest in that this is indeed a right difficulty. This is hard, this path of peculiarity and persecution and a perfect peace always promised in perpetuity for those who persevere through that which is here where we still are without a heart willing to again settle for the sound of staying. No, anymore as His voice grows through those words within His Word we read, we see only that there is nothing here for us to have, to hold, to home within or within to hope.

Just a long road of doors which close, be them by our hands or the hands which hold us. And in the end, I guess it matters not which as what means the most is that there is in our lives an endless instance of such insistence to deny ourselves the substance of things seen should that mean we miss the assurance of things unseen.

Indeed, it seems that as those doors begin to close we come then upon this confidence in what is in all regard such a blanket confusion as this one in which there is no more any delusion but only now the dilution, a dissolution of our otherwise longstanding decision to dance through life as if we belong upon this dancefloor so dark that most days we see not our face but, in times, a faint flicker of this foreigner who’s found themselves to be of such alien descent that we are but a billion miles from home with only the hope of another helping us there.

And in that understanding we find ourselves standing upon this strange stage in which there’s this something that falls from our faces to force us to face that all of the sudden of all everything we’ve ever known makes no sense anymore. Every dream we had has dissolved. Every plan we’ve perfected is punctured and passing. Every ideal we’ve idolized and every ideology in which we’ve identified, it all finds us no longer welcome into those winnings of a way of life lived inside a world that suddenly isn’t our home anymore.

Yes, we awake each day on this side of this faith, His faith in us meeting our failures toward Him, only to see that what we see seems strange, seems confused, seems scared and scarred and scalded and scalding and scolding all those, all us not holding any of those chains these rains have insisted we keep attached to so that we’re attached to a time and space and matter and meaning and mayhem that we know we don’t belong to anymore, that we never belonged to to begin with.

It’s like this incredible crumbling of an entire lifetime as if it really was built atop sifting sand shifting hands from ours holding ours to His holding us. And even the beauty of such a belief, still it’s met sometimes with this realization that our inability toward the responsibility of a reverent reality has left us so far from home thinking ourselves there all along. And therein, we go along this long and winding loosening of life only to feel each and every time we lose something, leave something behind.

Like all those dreams we’d planted in this soil that we pretended could hold such a hope. Or all those plans we’d made for this perfect life we’ve never come close to finding, let alone living. Or maybe all those groups we joined and friends we made that only made us feel welcome for a moment before we all still went separate ways and won for ourselves a semblance of freedom found in this most forlorn and fleeting of feelings. For that uncommon courage to walk away, it wins in that moment of a heart willing to help itself to something better.

But only to find that moment fades as we find that our hearts are still as deceitful and unable as ever before. Indeed, who can understand them?

Who can understand any of this? I mean, it’s a measure of meaning so widely misunderstood that we gather together once a week to try and figure out a faith as if such is our place. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe all this effort that we’ve given to finding something, forging something, forgetting something or fighting for something we think we’ve found or factored or figured, maybe it’s not all that different from all those days and decades spent trying to force this world to feel like home.

Maybe we’re entirely too prone to trying to prove we can solve this story, our story, any story, simply because we think still we need that glory that gives us a home in which to feel safe.

For let’s face it, we do indeed feel safe inside our assumptions. We feel safe inside our complacencies. We feel safe inside these ideas we have and these idols we make and these identities we’ve made that allow us to hide behind masks in a life made only a masquerade in which we can smile a smile that we sell as if to seal inside the hearts that are breaking as we’re breaking away from where we’ve insisted a place be built for our hearts to believe, all our hopes to be.

There is nothing about this that is supposed to be so personally simple that we can figure it out or understand it alone. I personally don’t even think we’re meant to try and understand it together for what can a million human minds comprehend when all of them are still so limited to the assumptions we all share in different ways? Indeed, what are we to figure out when even we come together and look only to one another to understand where we stand and why sometimes it makes no sense?

No, such is not the substance of faith, at least I don’t think. For what do my thoughts have to offer to a God who knows better than I do, believes bigger than I do, began bigger than I have, bounced back from what I never could? We can’t overcome death, and yet He did. We can’t author truth, but still we can read His every night. We can’t create a life or perfect a path spent through one, He did the first and came to still do the second after we messed everything up in the middle trying for what we assumed was perfect enough.

Yes, that is what is allowed, expected, insisted upon down here. Perfect enough. It’s really nothing more than this idea of good enough just on the steroids of pride and preference. It’s our attempt to invent a life that, to us alone, is so close to perfect that we can feel safe and secure once inside our living it out. And we spend so much time, so much life trying to perfect this life that we end up just losing this life still planning for something better.

All so that we can either belong here inside what we’ve believed we could build, or so that we at least don’t feel bad that we feel bad about not belonging here where so many others are building their beliefs.

But we do feel bad about it. For we want to belong here. That is the wrestling we all experience with the Holy Spirit He sent to guide us through this life to the one that is to come. It’s that there’s just so much here that we have hoped in, run for, wished for, went to war for. There is in this life as lived in this world an entire plethora of preferences and opinions which form for everyone these tiny little building blocks that we spend our lives placing on top of each as if we’re building castles, not seeing that still they’re sand. Shifting sand. Sifting sand. Sand which forms no foundation other than failure when that which is imminent become permanent.

See, that’s just it. We don’t care to consider the permanent. Just the preference. Just the perfect. Just this idea of a life we think so ideal that we’re well within the right to spend every day and every night building what can never become lasting. For here we have no lasting city. Here we have no lasting life. Here hope is held only for a moment inside those things which we hold only for a minute. None of this lasts, and yet in that is a reality from which we’ve ravenously rebelled into this irreverent unreality in which we think still we can still at some point here feel at home here.

But we can’t. And no matter how much that doesn’t make sense or satisfy our plans and the time spent making them, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. No matter what we’ve insisted or intended or invented, none of it makes any difference as none of those worries can add even an hour. And therein lies the heartbreak of all this. It’s that if we can’t even worry enough, want enough, wish enough, work enough to add even an hour to our lives, then there is simply no way that we could ever add hope to ourselves or the outcomes we’ve long thought were ours to instigate or investigate as if to insinuate that we might somehow know what we’re doing or where we’re going.

How could we when all we’ve done has been done in this place we’re leaving?

I just think it’s that whole leaving part that tends to grind and grate. For here we’ve made a life, maybe not perfect, not yet, not for lack of trying or buying or believing that we could. But still, we’ve managed to eke out a meek outcome that’s, to us at least, perfect enough. And there it is again, perfect enough. For that is what we think we can either find or have found within this place. Perfect enough. And whenever we find something good enough to be added to our otherwise perfect enough life, we find only that we loathe even more the idea of leaving it all behind.

That’s why I think to a certain degree we try to romanticize our idea of faith so that the difficulty has a more personal purpose, a more profound focus that allows us to endure what's coming our way today and what is to come before we're home so that the journey there isn't maybe quite so jarring. And yet it is. For here we have no home. We have no belonging, no belongings that are really worth beholding anymore, not now that we know Christ and are convinced that we belong only in Him, with Him.

And while that is a truly joyous hope, a most prolific peace, it is but a peace at times in pieces as this place pierces our hopes and helps us only to the struggles we feel as we find ourselves losing and leaving more and more as those around go the other way. Yes, we see so many down here loving life down here, and inside their smiles and successes and magnificent intentions, it seems to us a reminder of what we once thought we could achieve in this place.

But friends, what did it profit us to spend all those years gaining so much of this world that we now only worry that we’re losing or letting go what we can’t go on without? What did we benefit in all those beliefs we had held toward all that’s here?

Has such not only left us afraid of following this faith into the rain that rips away all these reflections of life to reveal the real life we’ve never lived?

Indeed, are we not only afraid to lose the life we have lived while also ashamed of the life we never had?

I know I am, and yet to me, that’s nothing but some strange encouragement. It’s this weird wanting to try to find what I never wanted to imagine before. It’s this sometimes awkward insistence upon a hope I can’t see, a truth I didn’t write, a path I didn’t pave, a plan I didn’t make. It’s this all of a sudden something that says there’s something that doesn’t need me to understand it, just rather to believe for it, to run for it, to lose for it.

And somehow this idea finds me daily that says I’m not losing anything that it seems I’m leaving and feels as though I see myself losing. Rather I’m just leaving what was never life in a place that was never home as He leads me toward what I never knew I always needed in all those years spent thinking that I needed to see this world as my home and my life here as one that I was meant to make sense.

But yet, this reality that this isn’t home and that it’s not on me to make sense of all this struggle, all this change, all this curiosity and confusion toward the uncertain of this path I’ve never walked inside a faith I never had, it’s left me feeling more alive than ever before. Because I’m losing what was never life in a place that was never home. No, home is where Christ is, and until I’m there, well it just doesn’t make much sense to slow down long enough to worry about what I’m losing.

For if we do indeed really do believe that He has a place prepared for us, one finally perfect, one fully at peace, well then why worry about the rain? Why focus on the pain? Why fear the failures or find the fears that says we’re missing something here? Why not rather just keep going and let come whatever He’s ready to lead us through?

Would He have come to tell us of Heaven if He couldn’t lead us to the gates?

As for me, I think not. For it makes no sense that He’d have given His life for me to have a chance that He knew I couldn’t complete. And there, in all that, to me, is the evidence that He doesn’t need my help but only my faith, my trust, my hope that He is there and that where He is, one day He will lead me. And if He will lead me home someday, why should I doubt that He’s leading me today?

Who cares if this doesn’t feel like home? It isn’t. Who cares if this ride isn’t comfortable? He promises healing. Who cares if we lose a lot, lose it all in this life? This life was always ours to lose. Can’t keep it, not any of it. So why worry about it? Why try to fight it? Why try to make it fit what we want and where we don’t mind it? Is life so meaningless as to mean only what we can make of it inside a world in which we’ve long assumed it was meant to fit?

I can’t settle for that, even if that means that the rest of this will be miserable at times and leave me feeling more and more out of place as time winds down. Doesn’t matter. For here we have no enduring home. No, here we’re only enduring to home, until home. For we have a city coming, and from the reviews I’ve read in that book He breathed, it’s well worth waiting for. No matter what we wait through, wade through. It’s worth it. Even if we never feel at home until we’re there.

For perhaps that’s the point, to have no peace until we’re in that place where peace is really perfect as He is forever present. Not to say that He’s not here now, but just that this world and our misunderstandings still found within the ways in which this place lives, it sure does muddy the picture.

And so maybe our peace, our place, our home could only ever be found once we agreed that this world isn’t our home and thus the noise of this place finally allowed to drown away leaving us to finally start looking, finally start listening, and in them, finally start believing in that city that is coming. Because I think we’ve all tried to imagine our version of Heaven on Earth, but personally, I can’t quite do that anymore.

No, I can’t seem to imagine a Heaven that fits inside something so small as this world so often feels. How can perfect exist in this place, or peace when this place so clearly doesn’t want it around? No, I can’t anymore try and force Heaven to fit here, and so neither can my idea of home fit here anymore either.

Guess I’ll just have to wait. And by some strange miracle, that's the only thing that makes sense anymore.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold