Day 3444 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 6:21 NIV

Perhaps the greatest gravity to a life’s regret is given in that there is here within this life as lived within a world’s temporality an unavoidable brevity to all benefit, especially those received only in the moment.

For the true reality of our mortality is that any of it spent outside of morality is thus recused into what is to become before long an eternal accusation of our having chosen to honor ourselves within our lives as lived within a billion separate moments in which are made either memories or mistakes, both combining into a message that chimes this choice saying that we feel as if our lives are ours alone. And we make this choice so very often because it’s the very ideal to which this humanity has decided to descend.

Indeed, everyone here at one time or another lives as if they’re here only to do as they please as if our personal proclivities such as pleasure and preference can truly provide a life its purpose.

But you see, when at first we dissolve into that resolve in which we involve ourselves within that lie all so that we can seem as if we agree with this sinful society in which we seek to belong, such a selfish society as that which has undeniably decided upon this stance which says that a self is here only to seek and serve the satisfactions of a self, the very lie which all sin sells, well then we end up turning blindly upon this path which paves a life left falling behind those fallen themselves. And while such may indeed bring about this sense of community as we find ourselves at home within the catastrophe, the issue is that we learn to become comfortable with it.

Indeed, we eventually reach this place inside ourselves in which we claim this self-proclaimed truth in which we apparently live free to do only always as we please not realizing that while such makes us look and feel right at home within this world’s rebellion, yet therein we bind ourselves to the keeping alive these lies needed to keep us convinced that freedom is actually nothing more than the ongoing burden of being our own source of belief and inspiration.

And the growing conundrum is that we walk beside a culture that considers that sort of selfish assumption the very best foundation of a life to be lived as a life is supposed to be lived within the debased designs of a mankind that’s fallen out of love with their Maker.

Yes, down that road in which we grow to become like, believe like this world in order to be like this world, to be liked by this world, we will find that we begin to only do as this world does.

And thus sin will come to blind us and bind us in ways that we never imagined nor have the audacity to break away from as we become just too broken to care for better anymore.

Something we see starting to rear its increasingly ugly head within this land.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t really have much of a leg to stand on in this matter as I’ve been one to make every mistake I could make myself believe wouldn’t be a mistake. Indeed, I’ve lived my life in the moment so very much, so very often, that I’m only now here at 36 learning that the moment doesn’t mean as much as we might think. Because as it turns out, eternity doesn’t really revolve around the minutia of minutes and the monotony of make believe.

Rather eternity is an expanse in which time simply doesn’t matter as, once we’re wherever our lives have directed us to go, there is no leaving, no changing, no learning or growing or going anymore along that line in which we lie to ourselves saying that it’s all on us to determine for us what’s best for us. No, that nonsense only works within this world in which we’re bound by time but unable to believe beyond it.

No, we’ve here only a set numbers of hours, days, decades, and yet we live as if we don’t. For within all those days and decades are hours spent within this imaginary ideal in which we’re the ones who know what’s best and couldn’t make a wrong decision if we had to. Problem is we have to stop making them now. That’s in fact the very purpose of repentance as it’s a turning around and leaving behind all of what we’ve become because of all that we’ve done.

Because as God’s Word says, what we’ve done has earned a wage that we can’t outrun even should we have all of forever to try.

For while we do have a forever, the issue is that this trial in which we’ve lived here upon this rental, it’s been lived in ways that inspired us to do things that have become the most indisputable evidence possible of our utter disregard to God’s design, our blatant indifference to what God deserves, our simply negligent response to a life that was at first a gift given in love and then even saved in a furthering of that unstainable and unchangeable grace as given us in Christ.

And thus we’ve left nothing with which to offset or offload the weight of our regret because we can never claim we never knew the difference between right and wrong. Because you see, we were made in God’s image and too given a share of His perspective, and too even an awareness of, thanks to Adam and Eve and a most sinful craving, the knowledge of good and evil. We know the difference, and no, it’s not quite as blurred as we’ve tried to insist it become!

It only seems that way sometimes because we keep trying to adjust His design just a little every once in a while so that our wants can seem to fit His will, so that we’re not left feeling as miserable and guilty as we know we should. Because again, deep down, we know that many of our wants and wishes as won within the workings of this wicked world’s welcoming us to make ourselves feel at home within that lie that says our time is meant to be spent upon ourselves, we know the things we’ve learned have indeed led us away from who we were meant to be.

And we know this because we can admit we’ve made mistakes.

Because our mistakes do not define us as they merely tell us who we can see we were never meant to be. Problem is that we’ve lived a bit too long inside this place in which our mistakes are allowed to define us simply because we live as if we can somehow deny them. And thus we have to keep running away from them so that we’re not humbled by them.

Pride is one incredible drug!

Because it inspires us to deny we do anything wrong. And now granted, we might not feel all that inclined to admit all that we’ve messed up. In truth, there is actually no possible way for us to even realize all the mistakes we’ve made. But the reality is that if we’ve ever done anything, said anything that’s brought about anything in even the furthest vicinity of shame or guilt or regret, then we know we messed up. And as sin is defined as knowing the right thing and failing to do it, what that leaves is us a conviction of being a sinner for we’ve known the right thing to do and, in the moment, chose not to do it.

Even if we only learn of it in hindsight.

That’s something that I think is often too discounted in our world anymore. It’s the gift of the ability to remember, to reflect, to realize through slightly older and (hopefully) wiser eyes that maybe some of things we’ve said or done or tried or bought or believed, maybe they weren’t right after all. The issue, I fear, is that within this world we’ve come so far away from such things as honesty and humility that we seem to seek instead of forgiveness merely a pretense in which we pretend we don’t need it.

And we thus again fall into that necessity mentioned above in that once we give our lives over to living these worldly lies, we just have to keep that deception going so that we don’t feel so guilty about our going the entire wrong direction in life. And we do this because we hate that feeling of shame. We hate regret. We have this almost innate but at this point entirely instinctual rejection of anything that reminds us of our personal responsibility as found within the weight of such things such as our deciding between the wrongs we’ve come to want and the right we’ve learned to discount.

Indeed, that is very much the problem within our world today. It’s that our wants, wicked as they are, are in fact wicked and yet we just can’t seem to imagine this burden of denying ourselves anything that this world says we should want, tells us we can have, shows us how much better, fuller, more fun life can be with having in our lives. And these desires just keep nagging away at us until we eventually agree to give in to that lie that we first bought way back in the day that tells us that our lives are only about our doing whatever we want without ever having to even agree to the possibility of consequence.

Who has time for that sort of limitation as truth or reality or responsibility all saying the same thing: That we don’t get to decide them but are rather bound to either appreciate them and thus live in accord with them or just bound to betray them and pretend that we can then avoid the price that sort of pride truly costs.

Indeed, what is the cost?

We don’t think about that do we? Because I’m not talking about the monetary or momentary. That’s sadly how our diluted minds have come to consider everything. We, again, have just become entirely too accustomed to living in the moment as if what we want right then and there is what matters most. But to what end? To what cost? What’s the long-term effect? Will the effect of our current wants and wishes possibly affect the outcome of a time we haven’t lived yet?

Will we grow to regret tomorrow what we’ve done today? Will tomorrow find us making choices that leave us filled with shame a few years from now? Will the way we live out the rest of our days leave us sad we have to leave and without a belief as to where we could have gone had we had the courage to deny ourselves what was never able to give us life in this life we’ll one day leave?

See, we think far too small in life anymore. It’s all always about only the here and now. What will make this moment the most fun, the most enjoyable, the most rewarding? Yes, what will make today the very best day I’ve ever lived according to all that I’ve learned from the world around me in regard to what makes life happy or comfortable or profitable or popular? Indeed, we seek those things as if there’s truly life within them.

When in reality life only flees from them, for we waste our lives to get them and they give us no life in return.

I say this because I’ve found myself having lived two lives, or rather trying to convince myself I could. That’s in fact what this world teaches us to believe, that we can spend today doing whatever we want regardless of the mistakes and messes we make for we lean upon this foolish assumption that tomorrow’s coming. Just do what you want to do today and, should you mess up or fall short once more, just ask for forgiveness later.

And so we put our hope of better off for later so that we can settle again today for the good enough of doing whatever we want.

But friends, the gravity of a lifetime as considered within hindsight is that we've each lived a period of time making an untold number of mistakes, the sum of which equate to a person we never were but perhaps should have been. Indeed, such an understanding stands at some point in our way asking that we turn from who we've become and embrace the fullness of God's grace as such a gift was meant to take us back to that place that our every mistake only led us from.

And the weight of that grace is felt in that strange blending of our humbled awareness of those innumerable mistakes mixed with an understanding that the price of the forgiveness through which God chose to free us from who we've become was the life of His Son, who is our Savior. And that our mistakes equate thus to the loss of an innocent life demands we understand that grace is a gift so very great that we, as these sinners we've become oughtn't even have the ability to imagine it, let alone actually receive it.

Yet our hesitancy toward that sort of mercy as seen inside this merciful forgiveness for which Christ died for us is proven in our refusal of repentance's simplicity, simply refused as it simply asks that our lives change on account of His helping open our eyes to see the sheer quantity of our mistakes leading to a quality of life that is utterly lifeless due to the wages won of sin as defined by those mistakes we've made which all equate to a person we were made to be but chose instead to deny.

All because the ‘in the moment’ was assumed to be worth more than the regret we couldn’t allow ourselves to imagine but still came to receive after that moment had gone into the past.

That is the weight of sin, for this life doesn’t come with rewind. There are no do-overs. We don’t get second chances. This day we have today, it’ll be forever gone by this time tomorrow. Because grains of sand don’t fall upward as gravity won’t allow it. And you know what else gravity won’t let be erased? The weight of our mistakes and the shame they bring when our eyes are no longer blinded to who we’ve been and what we’ve done to become who we don’t want to remain.

But that is a truly beautiful gift, regret. Sadly we live in a world that doesn’t see it that way, and that’s indeed why we’re warned against making friends with this place making God out to be their enemy. We can’t afford to see things the way this world does, the way this world has convinced us to in the past. We have to rather do something new if we’re to have a hope that’s new too. We can’t keep doing things as if nothing matters and expects something that matters to come out of that.

If everything we do in life means so little that we’re never worried about getting it wrong, then life itself can never mean much either.

And if you don’t believe me, take a second and reconsider some of the things you’ve done that you can now agree weren’t the best choice to make after all. What did those moments of taking life lightly leave you holding? Was the pleasure worth the pain? Was the fun worth feeling ashamed? Did that dirty joke leave a laugh that can drown out the guilt you feel for having lowered yourself down there?

Did the people you pleased ever decide to leave? Did the person you lost leave you wishing that you hadn’t been so quick to forget yourself?

You see, life has this way of coming at us pretty fast without our realizing it. Because we race through it living as if everything we’re doing is perfectly fine at best and fairly harmless at worst. But ask yourself this: Is there anything truly harmless about regret?

I know that we don’t like to consider these kinds of things as within this world people live like they don’t have to. But we all will one day. My prayer for everyone is that we fight to find the humbled courage to make that day today so that we don’t do as so many will and leave that day for later on down the line we didn’t draw and thus don’t know when or where the end will come. Do not put off for tomorrow the changes you need to make today because tomorrow might not be there.

And if we live just long enough like nothing we do could ever be a mistake, we might find ourselves kneeling before the Truth who says otherwise without any time left to do anything about it.

And the way our memory works, no, maybe we can’t do anything about all the mistakes we’ve made. But we can learn to fight a better fight so that we don’t keep making them. Maybe we can’t go back and do things differently. But we can accept His invitation back to our senses as returned to us within that tomb. Maybe we can’t even remember all we’ve gotten wrong or taken entirely too lightly.

But we can humble ourselves and hit our knees before the King who came to wash them all away and lead us toward a better life as it’s the one we were created to live long before we left it behind for what ended up being nowhere near anything better but only everything lesser.

Let us stop settling for lesser, because a day is coming in which we will either find ourselves welcomed into what was always best, or we’ll be left in a place where better simply doesn’t exist.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold