Day 3482 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 116:2 NIV

For within life we’re bound to find that to go alone is equally implausible as it is impossible.

Because we’re here as if radiant reflections meant to live reflecting the radiance of an image entirely not our own but rather one barrowed from He who is the source of all of this that we’ve so selfishly come to assume a matter meant for our own making. Yes, such is life as it seems, just a song we sing that’s but a chorus of chaos all coming down upon us from the bridges we so boastfully bet upon building by ourselves leaving us all higher and higher and yet all the more alone all the while.

All while God sits up in Heaven looking down probably both laughing and lamenting the many things we’re trying and the many more we’re only forgetting.

Simply because an infrequently found fact of life is that we’re not as well-equipped to undertake every effort, to endure every struggle, to understand every confusion, to decline every delusion, to pursue every priority or even to know most days what our priorities ought to be. No, alas we find ourselves so lost within this land of lies that we’ve eyed a many prize assuming the collective somehow accomplishing our life’s meaning.

Meaning then that we’re always looking toward something more thinking that having more is a life more lived. And yet it turns out that the wider spread we become as cast amongst so many ideas and ideologies, well eventually we just run out of both ability and belief as we’re sure to find that we’ve only so much time, only so much mind, only a little bit of life in which to live for what’s worth living for. And yet, judging from the past, it seems we’re not too good at that either.

Rather we’re a people proven perfectly problem-prone, always preferring the placation of pride to the specificity of a life of simplicity. Indeed, it’s almost as if we’re afraid of simple from here held inside these hollowed halls of holding here so dear that we want only whatever here has for us to hold.

And even though we’ve indeed held so much that is here it’s all managed only to leave us still looking for something to counteract the culture of chaos that’s become a sad community of comfort built upon being always complacent. And thus we find this disquiet in life, an unrest as it were, for we’re all but all torn apart and scattered around trying to both find more but not wander too far from what we’ve already had and always known.

And inside that impossibility perhaps the implausibility of our having another will to live by might seem a little less illogical.

Alas it takes a pretty rough fall to rock bottom for us to feel the fallacy of our folly. For all our beliefs as built upon only basically betraying each other, they’ve each become these arguments against one another in which we’re always yet again left to find some way to walk two paths going two directions toward what is somehow always the same destination.

That being our getting whatever we want whilst enduring nothing we don’t and not losing anything we won’t.

Indeed, we’re a truly spectacular breed in that we see only lifelessness as pursued and purchased by people who look like us and sound like us and offer to lead us to whatever they themselves assume is able to afford a life the ability to avoid the reality that we’ve none of us ever really lived. All because you can’t really live so long as your life is found within things or thoughts that never manage to migrate your soul toward the finality of finding out whatever we’re actually doing without.

Such as hope, joy, peace, purpose, passion, priority. Yes, life and love and leaving them both for the chance to find them somehow together forever seems a strange concept to be sure as it’s one not known around these parts of this place of peace in pieces and love left lonely for reasons nobody really ever wants to agree to.

And from within all of our constant confusion demanded of this illusion of our ability to so brazenly redefine everything and thus have to learn to re-believe everything from life to love and all that hope and joy and peace and purpose proven only in between, well, it seems that we’re only falling apart without the courage to admit we couldn’t ever hold any of this together.

Sadly always wanting to think it was always our place to prove otherwise.

But friends, that audacious lunacy comes with a question that all of us have already been asked but might perhaps come to find we’ve less and less time for us to find the answer before it’s finally demanded of us.

How much longer can we try to prove what we can do by only doing all we can in only the feeblest and most fail-prone ways possible?

Is that how we’re to impress anyone? Have we managed to awe anyone at all with all our efforts given unto proving ourselves only having proven our penchant for inability along the way? Have we even managed to ever impress ourselves via the things we arrogantly think we accomplished on our own knowing that we’ve made plenty of mistakes all on our own as well?

Are we to impress God and thus find our approach before Him welcomed whenever we’ve lived this life as if it’s on us to figure this out without any help from anyone, even though that means that we’re left to both refuse Him and resort to our own inabilities to overcome our insufficiency?

As I was making my lunch I had this thought hit me: A realization is the beginning of an understanding. We have to first realize something before we can carry that thought, that idea, that hope onward toward the growth that an understanding really is. We’ve got to become aware of something if we’re to ever come to an understanding of whatever that something is and whatever it might happen to mean.

What I mean is this:

I’ve lived quite a few years down here in this place we see as everything from our home to our horror, our ideal paradise to our jail cell in purgatory. And the vast majority of those years the person I’ve looked to most in regard to determining what needed done, deciding what to do, following that decision through and reaching as far as I might go all on my own was indeed always only me.

That’s not to say that I’ve not asked for help from others around me as that is something that all of us have done plenty as well. But the person that I’ve leaned upon most throughout my life so far is me. My life has been about what I think, what I want, what I’ve done, what I think about what I’ve done to get what I want as defined always by someone else inspiring me to think something is either cool or necessary or often the two combined into a fervency to find this excitement before it dared to evade me.

And because so much of my life has been all about me, well I’ve realized something and that is that so long as my life is about me, my thoughts, my ideas, my problems, my priorities, my feeble attempts to always make avoiding my problems my top priority, well then my life will be left to be lived within only whatever I can think, whatever I can do, whatever I might want, and my fear of whatever I might lose.

Thus I’ve been a slave to myself, always driving myself only to the edge of insanity either unable or, and far more likely, unwilling to understand that where I stand is not at all my own doing.

The problems are mine. The regrets are mine. The fears are mine. The falls and the failures and the pretty impressive foolishness, yep, all mine. But the life hidden underneath all of them, thus the life I’ve scantly lived in all these years that I could have, should have, well that’s God’s. Yes, He’s the reason I’m here. His will is why I’m alive, because honestly, I’ve made plenty of mistakes big enough that could have easily changed that whole still being alive thing that I’ve somedays pretty fond of.

But they didn’t.

No, it seems that every mistake I’ve made wasn’t as big as I imagined in the moment. Every fear I’ve felt wasn’t all that worth worrying about in the end. The choices I’ve made and the consequences I’ve tried to avoid for having made the majority of them so wrong, they didn’t change much of His plan. Didn’t change any of it in fact. Because I can still sit here now and confess Christ as Lord. I can feel still today that joyous urgency to share His Word even if I accomplish nothing else in this day.

Indeed, I can still see that He has a plan for me that I’ve somehow, miraculously, not entirely obliterated from within my best efforts having always been given to my biggest failures to realize that faith is the only way that life can be lived as otherwise we’re merely left to always follow ourselves in what would then prove only a path paved only inward into what’s nothing more than pile of smoldering insanity that is the idea that we know everything from what we’re doing to what we should be wanting to how to combine those two lies into a life that leaves us able to deny the fact that we’re dying no matter what we find here.

In fact, considering that’s one of our biggest fears if not the scariest of them all, leaving this world behind, it seems as if all we’ve known in life is only the fear of living as evidenced by our refusal to consider anything that might even hint at humility or reality or the responsibility that we’ve always thought we rightly understood as things so limiting that they couldn’t possibly hold any freedom.

What if we’ve never known anything of freedom from here within our lives as lived worrying only about ourselves?

What if our lives spent living always for ourselves has only confined us to ourselves, both still searching for what might be pleasing but also fleeing from all that we know wasn’t worth chasing in the past? Yes, what if the fact that our pasts have proven so many mistakes that they’ve even become chains that have held us to hiding what we don’t want seen as such is anymore far more than an assumption but has become in fact an understanding that maybe we don’t know what we’re doing after all?

Indeed, what if all we’ve done has only left us afraid of everything we are accidentally coming to light and undermining this masquerade we keep planning and pretending?

As I said I’ve lived quite a few years wrapped within the way life is so usually lived down here. I’ve shared all the normal fears from snakes and spiders to pretty girls and their tendency toward rejecting guys like me. And in fact it’s that blend of rejection, felt both from others and offered to those things that are almost unanimously found freaky, well it’s become a fear all its own. One so well-known that I find it’s become a fear of even being rejected by God knowing that He knows more about me than I do about spiders and all that all those closed doors cared to know about me.

What do I mean? Well, I mean that we’re so afraid of who we are being known by anyone that we even refuse to approach the One who knows us so well that He calls us out for being who we’ve become, sadly in that forgetting all that He did to bring us back from where we’ve gone. See, all we know in life is the verdicts we jump to. We’re just certain that if a spider even looks at us, we’re going to ER with life-endangering venom coursing through our veins. We’re adamant that if we hear a snake off in the distance that again we’re headed for a poisoned death.

We’re confident only in being rejected by others, so we don’t ask. We’re aware of our mistakes and shortcomings, and so we don’t try. We know that God knows us a sinners, and so we hide away in shame hoping He might just do Himself the favor we never could offer and just look away from what we’ve become so that He doesn’t feel bad about our letting Him down.

But when will we realize that if this was really about letting Him down that He’d not have come in Christ to lift us back up?

In all the years I’ve lived in and too of this world, I’ve only realized of late the most alive I’ve ever felt is when I’m closet to God even though it’s often too when I feel at my lowest, my dirtiest, my most ashamed. Yes, the closest I’ve ever felt to living life is when I dare to whisper a word within the direction of the One I’ve wronged more than anyone else. And that realization has become to me an understanding that there is a kind of love that exists in life that sees somehow beyond every single failure and every single fear and every moment of foolishness found in assuming our failures and fears somehow disqualify us from meaning something.

Anymore I look at the cross and realize that He really did pay that cost for me, and for you too. And in that I think we can understand, or at least should understand that God doesn’t see us for who we’ve been, but that that’s a realization with perhaps the biggest caveat of them all: If we’re in Christ. If we’re in Christ, well then God sees the love a Father has for His children as Christ is the only begotten of God and thus if we’re in Him then we’re too adopted into being again His kids.

And if we’re His people then, as Christ has proven, there is nothing He won’t do to get us to whatever will make us better and also through those trials that accomplish such an undeserved blessing as our being the better He’s always known we could have been, should have been, can in Him still become. And if we can in Him still become more than we’ve been, then all we should fear is not letting Him do whatever needs done to overcome whatever we’ve failed to do, to be, to see all this time.

Because the fact of the matter is that though God could have rejected us, should have ignored us, should have left us as we asked Him to, that He could have left us to live this life all by ourselves and refuse to help us beyond what we’ve done to ourselves, He didn’t. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear.”

Friends, my point in all of this perhaps incoherent rambling for today is that God made the first move so that we might realize that we can move too and that our move should be toward the One who loves us so much that His first move was to lay down His life so that we could in Him realize that we’ve nothing else to ever fear as He’d have not done that if His goal was to hate us, to refuse us, to reject us, to destroy us. He destroyed His Son so that through His Son we might join in the gift of resurrection from our lives lived in fear of everything from small dark spaces to the infinite places we’ve never imagined we might be welcomed.

And since He was willing to both lay down His life and to even then still listen to us say we’re sorry from within those rare moments of humility when we finally realize that all our problems, all our mistakes are in fact all our fault, such only proves that He won’t run away. And too that neither should we. Not anymore at least.

No, let us come both boldly and humbly before the only One who’s found something in us worth saving, as let’s be honest, there’ve even been times when we couldn’t find much in that way ourselves. No, because He’s willing to listen, to care, to heal, to allow us to continue to hope, let us then grasp as much of His goodness, His kindness, His compassion as we can possibly convince ourselves to finally reach for.

Even if such an effort means the risk of everything we’ve ever worried about. For if our fears haven’t stopped Him yet, I don’t see why we’d still believe they might stop Him now.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold