Day 3506 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Corinthians 11:4 NIV

May just be me but it seems as if we've all been led out to the middle of nowhere and left for dead amongst a world in which many live as if that's supposedly all that's supposed to be normal as defined for us all of us by those weeds whispering all around.

Which is an altogether dangerous design as it’s one day going to be proven that each of us were given the lives we alone were meant to live, lives we did end up living regardless of however many others we happened to allow to live them with us, for us, in us. Because such an existence has sadly become so standard that we don’t even stop to reconsider how wrongly we’ve been reconfigured in order to feel as if we might fit within this fellowship with a foolishness so fancy that it only inspires us to let down our guards and allow in whatever input we might be asked to consider by those who somehow seem more capable of living a life right than we’ve become.

Again, somehow.

How is it though that we’ve all become so convinced that we need all this extra input, all these alternative suggestions, as many ideas and ideologies as we can get our hands on if we’re to live worthwhile lives? Indeed, when did we otherwise take our hands off of our lives and decide only to let the majority vote as to how we live them? I mean, that is what’s going on down here, you do know that right? Nearly every life anymore is basically nothing more than some common consensus as achieved by opening our minds so wide that we’re not even in them ourselves.

No, our minds and the thinking and reasoning and reality as we were created to be alone responsible for upholding within them, it’s all but entirely been outsourced to such outlandish interpretation as that of whatever might get us the most followers. Indeed, just last evening I had a suggested video pop up on my youtubes that was this fella talking about yet another shift in his content as considered necessary in order to remain atop the shifting sands of a world incessantly losing its collective sanity.

Because that’s what we have to do in order to always remain culturally relevant, which is rapidly becoming the proverbial mark by which one is deemed either successful or rather forgotten. We either set our sails for the winds of fame and fortune as blown by the opinions and interests of the masses at present or we drop anchor and likely then out of the limelight and thus too the higher levels of profit as won anymore by, again, the number of followers we have and thus have to always feel obligated to keep.

You know, for the bottom line, making ends and whatnot.

For that’s what matters here. It’s why so many are always so eager to prove that they’re ahead of the curve around which is carved already another care to concern ourselves with, another headline to be outraged by, another limited edition experience that we can’t afford to afford but at the same time can’t afford to miss as such would leave us a week without new content to share and thus another source allowed to step into our momentary absence from the scene of the crime.

The crime being our culture and it’s endless fascination with the futility of pretending that somehow we’re the ones who can define what matters and then create little representations that further the evidence of our arrogance. These days they’re mostly t-shirts and yeti mugs, a sticker or two tossed in just for a little extra branding of ourselves for someone else. Indeed, seems anymore than to turn ourselves into a brand is the overall best way to make sure our lives matter long after we’re not here anymore trying to convince people that we matter.

Criminal.

Why? Because it’s all a fallacy. It was never meant to be this way, so divided and disheveled. We’ve all but stolen the very basis of life from the Creator of such and forced it to become nothing more than a matter of make believe in which each of us come up with our own versions of what matters most and then shortly thereafter hit the custom printing shops to have some merch made up. Again, made up. That is literally becoming the overall expectation of all human experience, just a matter of whatever we can make up for ourselves, by ourselves, of ourselves.

Yes, life here is just each of us all sectioned off into lives lived as if cubicles from which we type out our daily reminders that we’re still here and that we clearly still care about whatever hashtag is trending at the time.

See, we even have our own lingo anymore, hashtags and trending topics and a whole mess of other maniacal attempts to be so engaged in the world that we’re not left any time, effort or inclination to even engage in our own lives anymore. We’re just a conglomerate of what’s culturally popular at any given time. And thus the very epitome of Ephesians 4:14, “infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.”

Something that very verse opens with Paul stating is something that we should all seek to “no longer be.”

But alas, such we’ve become and too been now for so long that many of us today have absolutely no idea what it’s like to be anything else. I sit here at 36 and think back over my life and I can see clearly that there’s always been a brand, a logo, a hip lingo through which we sought to communicate that we were a viable part of the cultural changes that come and go as the tides ebb and flow, us always thus at the mercy of being blown wherever the hot air spoken around us seeks to lead us.

We’re byproducts of such commercialized lives that we know more commercial jingles than we do classic hymns. And while that’s undeniably evident, it’s also evidence that is in every way heartbreaking as it seems to have become some measure of the distance we’ve fallen further into what’s to one day be proven the worst possible direction.

Why? Because God made it clear from the very beginning that we were to have no gods before Him, no gods other than Him, that there are no gods other than Him. Problem then is that from our very beginning we’ve made it clear to Him, and everyone else for that matter, that we have every intention of dreaming up every invention that we will faithfully give our lives to in order to prove that we are the exception to His rule.

Yep, we’re going to be the ones who prove Him wrong as we one day show off all these others gods that we’ve put before Him, chosen instead of Him, served as opposed to Him, honored with the honor due to Him alone. No, we are societally expected to live our lives in just such a way that we please the world so much that whilst here we never have to fear the fact that we’re so utterly failing in regard to life, to love, to faith, to friendship, to fealty as all the above have been given their own worldly versions that we’re expected to uphold should we be held as those considered welcome in this world.

Indeed, this world has become so lost inside itself and the search therein for more idols to serve that we have stumbled upon the ability to not have to worry about God’s wrath as we live among plenty of people, the vast majority in fact, who will remind us until we leave here that in their opinion, which is always right, right?, that in their opinion there is no God to fear. There is no forever on the way. There is no need of salvation. There is no single source of truth.

There is no Judgement Day upon which our souls will be weighed and each of us so obviously found lacking in literally every way possible as a result of having so emptied ourselves of who we were made to be just so that we could be filled instead with all this world insisted we become.

And this world will continue to tell us that because of this super old and yet still unspoken idea which says that the louder the lie and the more often it told the more power it has to perhaps prove the truth more, say, open to interpretation. Our own usually. Yes, see, the devil, so deceptive and deceitful, has inspired this thing we call conceit in which each of us become convinced that we alone are the source of pretty much whatever we want to be the only source of. Truth, morality, reality, responsibility, reason, the list basically doesn’t end.

Because our adversary has convinced the whole world that each person in it is the center of it, and thus entitled to determine how life should be lived whilst in it. By everyone else.

Ain’t hard to see why we like that idea so much!

But what is hard to understand is when we managed to unlearn the lesson that has proven countless times that quality is indeed of far more importance than quantity. In fact, we’ve gone so far in the wrong direction in that regard that anymore our houses are more filled than our hearts. Our minds are overflowing while our lives feel often empty. Our time is taken up constantly by a billion different priorities, and while we can always manage to find space for one more that’s of currently growing popularity, we somehow never have the room to make some room for the only hope any of us have.

Because He just isn’t ever going to be a matter of increasingly popularity. He’s forever, or at least for here, the oddity, the outlier, the extremity so different that His will and His way and His work as done within us will just never fit, never make sense. Because it’s all objective rather than subjective, meaning that it’s not a matter of what we think but rather a reminder of the varying distances our thoughts have led us astray.

For that’s all that all idols do, even these pitiable opinions so idolized in our world anymore, of which all 8.2 billion of us have roughly 2.8 million of.

Ballparking it, obviously.

We talked about that a bit yesterday, how each of us have been led off on a million treasure hunts dug inside ourselves seeking the substance of things assumed by ourselves, leaving us nothing but hollowed out mines of what were once minds meant to allow us to do our own thinking, our own living, our own believing. But amazingly, that’s somehow become the normality. We’re all told so often here that we’re basically to do nothing but stare either into the mirror or into the media until we find what they say we’re supposed to be. Because this world and those in it are the only ones who can know best.

Right?

Thus life has become subjective, each of us subjecting ourselves to a million voices leading us in a million directions, all of which again lead us only out into the middle of nowhere entirely happy to leave us for dead and soon then forgotten just as soon as we stop chasing the next rabbit held out in front of us by those blind leading the world over the edge into utter disbelief. Because sadly, that too has become so normalized that even to mention it normal is considered abnormal as nobody likes to be reminded of the reality of the utter lack of hope found amongst this shattered humanity.

Why so shattered in what are a trillion pieces aimed a billion directions by a million voices? Because not much will go well when everything goes and everyone just goes along with it in order to get along with the many whose only remaining belief is that such is the only best way to exist. That’s why we have so many priorities anymore. It’s why our houses need garages. They’re not for cars but rather so we don’t have to rent storage units further away to store all the junk that was at one time the only thing we could think about, but now only a reminder of the time, effort, attention given that we can’t now get back and thus can’t get rid of fully either.

No, we have to hold tight to every treasure we’ve tarnished so that we can maybe one day shine it up and feel a little less ashamed for all that time and glory we gave to have that whatever become a part of our story we didn’t care about for a while.

Which ought to inspire us to ask, what is our story? What is our life? Who are we? Why don’t we care to ask anymore?

Maybe because we know the answers to those questions aren’t the ones we want to admit have become so much less than what we had way back before all this time spent trying to prove that we’d be the exceptions who weren’t led astray, weren’t left lost, weren’t so broken and burned out in the end that we, like everyone else, just rolled out the red carpet and started sharing our lives as if museum exhibits of what we thought mattered from one day to the next until none of it mattered anymore at all.

That’s normal, and indeed, we do put up with it easily enough. Just point us the direction you want us to go, promise us some profit or popularity is waiting at the end of the hollow brick road and we’re off and running right into another dead end.

Because someone else told us it wouldn’t turn out that way.

No, you won’t become ashamed. You surely won’t end up addicted. There’s no way you’ll come to regret all the time you’ve spent, the money you lost, the opportunities you didn’t take, the changes you didn’t make. You will not surely die!

It’s all the same lie hiding under novel masks that make us think it just might be something different than all the times before.

But no, that idea so naïve may have for a while worked well enough while we were so widely inspired to imagine that we were meant only to merely exist, getting by then our greatest calling in life. But alas, we've been called to do so much more than just survive, to just exist, to simply be here and live as if here is the only place we'll ever be and thus the only place we should ever try to make feel full. It isn't. Just isn’t. And because it isn’t as now defined by the promise of another place prepared back inside the presence of the One we’ve been pretending wasn’t there, the ways in which this world works won't be the only ways by which we'll experience life.

And since we are not otherwise bound to the outlines and expectations of a world so broken as this one has become and is indeed about to be forever sentenced to remain, safe to we should not then remain of this world despite our still being in it for what amounts to only an eternal minute. For one minute here may be all we've left, and even should we have 100 years to walk this world, those would all be but a blink in the comparison to eternity's infinity.

Thus we cannot do as we've done, Deuteronomy 12:8-10, and for the exact same reasons just now in a slightly larger and eternally longer outlook. For here we're not home, and the home to which we go will not be as lazy or lacking in such things as reason and responsibility, reverence and humility. No, this world and its way are passing away, and thus we cannot anymore agree to just go along with whatever whomever inspires us to agree to be.

No, we're headed to another place where this nonsense just won't fly. And so maybe we should clip the wings and walk away.

Because the end of the matter is that there is still but one Way home. And no, it wasn’t made by human hands but rather by God’s heart. It wasn’t crafted in some artist’s den but rather within the delight of He who drew us to be His and draws us now back to that beginning. It wasn’t brainstormed by some billionaire or offered for us buy from upon some store shelf for a few bucks. No, the only Way home was bought with the blood of Christ who doesn’t ask for money but that we realize we cannot continue serving it, or anything else this world finds important, if we’re to one day go where money don’t matter.

Friends, my point is that we’ve all been tossed about long enough and become entirely too happy to just enjoy the ride. It’s time to get real because this world simply won’t. There will always be new ideas, new ideals, new idols within this world that asks us all to remold our lives around them. But the truth is that we can live without them, in fact, in the end, the only way we can live is without them. Do not let anything of this world steal your attention away from the only One who came to find you from all the other false hopes you’ve been led to be faithful to instead so far.

No, it’s probably best to just leave the dead to bury their dead and walk away if you don’t want to be swept up when He comes back to put this house in order once more.

Because that day is indeed coming. Please don’t listen to a world that says it isn’t while the majority play house with all these little toys that they tell us can somehow stop it. They can’t. And we can’t afford to believe otherwise anymore.

All I’m saying is that we've all put up with so many suggestions that only turned out to be horrible directions is probably reason enough to stop assuming that easier is always better. Might be here, but friends, here ain't home.

So stop listening to weeds.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold