Day 3508 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Colossians 2:8 NIV

Rather than on Christ.

You know, trudging through these days within which we’re all tried and tested by what feels a torrent of attempts to turn our time and attention to the timely yet temporary, things already tarnished and tainted but sold as pleasing though painted, it’s becoming quite the blessed burden.

For it’s no secret that life’s otherwise devolved into our not worrying about much more than some list of lies seeking to live our lives by shifting our eyes to holding our hope inside the seen and seeking our safety in the shouted. Because that appears to be where the whys and where’s in regard to what we worry about, and thus agree to go ahead living without, are always apparently waiting for our agreement with the rest who apparently think such things matter most.

And yet that list of life we’re now living without has indeed come to include such things as hope, peace, purpose, reason, meaning, meaning then that our every concern is found within the things we’re feeling and whether or not they match up with what everyone else is saying.

But considering the commonality of it all anymore, such now affords those who don’t mind to be different the perfect plethora of input by which to live oppositely.

For indeed, we’re scattered amongst a people now all but defined by fear as forced from within those forests of those faithless amongst whom we’ve all fallen for friendships too equally yoked to the yearning for things wanted as won within a world we’re leaving. But yet many just keep listening despite all we’re losing. Because it seems again that we’ve mistaken volume for volume in that we’re more worried about what our lives are supposedly going along just fine without, seeking inside such socially standardized assumption of discontentment always present that we need the more that most everyone else is also dying for.

Yes, volume matters most in this world, only yet that heard in terms of those shouting the assumptions they presume we should purchase so as to save ourselves the lack of the material and monotone monotony that’s come to become this confused community.

But yet when we live so worried about listening to only what the majority have to say that they insist we have to hear, we’re only going to ever hear that here is where all that matters most in life is to be found and felt, leaving us always with at least one ear tuned into those who tell us what we what to hear in order to continue living lives that look like, sound like, feel like they belong here. Because that’s apparently all we’re supposed to care about.

Yep, we’re all apparently supposed to live as if we belong only here, a place in which hope is housed inside of assumptions presuming our opinions a more perfect platform simply for the profit of public popularity than the objective reality which says that most things manmade are monstrosities regardless of the reward found in this life that is but the in between.

Because if we were to step back from this shouting match raging through society we’d probably come rather quickly to the realization that just because someone, or anymore a whole bunch of someones, shouts something incessantly louder, that doesn’t actually mean that it matters more. In fact, if anything, I’ve come to find that the wrong kind of volume is only a distraction from the utter lack of the right kind of volume as proven within a heart rather than from within a mouth.

You see, this world lives by the tongue, all of us so entirely tied to whatever others are saying assuming that words are a fair equivalent to actions. How we arrived at this perception, I’ve my own opinion, but with so many of those flying around anymore I find very little reason to share mine. Because I’ve found that within this world so in love with personal opinions, preferences and the like, only two things can come of an opinion shared: It will either be agreed with or fought against.

And so what’s the point?

For if the best that I can accomplish in sharing my own personal opinion is nothing more than some form of social agreement, well I just don’t need that as I’ve managed to form my own perspective without any external input. And well, if I didn’t need the help deciding where I stand upon some matter, then nor does anyone else’s agreement matter either. If I didn’t need anyone’s help to make my own mind then I don’t need their help to convince me I did it right.

The world seems to not really understand that sort of logic though. Probably because of the only other outcome of sharing an opinion.

Indeed, we again are a people of almost inescapable fear as found and felt within this world all but insisting to hear so much suggestion that they can’t leave anyone be but rather will berate the peace out of someone just to know whether this person is friend or foe. Yes, there seems to be no middle ground within this in between for everyone has become consumed with both community and competition. All that’s left is figuring out where everyone else fits.

And thus all the fits we see and hear people throw as if their contradictions are a matter of someone else’s alleviation.

Which is precisely my own personal problem in that, whilst I have absolutely no problem helping anyone who may be in need, I don’t personally find this fascination with hatred and division to be as necessary as so many here seem to assume. And thus I struggle anymore, rather mightily through most days, as the world around us just continues to insist that all of us should care about all these worldly worries that have so many so wrapped up inside themselves that it’s honestly amazing that they can find their way home at night.

Because everything is a fight. It’s all a matter of battle lines being drawn, and nearly the entirety of them all over the most insignificant nonsense imaginable. But that’s the problem with human religion as always being built upon human tradition. It’s like the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s. What starts as a simple disagreement or difference of opinion can rather quickly, and sometimes pretty violently, decay into a tradition of hatred in which those of younger generations don’t even know why they’re supposed to hate someone else, just that they’re supposed to.

All because we can’t actually accomplish that age old idea of live and let live.

It’s like everyone here thinks that they’re going to die if they don’t come to learn someone’s opinion about something apparently presently important. That’s the demise of such a socially entangled world as this one’s so clearly become. Everybody is so glued to everyone else’s life that we don’t know how to live our own without that constant inflow of fulfillment found inside a scrolling through lives we’re not living but can’t anymore seem to live our own without.

Why do we need so much suggestion in life? Is this all really that complicated that nobody can figure it out? Or is it that we’ve progressed so far past the point of logic and reason and reality that we actually can’t comprehend the simplicity of sanity?

So much for our being careful so as to not be taken captive by hollow and deceptive philosophy! Anymore we’re captives of the epitome of human insanity as seen such things as people eating Tide pods, which is sadly now proof of life as lived inside this incessant necessity of either saying everything we think without thinking it through, listening to everything everyone has to say without questioning whether or not it’s actually true, or just doing as everyone else does simply because it’s the thing to do.

Yep, it’s like we just wake up every morning, grab a jug of go juice, strap on our blinders and boots and we’re right back in the thick of it before we even leave the house.

What is so special about the ways in which this world has come to insist life is supposed to work that we can’t allow ourselves to walk away from our phones for more than second without some spine-tingling fear that we’ve missed something important upon the highlight reels of human tradition? We do understand that that is literally what we’re building within everything we do consistently, right? We’re not just reliving the thoughts and theories passed down to us from those who came before us. No, we’re also carving the paths that those around us and any here after will plausibly follow for themselves.

Are we upholding that responsibility responsibly? Or are we just doing whatever the world says we should without thinking about what it’s doing to us or that those ideas and idols are things that we ourselves will pass on?

What are we doing?

That seems all of the sudden a question I ask quite often in these posts, but it seems too one that we don’t really take the time to think about anymore. It’s the simplest of considerations, and yet because it is so inseparable from personal responsibility, well, I guess it’s easy to see why we don’t worry about it anymore. Because if there’s one human tradition that all of us love as much if not more than life itself it’s that idea that we can somehow live a life without personal responsibility.

Because we just hate all that consequence stuff and the costs they incur and the realization that our choices are in fact our own no matter how many people we allow to the table when we make them. It’s just really unfair, am I right? Why should we have to endure the undertaking of ensuring that everything we’re consuming is something that we’d be happy sharing? After all, what’s in our hearts never leaks out right? Not through our mouths or anything, right? Like, not ever, right?

No, wrong, and that’s the whole problem!

We’re so quick to forget anything and everything that we don’t want to remember that we’ve come to use that as a crutch, an excuse to excuse our lack of personally learning to appreciate the gift of both personality and personal responsibility, all because that’s what is normal anymore. That’s what we’re told all the time. It’s a message so common that nobody even has to say it anymore. We all just know. It’s inherent in us, this idea that if we just do whatever someone else tells us to, then it will either work out well or they’ll be to blame.

No, wrong, and that’s the whole problem!

Our lives are our lives folks. Our minds are our minds. Our words are still words that we speak with our mouths even if we’ve allowed a million liars to teach us how to share their lies. We’re still the ones doing it. And so with that now hopefully in mind, again, what are we doing?

What are we listening to understanding that it may well become something that we say that someone else listens to? What are we doing as now realizing that it is an action that someone else may themselves repeat? Are we being good stewards of this gift of life or are we otherwise so much like the rest of the world that has so utterly outsourced every aspect of life that nobody lives but the same life as everyone else? Indeed, when did we all just get together and agree that the best we could ever possibly be is nothing but a replica of everyone else as formed themselves by this world we’re in?

Look around my friends! Is this place truly what you want to emulate? And for those who don’t know, emulate means replicate. And replicate is the verbal form of replica. Replica means copy. And copy means that something is the same as something else. Is this world the thing, the place, the purpose, the path we want to be or become? Are the things people are doing, no matter how popular they may be, are they things we want to copy? The words we hear, do they sound like the things we want to say?

When we reach the end of this life as lived within this world do we want to fall upon the hope that living like everyone else was either the best choice to make or left us with everyone else to blame if not? Or do we perhaps want a plan with a little less doubt?

Because that’s what we’ve been offered. It’s not popular. Not normal. It’s most definitely not easy, and in fact getting harder. But we have been offered a different kind of life lived all but completely unlike anything and everything that almost everyone everywhere is doing and saying and thinking and assuming and supposedly even believing. It’s so different in fact that it’s promised a different outcome in the end.

But then again, can we truly afford to reach for something so different while most continue along as captives of perhaps the oldest of all human tradition in that of our being terrified to even contemplate the end of this life?

Again, that’s normal. It’s common. It’s popular and easy and thus easy to see why it’ll remain popular. What else is popular? What has easy ever done for us? Is something being common or normal or a tested human tradition truly able to ensure us something lasting?

See, the Bible tells us that if any of us lack wisdom, which if you didn’t know or weren’t really sure, we all do, if any of us, or in this case all of us, lack wisdom, we should ask God. Not Bob. Not Beyonce. Not Mike down the street or Michelle at work or Montavious stocking shelves overnight. He didn’t ask us to login to Youtube to see what so-and-so says on the subject. Didn’t ask us to seek common consensus as counted these days in likes or followers.

No, if any of you lack wisdom, ask God. Because only God can forgive us for having made gods of everyone else. Only God can save us from these ideas planted so deep that we don’t know how to think any other way. Only God can free us from this feeling of fear we find inside this world overflowing with suggestions that they suggest we take seriously so that they don’t feel unappreciated for their help living our lives.

Yes, only Christ can atone for our every choice made thus far at the input of anyone else, for anything other than His will for our lives. Again, our lives. They are our lives.

Or are they?

That’s the consideration for today. Are our lives our lives or are we letting other things, other ideas, other voices live them for us?

Just know that at the end of this road, and again, yes, it will end, at the end of all this we will answer for our lives alone. The presidential nominees will answer for theirs. The pope will answer for his. Your preacher will answer for his. The lady who brings the mail will answer for hers. And while that doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t try to help one other toward the best possible outcome of the only two promised, that is pretty much the point. We should try to help. We should try to better. We should seek mutual edification so that all of us grow to become more like He who is the head and has gone ahead to secure our only hope.

This world don’t believe in that though. This world is worried about other things. There are a lot of people here who don’t care about truth, about morality, about humility, about hope if it’s held beyond this life in which we’re told that plenty else matters just as much and is had much sooner. Do not build your life upon a foundation as shifting as that of this world so lost in progression that it has now progressed beyond reason.

For the same Bible that tells us to ask God for the wisdom we lack is the same that says that there is no other Name under Heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved. And it’s that same Word which says that this world is passing away and that any who are not His will not live, but that all who are His will live even though they die. Do not wait for a world that doesn’t care to finally agree that that hope makes far more sense than whatever this world is presently worried about trying to convince everyone else to believe.

Because it doesn’t matter how long something has been the way things are done nor how many have been doing them that way. None of it changes the fact that humans simply never had the right to determine how to live these lives that we didn’t give ourselves.

I don’t know, I guess I'm just finally at this place where I'm simply tired of reaping death from those many around us who don't care to live as if more might matter more than the less that this world so clearly seems to think matters most.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold