Forged By Faith

1 Peter 2:11 NIV For what freedom is there to be found within this forced feeling that we’ve more we’re needing to keep our hearts beating while still bleeding for this bleating of believing that there’s more still in this world that might make our lives more full, filled or fulfilled? And yet, as we reach again what feels another end, what of this raging commonality will be allowed to venture with us into this coming batch of newness? What of all that’s behind us is welcome to stay alongside us? Who in terms of those many either people or pleasures are to be considered still welcomed treasures that are thus invited with us into the gift of the beginning which awaits just beyond this nearly ended? Seems that something so simple as a calendar change has often been used to inspire such intrigues as these. Alas we coin them all ‘resolutions’ for sake of feeling as if we’re doing something but yet without the resolve that makes all resolutions revolve. Indeed, just how involved are we to b...

Galatians 5:13 NIV What if the only way to ever know freedom is to walk in the shoes of a servant? See, the satisfaction of a servant mind isn’t won within the wealth of a world spending this life serving only itself but is rather rewarded within the realization that life here is but a roundtrip and thus we’re all headed back to something more than everything here. And this understanding as understood by seemingly scant few these days, it’s one that brings along with it what I find feels like what is a companion consideration that exists inside what seems a counterpart, a cousin, a close kinship of sorts. And that is that the rarity speaks to the gravity of the volume of what we say being fulfilled not in the volume within which the world relies in terms of loudness but rather the honesty of what may often come across as but a limitation to our offerings. Which is where I find humility to do its best workings. For somewhere along the way we’ve largely lost sight of this frame of mind i...

Mark 10:45 NIV As if to be the first to cast a crown into the sea of humanity, so Christ came to show us humility so as to in hopes restore the humanity to humanity, even if through the somehow still often seen hostility of humility. And somehow, such is still indeed what we so often seem to see. Yes, we live as if humility is a hostility as it speaks in the language of honesty and mortality while still in a world lost in a war of words waged between each of us seeking to prove that it is us alone who knows what means most. And yet, we can’t as it’s only when honesty and mortality are combined that can be told the tale of this trip we call life. Because alongside this ride away from the righteousness of reality as given us in our share of His regality as made manifest at first within us and then again in He who came to save us, we lost sight of the weight of life. We discounted, devalued the worth of a life, so much so that as seen in the cross of Christ, we even left behind the ‘kind’...

1 Peter 4:10 NIV To have been so assured and insured that our hope were and will continue to overflow, as such they are, is to bestow an invitation as to the extending of the same grace as has been given in place of that first that He gave. For grace is but an open door. It’s a revolving reverence. It’s a gift given meant then to be given away. Grace is this place to which we go that runs along the outskirts of both Heaven and here, asking us that we might invite the delight to walk this line between mercy and madness as blurred so violently within a humanity that needs the former because of their fondness for the latter. Yes, grace is a gift so God-given that it both settles the matter and then further unravels whatever we once thought to matter more. Because when stood face-to-face with forgiveness, what’s a soul to do but to break down in empathy for the others around who may likely be as of yet unable to see what God’s given them. All because we’re not taught to see such things in ...

John 1:16 NIV And now it’s the lone reason we’re still standing in what is a life lived as if drown underneath what are wave after wave of a mercy and grace so deep that we are indeed sinking to depths no human could go. That’s what I love of this faith that continues to find me for reasons I seem to daily to leave unfound myself. I see not what He sees in me. I know not what He has in store for me. I dream for less than what is His best for me. I’ve left no stone unturned seeking His will for me, and yet as here I sit still I see nothing more than a mountain of mistakes piled so high into the sky that sometimes Heaven seems a lifetime away in a place that I could no more reach than into the past in which all those mistakes were made that need now yet another flood. Only one this time of grace as opposed the grave. For that’s the truth of what I see. Maybe it’s through eyes now blinded to the hopes I’ve always known to look for. Maybe it’s eyes seeing finally what and where hope always...

Psalm 130:4 NIV For, “If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand?” It seems as though verse 4 highlights the hope whereas verse 3 pinpoints the problem, both coming around to the combing of the magnificence of what we celebrate at Christmas. Indeed, it’s something that manages to hit me somehow differently every year anymore. And yet despite the design or divide, each year is still defined in many ways the same too. It’s become quite the challenge to a consideration as it always changes and yet stays the same. Kind of the perplexity proven between affect and effect. I remember growing up and finding that similarity in spoken word as defined by the difference between one letter determining the verbal form of the same idea from the idea’s use as a noun instead to be an almost condemnation in regard to my ongoing interest in the English language. Look at me now! Guess it’s sort of like the kid who despised geometry that grew up to own a construction company or engineering ...