Day 3572 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 16:18 NIV

Despite whatever our design might delight, the fact is that the fall cometh unto us all, all then that seems left is our consideration as to what will arrive when it gets here.

Or rather we there.

Indeed, when it arrives unto our lives, this final fall as promised unto all, will it prove perhaps fracturing or all but perfectly fatal? Will it find us shattered beyond saving or among the few scattered still clinging to faith amongst the many without who thus didn’t see it coming? Will we listen to the hearts which want it not to come for sake of the horrifying humiliation to be both found and felt within the fall from where we’ve built ourselves? Or rather will we seek the sounds of the souls screaming inside to stop building this brink further into a life already at times blown apart by disbelief?

Yes, what if the difference which determines the overall survivability of this fall is measured not in our affinity for mediocrity but rather the degree of acknowledgement given unto He who came to warn against such a common tepidity?

You see, each of us have lived a way of life not at all unlike that of everyone else. Now sure, there are always differences and unique delusions to everyone’s choices and favorite illusions. We all have varying degrees of disappointment and delight as designed inside our way of life as all commonly having thus far been lived for us, alas not at all by us alone. We’ve all managed to mesh together a masterpiece of a rather wide array of misunderstandings and even more mistakes.

But the bottom line is that we’ve all built this life as if a tower within which we’ve sought only to continue climbing higher in what’s always been this standardized assumption of what’s long been a vanity’s lying telling us that we’re to be better off the more we think of ourselves. Yes, life has come to be what seems to me but anymore a most solemn equation in which we see ourselves as nothing more than the sum of our elation as divided by our disappointments.

Each of us trying thus as hard as we might to ensure the former overwhelms the fright of the latter.

But the question is coming upon that day when all fall down, a question in which He will ask us what did it matter? What did any of our undertakings uncover? What did we manage to build, believe, become, betray at these hands that we’ve all so often insisted get in the way so as to try in vain to ensure our way is the way it all went? What ended up proving capable of proving that we knew so well what we were doing that we designed a life that was indeed all our own, the very sum of our every decision?

What can prove capable of such when it’s undeniable that many of our every decision has been already thus far made for what hindsight now says a mistake?

Or, and more to the point I’m trying to make, can we even see hindsight from up here?

Because you see, the fact is that each of us have indeed been or become so high on ourselves, either at present or in times now passed into the past, that we lived as if we couldn’t see anything other than what we felt the almost divine authority to otherwise insist unfolding to what we’ve long demanded be our glory. Yes, so many of our days and designs have defined our times as having been spent upon what we wanted and too ignoring where everything else might have went.

Indeed, we’ve at present very scant evidence left of a lifetime in which we might find any hope of any help of our finding where it all went so wrong as to leave us doing it this way for this long, so long that we might not be able to even believe that there might have been, might still be a better way than this one we’ve called ours. Simply because humility has become such a matter of horror that we know not how to hold hope within it as, well, we’ve not even tried to hold humility all that much.

And thus how could we possibly understand where to look within it for the hope we’ve never imagined it having?

No, to us hope is something held within the heights of the highs for which we hope as opposed to the lows of which we so arrogantly claim we’ve never known. We all live as if we’re such tangible evidence of a life lived in undying betterment that we pretend that we’ve known nothing of limit, of loss, of laziness or lunacy or laxity as loved by all but somehow never admitted by any. For we’re the last to call ourselves lazy, looney, lost and lacking whilst looking still for what we’ve already found but only then unable to confess how unfulfilling it felt.

Rather we exist in what is a consist of a rather contextless confusion contained inside a delusion designed for us by us to leave us looking always as if we’re not as powerless and pitiable as our pasts prove. And as we continue to build ourselves out further upon these ledges of legendary lies and laziness, we’re otherwise anymore unable to realize that there is indeed a limit to our insanity. Simply because gravity has yet to be overcome for anything but a measurable amount of time.

Thus we cannot rely upon this infinite insanity to keep us aloft forever.

Especially when the gravity against which we’re living in competition is that begotten in Christ who came to live the Gospel which proves us sinners in need of a Savior.

There is no outrunning nor outshining this pinnacled standard of truth as there has been, as of yet, none other who’ve died to prove a point, further proving it by raising themselves back to life. And so despite our arrogance having become unto us a floor from which we cannot see, feel, imagine the fall, we will, yes, we will all. We will fall as Scripture says every knee will bow, whereupon each tongue then shall confess that Christ is in fact Lord, King, Savior and Shepherd who came indeed to save as many as could admit that they needed it.

And yet this is where we find ourselves in a particularly deadly predicament.

Because from up here, living a life so very high on ourselves, we can’t see it. We can’t see our need of His punishment as borne for us rather than as deserved which would be by us. We can’t see how we could deserve any of what was done to Him, and nor then can we understand why He did it. It makes no sense to these now singed senses which sing a song of our doing never anything wrong. We can’t compute His compassion when it’s compared against our stance of our needing none.

For if we can’t see that we need saved, then we won’t be.

It’s the horrid beauty of the Word’s clarity.

It levies against us a most loathsome leveling in which we’re lain low underneath the weight of our realizing our many wrongs as having always been there but too been ignored. It’s the opening of eyes to see things never hidden from sight, leaving us lost as to how we became so amazingly unable to see any of it. Yes, His Word, as brutal as it’s in every way truly supposed to be, it’s a perfected affront to our insanity as within it is found every story which tells the tale of someone trying to stoke their vanity only to be brought back to reality as defined, get this, not by us but by the God who created us.

Who’d have thought?

After all, we’re all so convinced that our lives are a matter of our own making, each of us making it up as we go so as to always look as if we’re right and know best and are as better than all the rest as we’ve long loved to confess. Problem is that all we’re making is ourselves the fool in what’s never been a story we began but rather one we’ve, in pride, only sought to overwrite by what’s to soon be proven a most underwhelming unwillingness to embrace the humility that God has shown us is the eternal key to everlasting life.

When did He do this?

In Christ.

For Jesus, the Cornerstone which the builders rejected, He came in what is humility perfected. And these builders He mentioned, well, they’re us. We’re the builders. We’re the craftsmen. We’re the construction workers working always overtime trying to make these lives feel as if yours is yours, mine is mine. Yes, we are the ones who have rejected Christ as the Cornerstone of our lives as we’ve needed Him nowhere around so that we could do as we please, finding our pleasure upon only this ground.

We can’t have Him sticking His call to believe in our business as our business is only about us, and alas, business has been good. We’ve each become what is the fortune 500 of faithlessness. Each of us have built a life based upon betrayal, blaspheme, insanity, vanity, idolatry, immorality, immodesty, dishonesty. All because here those things and the rest of their deceptive family, they form the foundation of every ivory tower and every gold-plated goon building them with a foundation only as firm as the lies we buy telling us that we’re doing it well.

And thus the fall which is coming for us all.

It’s, again, something so kindly warned of within the Scripture He breathed for our benefit. He tells us that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God, which is why He gives us this undue chance at falling upon the Stone as opposed to said Stone falling on us. For this Cornerstone that all we builders of our own lives, minds, eyes seeing our own wills as if walls within which we love writing this love story of our wanting a life lived without the will to do better nor a will left behind as we prefer pretend we’ll be here forever, He’s the One who will either intercede for us or rise to condemn us.

The difference determined by whether or not He knew us, which is an obvious problem on our part as His Word also says that He knows all of us, has in fact since before He formed us in our mothers’ wombs. And thus it’s not really about His possibly not knowing us but rather about our incessant arrogance living as if we needn’t know Him.

But again, such is why we’ve this day to perhaps do as our pride has thus far never found or felt any reason to. And to help us do what we’ve never found or felt the reason or necessity or urgency to do, He again breathed for us a humility as read within His Word wherein we’re offer the underserved opportunity to learn things other than those assumed by vanity.

Such as the part in Matthew 21 where He talks about the Stone falling on or rather being fallen upon.

For there is says that to fall upon this Stone of His Son will break to pieces whereas our waiting and living as if we needn’t be so broken will leave the Stone to fall on us in what is then an even furthered vengeance for our having so willfully denied Him for what became an entire lifetime. Indeed, to those same who do as such the Scripture says they’ll then be destroyed, not merely broken to pieces but rather crushed completely, ground to power as many translations put it.

And, well I don’t know about you, but it seems a far better dilemma to be then broken to pieces as opposed to being so utterly decimated as the idea of even those pieces being destroyed even further into what is referred to as powder.

Because as even He Himself was crushed for our transgressions and yet, as He’d said He’d do, He then went on ahead to rebuild what was never the Temple made of stone as if human hands had any say in the deal, but rather that made within the soul of which we’ve been made caretakers. Alas, we’ve been mostly only caretakers on extended vacations, spending the majority of our time, of our life building such things as doubt and delight as opposed to holding tight to His will for our lives.

And thus is now why there comes a final fall.

But again, when it arrives will it prove only to fracture and thus us left able to be healed, or rather eternally fatal as we never placed our hope inside the Healer?

That is the difference in this. It’s defined by whether or not we’ve any acknowledgement of Christ as Savior. Do we know Him as Savior? Do we know Him as our Savior? Can we know Him as our Savior if from up here upon a pride so lost within itself we see nothing but what we think of ourselves? Is our life the sum of what we think, or is it now time to stop thinking we have any say in this and ask Him to help us find our way back to the Way we should have followed all along?

Because again, the falls comes for us all. Where do we want to be when the aftermath is swept away?

Fact is that if we continue on ahead assuming that we’ll be okay and we can do this alone and all because we’ve become convinced that we’re better and bigger than reality says any of us can be, we will face a fall that is from so high on ourselves that when we hit the Rock who is the foundation of reality, there will be nothing left of us but the powder we’ve long pretended we weren’t.

Friends, we are but dust and patience.

He took us from the dirt and breathed into us the breath of life, letting us continue living in what is a patience so kind that He came in Christ to try once more to help us see that a life lived lost in vanity will only end in utter misery. And He took it all upon Himself to prove that He is of a mercy that wants indeed none to perish but rather all to come to repentance.

And so let us not fall into the hands of the Living God who will indeed so destroy all manmade distraction as all our false religion but rather embrace this chase to be found broken having chosen ourselves to fall upon Him in faith as opposed to the many upon whom He will fall in response to their demand that He again prove Himself further to them. No, let our breaking become an evidence of our agreeing that He is just as opposed to just the justice we so rightly fear for our having lived a life that’s all but thus far forsaken Him.

For, again as found within His Word, He shall not forsake those who come meekly to the throne of grace. But friends, nor will He fail to repay to the face of those many more who’ve lived a life upon this most distant of shore so far from salvation as found only in our falling away from Him despite the promise He purchased as He fell for all of us only to lift us all up and rebuild what has been broken to pieces by pride and preference. There is simply no rebuilding that which is pulverized into powder, as He’s already taken what was but powder and brought it to life once.

May we choose then the breaking, for it’ll be found far less the eternal cursing as found for those who live as if they’ll find a way out without He who is the Way.

No, let not pride convince you that you’ll not fall. For we all will.

Just how hard and then to what end seem the only things left us to decide.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold