Day 3595 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

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 firm. It’s amazing how the mysteries of our Father’s workings always manage to work out in such a way that proves us ignorant in regard to the grand scheme.

Such as Christmas being a celebration of both our every single reason to have been condemned ourselves but instead awaking early to rejoice at gifts given and food coming and lights shining and friends singing alongside strangers outside our windows those same songs we used to hear this time of year. It’s perhaps the effect of affect in, well, full effect.

Indeed, that’s what hit me this Christmas time, the realization as to the similarities between commonly considered divisionary tactics as used to separate the admittedly wanted from the ashamedly hidden. The distance between where we should be and where He came from to lead us elsewhere. The difference between the love we’ve never known and the love He’s always shown. The miracle of mercy as made in the messes we made that needed it, and those we make still that need it still.

Yes, there’s come this year a stillness inside that I didn’t know I always knew I was missing. For the last several years I’ve really limited my life down to one or two main priorities and I’ve sought out the extremities in regard to both. And while I thought all this time that doing so would help me to do both right, it only left me struggling to find the perfection I imagined I could come upon, and too doing everything else wrong all along.

I suppose that’s what’s supposed to happen when we miss the exit to effect in exchange for the chance to affect the change we think would have the best effect.

And yet then Christmas comes bringing, as always, the reminders of the violent simplicity to everything from salvation to surrender, and in fact the very story of how the former was bought by the latter as the Father sent the Son to settle the matter. And it’s in fact a story so kind that it alters time, speeding up the miseries so that the joy has more time to stay. And that’s become, at least I think, my new direction in life. A hurried wait to find what I’ve missed hoping that I’ve not missed more than I might find I have.

A chance all of us have thanks to this Son who came to us to come through for us so that we could see that it’s not about us as none of us could do what His love already did.

Which is the effect of affect as considered inside His coming to earth at the momentary expense of Heaven’s peace, comfort traded for contention, delight for our detention, innocence buying our bereavement of a life lived in so much appeasement that we’re each but apartments filled with so many empty rooms that we’ve no idea how much we stand to lose when it all comes crumbling down into the finality of a life that only ends for a moment.

For one day is to Him a thousand years and too a thousand years but a day. Almost seems to inspire this wonder as to whether or not our days matter in anything even resembling such a way that will have any effect on the outcome, knowing that not much of all we do means all that much as none of it can change what He’s already finished.

Wave upon wave of His wanting more for us than we’ve ever asked from ourselves.

It really is quite the amazing gift to be so reminded as to the so very much more that He both has in store and too that we’re so used to only storing inside these vessels made to break wide open as if lives lived atop the ocean welcoming every bit of whatever He determines to do within the desire that our lives be lit on fire so as to show the whole world that we’ve no reason for still being here as much as still we seem to be. Seems like a gift meant to inspire us to do something with this new lease on life.

Affect vs. Effect.

Yes, this idea woke me up this morning after a night spent mostly praying about all I’ve been learning of late thanks to Christmas doing as Christmas does and demanding that I do some thinking, some praying, some searching alongside some halting of other searches. Something about the love of it all just makes all of everything else not matter for a moment. And perhaps it’s within that moment, this moment here, that I, that we are meant to find that affect and effect aren’t so different after all.

For is not affection effective? And is this not what we celebrate at Christmas? Indeed, does not the effect of affection relieve the agony of affliction? So much so that we manage to steal a day away from routines and schedules to allow stores to close and the gifts we give to matter more than the time we spent spending money to buy them in the rush leading up to the quiet of a moment spent reminding our loved ones we love them?

Might not both affect and effect inspire anything from deflection to defection? Something that allows us to deflect the world’s inflection of infection as felt in this constant inspection and subjection to status quos and holiday hours? Indeed, do we not defect from our normally scheduled programming of a life lived planning to spend a day without a worry as to what we’re missing? Are we missing anything here inside these moments spent amongst reminders of the love that brings life to life?

What if the effect of love is but an affect chased forever by love?

For to affect is to alter, to change, to inspire perhaps whereas the effect of said affect is the result either received or still expected. Yes, is not both affect and effect merely a matter of expectation, sort of the kind that we discussed in the oddity of what is humanity’s attempt to define hope? Again, hope is defined as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.” And thus is not hope, at least apparently, but an effect of an affect aimed at a betterment as bought by believing so hard in it that it explodes into a certainty?

Is this not what Christmas is in its entirety?

Seems as if that’s what it seems to be to me. It’s an expectation, only one written backwards as it had nothing to do with us pretty much at all. We’re but the receivers, the recipients, the ironically rebellious somehow now holding the receipts to a gift we didn’t buy and couldn’t if we tried. And try we have! For all of us have tried ourselves tired seeking to force our needing this idea of mercy to just go away. Like I mentioned, I’ve suddenly realized that I’ve spent 5-6 years doing things in an extremity that never accomplished the effect I hoped to affect.

Which is the same as what all of us do. We all seek these things that we can do or be or become thinking that it’s on us to accomplish them, to affect them, to bring them to effect. And yet, we pour so much of ourselves into the ideals that we become our own idols in such a way that leaves us unaware of the many things that are affecting us in the worst of ways.

We are, anymore, living only at risk of being only our own reflects of affects proven ineffective.

Simply because we’re anymore too busy for love to do what love’s meant to.

Such as what we see most perfectly around Christmas time when life slows down and thoughts do too. It’s a time spent in reflection, introspection, investigation, gratification maybe. Yes, sadly this too seems a side of Christmas time that’s anymore quite common. The seeking of gratification as found and felt in our giving or getting the perfect gift as requested by those who ask for what we want, perhaps never knowing our every need is already so overwhelmingly met that to request a wish is almost heart-wrenching in certain retrospect.

But have we most days the opportunity at such retrospection as the reconsideration of our every commonality as shared across a world racing so fast that, no, none of us can typically admit we do have such an opportunity as given inside of every single day we’re given. We’ve anymore only such time in things like vacations and holidays and birthdays and getaways to the life we’d live if our lives weren’t lived in such a way that left us only looking forward to getting away.

What are we running from and why aren’t we there yet?

Maybe it’s because we’re running away from life and love as lived together in what is now proven, in Christ, an eternal inseparability that proves perfectly that what we’re doing is only driving our own insanity. All because we gave the keys of this bus to the world around us and just settled in for a long-winter’s wreck as wanted by all without any reason or recollection as to why.

Why are we so busy as to miss what’s always been seen so easily?

Are the things we’re affecting bringing the effective kind of outcomes we’d hoped to affect? Or are we just infecting the innocence found again on our behalf by the only One who has any at all, let alone enough to go around? Why are we so often avoiding the things we find and feel around this holiday, such things as humility and gratitude, as if plagues not welcome or wanted where we play? Is life a game only on holidays? Or are we still not holding any of the cards any other day of the year?

That’s what amazes about the gift of Christmas as given in the King which gave both the holiday’s name its etymology and too our name a chance to change around an entire eternity, not on our own of course. No, He came to change our course, to change our cords, to loose our chains and dry our chins from the tears in which we drown, worries wearing us thin. And this is such a cause to pause the pursuit of more chains to wear and tears to watch that we all agree to slow down and enjoy a day spent apart from the race.

At least once a year.

Because I think deep down we know that it’s only a race to last place, which is where we should want to be, only that by going at it as backwards as we do we’re only setting ourselves up to lose when life and love collide. Simply because we live so lost in this assumption that they’re somehow far enough apart that they can experience what we’ve come to expect.

But they’re not.

For God brought the two together so powerfully one night that all of our every forever was altered. All because He saw fit to affect an effective way to help us realize that life is a gift and that as such it’s worth more than our trying so hard for 364 to make it line up to a life lived inside these lines that we drew for ourselves at the expense of the freedom felt only beyond them.

He came to lead us outside the hem of this world were in because He loves us too much to leave us so lost inside a place we’re all leaving behind. So He came to go first so that we don’t leave this opportunity last in our lives. Because He knows we have, and such is why He came to change things up a bit.

Or a bunch.

So much so that we can come to see, I pray, inside this display of a gift so deep that the world had and has no room for Him to fit, that we need to come out of it. The world. Ourselves. Our minds. Our plans. Their preferences. Every one of our opinions. Every idol we’ve purchased. Every extreme we’ve chased. Every dream we’ve had and all the ones we’ve felt go to waste. Yes, He came to help us see all the waste in our lives as won in such things as time given to what doesn’t give it back and hope placed where hope doesn’t exist and praise offered to pitiable pursuits and lives lived in suits as if looking good to a world living wrong means anything.

It doesn’t. For we’re not here to serve expectations. Not here to measure up to all this comparison so many are doing. Not here to live in fear of failing to meet the world’s requirements. Not here to even admit the world can have any worth our attention. It doesn’t. No, the only requirements that matter were met in Christ who told us Himself what He came to affect. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

And thus the Law is filled, leaving us only to uphold the part that never changed. Love the Lord with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. Affection in affect leaving us living effective lives simply because we live to serve the One who came to serve us with a hope that continues to fill our hearts as we empty our lives of all that He’s still washing away.

And that gift, that constant cleansing, the ongoing ebbing and flowing as felt out here between faith and fear, it’s something that came to begin this ever-reminding of a love so vast that everything else instantly and eternally pales in comparison. Because knowing that He came and then why He came simply changes everything.

At least it has for me. For I want nothing else in life, of life, for life or from life than to let Him take over so completely that somehow, someday, I manage to do something that might bring Him all the glory and honor and praise that His coming here only to take my place so fully deserves. It’s just that I know I can’t do that on my own. And yet, thankfully, Christmas is the reminder that we don’t even have to try as that was just never the point.

No, the point was that He loves us because that point is more than enough to affect the change that leaves our lives having an effect that is felt all the way to Heaven as we’re told that there is rejoicing up there whenever one of us comes to the senses that He came to bring us back to once more.

And if there’s a better gift to serve, to share, to speak about and actually hope others hear, I don’t have any idea what it could possibly be.

For nothing else here leads to forever. And so nothing else here will retain any of my focus. Because I know in my heart that I shouldn’t have the opportunity focus on what brings the forgiveness I know I need.

But since I can, I see no reason in holding anything back.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold