Day 3613 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 90:10 NIV

To where and from what?

You know, it seems to me a clearer certainty every single day anymore that we’ve gotten the outcomes opposed. It’s so sadly common to misconstrue hope and meaning into matters made or measured within this moment and never held anywhere nor within anything elsewise. And this apparently agreed upon “understanding” of everything from life to its very meaning has caused us to discount the deeper depths to which we’ve been asked. And we agree to there never go because we know it would be a journey fit perfectly with everything from danger to doubt.

And well, we’ve already enough of those to go around!

Indeed, we’ve arrived in this way of life in which, as we discussed yesterday, the only thing we never really seem to worry about is time. It’s as if the clock is just there to mock! “Watch me,” we say, insisting that the ticking tune its attention to our proving it wrong. Because surely it’s not really running out. Surely we have plenty of hours and days and years left to use and abuse. I mean, after all, we’ve all had so many of all the above already that we’ve no reason to imagine anything less than at least a remaining half.

Maybe that’s why we stopped using the hour glass. Must be something about the sand that might make it harder to deny that maybe the heavier half has already passed.

But thankfully, well, seems we’ve plenty of other priorities and their pursuits to peruse in what is a lawsuit in which we continue to unwittingly lodge accusations against ourselves in the form of all these assumptions of ‘surely not’ and ‘you only get one’ and ‘we’ll sleep when we’re dead’ and ‘live your own truth’. Yes, we’ve heard all this junk for so long now that it seems we’re overly if not overtly jaded to the very idea of life being a journey. No, rather we want roots which sink us deep into right where we’ve stood ourselves in what is only a stance taken against ourselves for sake of the wind won the other way.

Indeed, seems that we’re only always here afraid to move, to try, to beg, to buy, to live, at least as if we’ll die because of it. No, we don’t much appreciate such consequences to actions we didn’t ask for. In fact, it seems that even that idea made the rounds for a while, that lie that we’re not responsible for what we didn’t ask for, life thus being basically akin then to one of those etch-a-sketch things in which we just shake it violently if the picture we’re trying to make of straight lines somehow doesn’t come out just right.

Because what are the odds of that happening? I mean, surely we can paint this self-perceived portrait of a life picture perfect using nothing but a couple of dials and a whole bunch of straight lines and 90-degree angles. Yeah, nothing round in our nature! And yet perhaps that’s the problem, we’ve so rounded off our edges trying to fit where we don’t that we don’t have any idea what it is anymore to live outside these lines we’ve drawn for ourselves.

And it’s because of these lines that we’ve become of this mind in which time is the only thing that somehow doesn’t matter anymore. Because we can’t allow it to matter anymore. We can’t allow ourselves to imagine that there might be more than we’ve been living for. Can’t tolerate this idea as designed by faith that says our time here is fleeting and finite, but that if we go ahead and die to self then we could live for both something else and in that too thus with the hope of living eventually somewhere else wherein, once in, time truly won’t matter anymore because forever finds no reason to count what doesn’t end.

All we see from here though, inside this idea that has us running in fear of perhaps the only remaining inevitability in life, is that we can. That we can deny death its due. That we can find a way to keep on going to what we want and running through what more we don’t. Again, it’s all just straight lines and right angles down here where the only winds that blow are the ones we allow to even try. And it’s this lie brought to life in only our minds that’s left us living against the wind of God’s will, earning for us a wrath that we simply cannot survive as seen inside the Christ who came to die so that we could share in the getting it over and the then getting on with something better.

But for so long we've lived but half a life, always hedged in from that whole by our arrogance, our assumptions, our arrogant insistence upon assuming that we know what we're doing trying to deny the only shared outcome owed by all who walk this thing we call life. But you see, that’s just it! It’s all become a matter of our making things mean what we want them to, or rather wish they would. We’re nothing but petty thieves trying in vain to steal the pen so that we can pencil in a few more years toward the end.

Or preferably before, I mean we’d really like another go at our teens and all the fun scenes we saw back then, an extra set of our 20’s might be nice, a side of our early 30’s perhaps, and we’d even be willing negotiate the 90’s that we probably wouldn’t enjoy all that much if it would help close the deal. After all, how much fun could nursing homes and rocking chairs really be? Jello’s probably still fun though.

But no, we want our life to unfold how we see fit, always fitting it inside this lie that says, again, we’ve plenty of time to make all the mistakes we need to break and just confess to the utter lack of confusion later on. Lack of thereof because there’s no way we can ever convince Him that we truly didn’t know what we were doing, especially what with all this noise we make about, well, how we know what we’re doing. No, the cold hard truth is that we've only bought that lie we’ve sold only to ourselves because it helps us to ignore the overall gravity of a lifetime being not at all ours to define. It’s just that we want to so that perhaps we can find a way through all these winds that don’t blow just right and keep us up at night.

We need our sleep for crying out loud! Life’s just easier when we’re at rest in slumber.

And yet our having become so lukewarm as to utterly deny where life’s from has left us having only ever seen to the limit of our sight, known only the distance our minds can imagine, heard only what was spoken either inside or in the near vicinity, believed only in the very meager beginnings of a faith so vast that we cannot possibly understand it from where we're standing. No, we've long existed on the wrong side of this eternal divide, almost as if we ourselves and this world we're in have formed a fence keeping us from knowing more, believing more, loving more, being more. Living more?

All because this place settles still for the half we can see.

Because it’s that half that allows us to see our strength, our abilities, our plans without their futility. Indeed, this life lived here is one lived so blind to everything bigger and better, such as forever, that we anymore care only to consider that we’re going to be 21 forever. And all this trying so hard, in vain alone as that’s pretty much all we know, to keep our understanding of life on this side of the grave’s divide, it’s caused us to not only discount eternity but to also live as if it couldn’t possibly be better than the 70-80 that we may or may not have until then.

What if we don’t even have 80? Or 70? Or 40?

What if leaning upon such assumptions as sight, sound, self or surround has only inspired us to the point in which we’ve sold our souls to the hollowness of the ways in which this world has settled for accepting, such as this idea of our 70-80 to being our biggest and bestest blessing? What if all that this world has settled to accepting, the laziness, the laxity, the levity and brevity of life itself has only inspired us too to live as if we’ll live here forever, inspiring inside then a share of this search for a quote un-quote ‘best life’ as defined within one in which winds don’t blow and storms don’t come and struggle is never known?

Can a life truly live inside such insanity spent all but demanding such impossibility?

What is a best life if it’s lived on only this side of knowledge, of reason, of reality, of vanity, of responsibility, of compassion, of passion, of purpose, of purity, of hope, of home, of Heaven, and thus nowhere close to forever? What if this ‘best life’ that everyone else is clamoring about is only a life ever half-filled with only the fraction of hope and peace that this wicked place might pretend to offer? Not that we don’t want more, just that we’ve come to become convinced that it’s not worth the weather, the whether, the wind, or tether to what is a hope so heavy that it shakes its head at the suggestion of it fitting inside only 70 or 80?

Indeed, what if all that this world offers over here on this heartbreaking half of life is merely a really big distraction from the ability to witness and want for, war for the blessings God has been pouring out for all our lives in the forms of the winds and rains we’ve learned only to deny until our lives are now overflowing with a goodness we can’t recognize? Or actually having written it that way, it’s not even a half. Perhaps a quarter of life? An eighth? I mean, it’s been a minute since I’ve factored out fractions, but honestly how does one divide forever into fragments or some sort of possible percent?

It’s madness I tell you!

And yet it’s a madness that we somehow agree to almost every day anymore. It’s met within this assumption that, again, time doesn’t matter because all we think does matter is the weather and whether or not it’s anywhere close to anything we’d call ‘nice’ within all our small talk undertaken to, again, turn our attention from having nothing of a life worth talking about? Because friends, truth is that not much matters more than this little time in this life we have left. Why? Because it’s holding every chance we have to learn something new, do something new, be something new, lose something old, try something better, fight for something bigger, surrender all that’s lesser.

And again, considering you can’t divide forever, is not then everything here only everything lesser?

As this verse puts it here, we’ve got but a set number of years, and of that number that we already don’t know, the vast majority of them are already hard enough as of it is without our adding our stupidity to the mix. And yet that’s all we seem to focus on anymore. Life has devolved into this daydream in which we plan our steps and ensure our paths and pick our prizes before we even start moving. Because we know that both we are moving toward that otherwise invisible line of the end of our life and too as hard as we can in the other direction trying our very best to only avoid it.

But what are we actually avoiding as we’re found again today only standing in what is this middle ground found between what God has sent to lead us home and our fear of having to face it? Reality? Inevitability? Humility as held inside the truth of our struggle-filled mortality? Friends, we are not getting out of this alive! And no matter how hard we may want the storms to leave us alone and the winds to never blow against us and our pretty little houses so filled with plans and pretenses to keep standing forever, they can’t. They’re not meant to. We’re not meant to, at least not here.

And yet that’s the gift! It’s the hope of that promise held just beyond the horizon.

Who cares how hard this part gets before we get there? Will it change what’s there? Will it change He who’s waiting for us? Will the winds of want and wish and wrath and wander get the better of us before we ever even learn to care as to what or who might be waiting beyond this 70-80?

Sadly, it not only might but for many it already has. We’re surrounded by people so afraid of everything from life’s difficulties to its eventually ending here that they simply live on the run. Anytime the wind picks up they quit. Anytime something bad happens they get upset. Anytime their plans go up in smoke they scream at God for being so mean as to save them from the unforeseen regrets found along the way to their way. And that’s been something in my mind for a while now. It’s that our way doesn’t matter folks.

Our way is nothing. Our life is nothing, at least so long as we try in vain to live it only our way under only our strength. No, on our own we can neither make anything we want come to pass nor anything that God might need from us. We can do nothing on our own, often can’t even stand in the wind that blows so often against us. What then are we trying to prove with all this stuff about a ‘best life’ and our ability to write ‘our truth’ and every other cliché like them? What can we know of a best life when we control so little that happens in it? Of what use is our truth when reality blows it away?

Can any of us, by worrying or running or getting upset or throwing a fit or cursing at God and denying His existence, can any of us in any of that add anything to ours? Like I’ve said friends, we’re nothing but dust and patience. We’re jars of clay that God’s given another day. And yes, this day is just like all the others and filled with far more problems, fears, failures and disappointments than we’d probably like. But maybe those aren’t the things we should be running from!

Maybe they’re nothing but open doors to seeing that God is the One sending the wind so as to inspire us to take shelter in His Son.

“Even those who seem secure.” We discussed that verse from Psalm 39 yesterday, and honestly, I think it’s maybe one of the single greatest lies that needs to be exposed. Because folks, truth is that outside of a faith in Christ and trust in God, in fact a fear of God, we’ll never know anything of security as our only understanding of security as considered outside of Him is found in things like money and fame and plans and dreams and expectations and our endless assumptions.

Are we truly willing to bet our eternity on 70 years, maybe 80, of guessing just right and getting upset when we’re mostly wrong and thus unable to endure the wrath of our wishes going unmet?

My point is that we’re not only running out of time but we’re also out of reasons to keep thinking that we can do this on our own or somehow make it mean what we’d like it to mean or ensure that we’ll have other chances to come to our senses and step for once into the wind that is God’s will, sent only to remind us just how feeble and fleeting our lives really are. It’s that we were never meant to do this on our own, and He both made us to live a life that’s limited by time, but also one perhaps even more limited by ability.

We cannot do this alone as we’ve neither the power to press through nor the time we’d need to figure out how else to. We need God, His patience, His kindness, His mercy and compassion. We need His gifts of hardship and testing and weathering and waiting as they all teach us to rely on Him as only is He able to overcome what we’ve learned only to run from.

Friends, none of us know how much longer we have, and truth is that it doesn’t even matter as much as our fear of death says it should. We are all one breath away from not having another here. For our lives are as fragile as a flower facing a funnel cloud. Do we really want to face the rest of this alone considering we don’t even know how much longer the winds will blow?

Or should we instead ask Him to do whatever it takes to help us learn to stand on faith?

The way I see it is that we’ve got either at best 70-80 to figure this out or we can take today and step out into the faith that would then allow us to not worry about how we can’t. What’s the best use of our time? Trying in vain to either understand or change everything we can’t or simply letting go of trying to do what we were never supposed to and instead clinging to the only One who’s already overcome the storm? He knows the way my friends!

Don’t bet on trying to find another within whatever time you’ve got left. Because the wind just keeps blowing it away. What will we allow to be taken with it?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold