Day 3660 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 NIV

In its time.

As if to remind that time is the greatest enemy of all mankind. For we are here surrounded by such beauty and bounty as begotten by the eye of we the beholder of whatever it may be that we’ve here found to be beautiful or bountiful enough to be unto us the very beginning of what all we’ve come to hope within. But then, too, this seems a stark contrarian to the continuum of all things currently uncertain and thus unconsidered. Meaning then that, while beautiful enough to have become our every belief, that it’s all been made to be so brief is a cause to pause as we peruse what more may be possible still.

For while we may indeed seem to see the beauty as beheld beside all things proven in certainty, time has already told that we know not what tomorrow may hold.

Nor then what of the days are be in the ways of what is truly best.

No, such is the tempest that is time itself. For it daily rages into a ranging away of our regard for the fear of the best having already been found behind. And too it comes, this enemy of time, to fight against our every such fear of either having found what was already best or having now still lesser left in which to find the best for which we still may hope to see. And thus time, to me, is something of a contradiction to beauty in that, even as Scripture puts it, the grass withers and the flowers fade.

And thus what of what’s here can truly be perceived as best when all that’s here is but the little that’s been left of the more we’ve not seen, never been, haven’t come even close to knowing before. Indeed, this time is a great gift in every way as proven in every day bringing us blessing anew thanks to such things as the dew which falls from Heaven to kiss the plains upon which awaits our plans, should we’ve enough time to find them, that is. And I find that it’s in this ever-hurried version of hope as accosted by time itself that we’ve, ourselves, come to lean upon ourselves to get wherever is good enough so long as it’s found fast enough to not feel time slipping away.

But it is.

Which is instead a fact fought against by nearly everyone anymore in what’s become what often seems our final stance as stood against the time and chance that the writer of this very book says befalls us all. Yes, we seem a people whose greatest beliefs are anymore merely those things which seem to overrule time such as chin lifts and all this ongoing allure of the time travel fallacy as found within so many films and focuses these days.

Yes, we want so much to somehow prove that time isn’t forcing us to lose all that we’ve come here to love before we know we’ll leave. And so, as such continues to elude and prove perfectly evasive, this hope of time abated, we seem to have turned our tryings to simply avoiding the truth of time and how it’s more thief than theory. For none have ever been able to prove time something able to bend, and so rather we’ve willfully broken away from the beauty of belief for the ability to believe in what’s beautiful already.

Because make no mistake, every life is to be lived within what is a beautiful gift as given us renewed every single morning. The only difference then is the audacity to consider time something other than our greatest enemy. Yes, such is what I find faith helps us feel, that time is but a measure of everything here, beauty included as concluded of everything considered beautiful around us as found upon or along or even within this ground upon which we’re for now found.

Faith merely wonders as to the possibility of a place in which time cannot be the enemy as it simply cannot be used to measure the immeasurable.

Such as eternity.

Indeed, time doesn’t matter once we’ve left this place. And so what’s left then is for us to choose, whilst in this place, whether we succumb to the fleeting findings of what is in fact a beautiful beginning or if we rather look to what we can only trust is a beginning again that’s still to come up ahead. And in fact, it’s this very hope that’s caused some to wager the sum of all things seen for the uncertainty of the hope which says there must be more than the eye can imagine.

But see, the issue is that to so imagine beyond that which the eye can fathom demands a faith that we simply struggle to have within this place that considers such a trust as foolishness personified. And it’s been made such a personal indictment due to the unnegotiable characteristics of the eternally unmoved. What I mean is that we’ve grown so accustomed to the measuring of everything by either the mile or the minute that we cannot see in it any other way in which anything might be even plausible.

Let alone possible. Definitely not probable. Probably then not at all ever provable.

And thus we lose the plot of what is still the greatest story ever told. Simply because, due to time and other such measurings of our modern mundanities, we’ve left behind by now that ability to believe that a story could be still ongoing. We know only of those with happily ever afters or season finales. And so we cannot calculate the consideration that salvation is underway. We know only the beginning and the end, the start and the finish, the first and the last as matters made evident within the evidence of again happy endings or series finales.

Add on top our fear of the true end of our time here in what has in many ways become all the beauty for which we’ve long now been able to believe, and you’ve got yourself every reasoning to perceive that life is but ours here to lose. Because it’s all we can see, so much so that we’ve come to believe that the grave is but the end of the beauty we’ve beheld behind these eyes now blind to any belief beyond the certainty of the surface. Yes, we’re a people being held prisoner by our perceptions and their opinions of perfection.

Leaving then everything unknown and uncertain to feel a fear as felt within a lack of a faith that’s willing to risk that wage of a hope won later at the expense of a fair many more, granted more minute and minuscule, hopes had or held along the way to what many here only agree is the bitter end of everything.

Even beauty.

For our fears have found us feeling that our finality as proven in the mortal fragility of all humanity is but the ceasing of any chance to behold any further beauty. Because when we die our eyes close. And if we’ve by then believed life to be lived only through them, then sure, it seems that life must end when our eyes lose their ability to open again. Thus the common fear as felt amongst most around here.

It’s simply because we’re bound to fear all that we can’t understand when left to a life lived leaned upon our own understanding as undermined by such things as time and our continued war waged against it. And this seems to explain the growing dismissal of faith as felt within most anymore. It’s because faith is the fathoming of the otherwise unfathomable. It’s the willingness to leave unmeasured the obviously immeasurable. It’s the considering of the uncertain, the assurance of things unseen and in fact a confidence in the as of yet otherwise impossible to know for sure.

Indeed, faith, it’s a belief in both beauty and yet also it forever bettered. And this is anymore so very hard for us to continue imagining when surrounded by so much beauty and opportunity to better measure it as both society and technology merge together into a measuring of everything right down to the atom. But, as we’ve been talking about a bit, if beauty is nothing but something measured within the lone eye of one beholder then it’s baseless.

And too, if better is always something that can only come based upon our understanding of it or effort offered toward it, then so too is all such growth and improvement basically impossible. Because we’re all well aware that we cannot add time to this life, and thus that we’re running too low on opportunities to risk wasting any time upon those that are otherwise anything but certain. No, we are willing to live only for the already known or elsewise undeniably feasible. Simply because we know time is the one thing that we’re running out of.

So we’ll not risk placing any of it upon anything that could in any way be mistaken.

Such as all things seemingly impossible or presently not present or perfectly unperceivable. Yes, we will not give any of our time that we know we’ve now less of than we did yesterday to, within this day, considering anything that could be anything other than certain. It’s has to be provable for us to believe it. Such is why this monstrosity of an outlook considered within our tendency toward agreeing that seeing is believing. We love that lie because it’s just so much easier to believe in the beauty we can see than it is to imagine all that we haven’t yet.

But that’s where I find that I’ve fallen upon a different direction from the world around me. Because this world is controlled by can’t and I simply find might to be far more exciting. For sure, this world talks all about all it can’t see, especially when locked inside some debate as to the necessity of faith in life. But while this world focuses on what they can’t see, I find that I only wonder about what we might someday. Because time thus far has only come around to show me things that I hadn’t seen before.

Like self-driving cars and identity politics.

Indeed, there was a time when those things, at least the self-driving cars, were aspects of science fiction movies. But here we are! And thus, well, I find that any time spent worried about what I can’t see is just wasted as I cannot prove to not be there what I don’t know for certain isn’t. I’ve personally never lived this long, for in fact every day we break our own record for consecutive days alive.

And so who are we to say what is and is not possible considering we’ve awoken yet again into something that nobody has ever seen before?

There was a time, or in fact a great many of them, in which people feared the end of days. Doomsday theories and theorists trying, in vain, to calculate the end of time itself. Y2K. Mayan Calendars. I’m sure Nostradamus had a thing or two to say on the subject. But they’ve all proven feeble if not faulty if not simple folly as found in light of our fear of time stealing away our last opportunity to lay our hands or eyes upon what we’ve long considered the only beauty in existence.

Because we’re better at seeing excuses to quit living life than we are at finding reasons to imagine it might continue on into the eternal.

Indeed, I’d say that at this point we’re almost experts at the experimenting on and experiencing of any and all excuse to exercise our right to refuse to hope or trust or believe in anything better should such aim into the weather of whether or not we can find it or make there on our own before the clock runs out. But friends, is that not the beauty of faith, that it has absolutely nothing to do with us being alone or thus having to rely upon our own unique blendings of misplaced beliefs and times that are ending?

It’s rather a reliant trust placed in Christ to both see what we can’t, know what we don’t, do what we’ve not, and thus all combined into the leading of us to that where we’ve long since lost the ability to even imagine.

And yet that’s at least one part of why I do believe. Because He puts that distant idea of there being always more within every human heart for the express purpose of pulling us, even if begrudgingly, into the beauty of the better we’ve never been, known or seen before. He allows us to consider the cosmos as the continuation of exploration so that we find a fervor felt in our finding out what’s out there. He places these ideas of forever into our feelings as if to force us to feel that there must be more to this.

It’s all the story of how His will for us is better than ours could have ever even pretended to try to be.

And so it seems that it all comes down to whether we continue to lean upon our limitations in terms of such mortalities as time and sight and understanding, and thus continue finding the fears and failures attached to every such one of our shared inabilities, or if we’ll rather allow ourselves to hope bigger. Or in this case longer. For I consider that time will tell that a hope fulfilled is nice for the moment, but it’s that ongoing longing that truly makes life worth living for that’s what keeps us going into the unknown of all that’s proven as of yet only unseen.

And thus not necessarily impossible.

Indeed, I think that’s why He’s placed eternity in the human heart whilst said drum is caught presently beating amongst beauty aplenty. It’s to show us both the current evidence of His very existence, but to also inspire in us a wonder as to the more that such a limitless Creator might be capable of doing or proving within the fog that is always ahead along this journey called life as lived atop what feels a bridge spanning where we’ve already been and who we can still become.

And that’s what I want to know. Not just what I already have or probably will by the time I leave. No, I want to know what I can’t because that seems, to me, to be the last wilderness to and through that which we might wander in what is the last bit of wonder left to a life lived within a world all but lost within the limits of understanding and its ongoing assuming that since our time is ending that our lives must be the same doing.

For I believe we were made for that wild. And having only known it so long stifled, I want to feel again what it’s like to be alive inside a life lived outside of my control. And so it’s into the fog I go. Unto the unknown. Because I just can’t help but wonder if He put so much work into all that we can see, which is evidence of His existence, then what more might be even more beautiful as seen from only the other side of eternity.

Because sure, there is plenty that’s beautiful here and now. But that it all ends, or at least our chance to see it does, such just seems to limit the overall allure. But forever? No, seems to me that anything of beauty beheld beyond that line that’s been drawn by the end of my time, anything over there isn’t so betrayed by time or space or expanse. And so, if eternity does exist, and thus eternal life too, well then I want to know what that beauty looks like.

For this temporary version is in fact quite remarkable. But that it’s measureable and thus impermanent, well, such just makes it a limit that I cannot find any reason to believe He had in mind when He set all of this in motion. No, there’s got to be more. And while I can’t prove it, I also can’t disprove it. So why not imagine the better as opposed to settling for the lesser?

I mean, haven’t we already done that enough?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold