Day 3663 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Corinthians 15:54 NIV

So then why the sky?

That question crossed my mind yesterday as I climbed closer to it within what is an apartment stairwell on a mail run reading a credit card offer that sought to inspire my debt with the promise of the sky still being the limit for what might be possible should I have all this extra funding that was never mine to begin with. And it’s within such oddities as these that I find an inescapable truth in regard to how the Lord does indeed work in some pretty strange ways!

Like using junk mail to inspire what is today’s attempt at my once again seeking His glory through a story He’s been telling both to and through me for a growing portion of my adult life.

A story set in impossibilities that only a child could believe.

Because it’s one asked in questions pondered in response to common normalities such as old wives tales and a culture of clichés. And in fact it’s one that brings about such wonderings within even the wee hours of the mornings in that just this morning I was jolted up with an idea that demanded me jot it down for sake of this post shared today. It’s that faith isn’t merely the courage to ask questions but is rather something of the audacity to not stop long enough so as to wonder as to the answers.

And I find this quite perfectly peculiar in that we live within a world right at home within the rhetorical. Indeed, so much of humanity seems only willing or interested, or truth be told, both as they’re anymore so resembling of one another that they seem nigh inseparable or even most days distinguishable, to ask the questions that we already know the answers to. And thus life’s devolved into something rather cyclical if not clinical in that we follow our pride in such furthered and fervent fealty that we don’t even have the guts to ask a legitimate question in regard to the greater reality.

We rather insist that we know all the answers first and then ask questions from there that lend to our haughty opinion of ourselves.

But then this leaves us never possibly learning or growing or going where life is spent flowing into the knowing of the more we don’t quite yet. That’s the beauty of faith, at least to me, that it opens doors that lead to open doors that end up in a place that has only outer gates and no other such limits once inside. And this hope of that home with He who made me and saved me in that place He calls Heaven, that’s become something so tangible within my faith that I find a swelling willingness to wonder into those places where we ask those questions that we’ve long known would probably make so little sense to anyone else that we’ve just kept them locked inside all this time.

Like why the sky?

See, around here we’ve this commonly agreed upon limit of our reaching the sky being the moment that we’ve then left only to turn back as we’ll have reached the limit of whatever it was that we started out reaching for. Or at least apparently. But as of about 3:40 this morning, I’ve been wondering why we continue agreeing to such stoppings in life. Why is the sky the limit? Was there a vote I missed? A meeting that I wasn’t invited to? When did we agree to this? Why did we agree to this? Is the sky as high as we’re willing to fly? Or rather anymore are we ever willing to try even that high?

Why the sky?

Been thinking a lot about a childlike faith and that’s brought me back to those younger years in which we reached for the stars without any ability to imagine that we might not make it to them some day. And so, considering how as adults we’ve now settled for embracing the sky as the limit, I’m kind of left wondering what did the stars do to us that we stopped reaching for them instead? I mean, why can’t the moon be the limit? Jupiter?

Personally, if there were a meeting that I happened to miss and there I’d have had a vote, I would have voted we consider Pluto as the starting point of any such limitation to our every expectation in life. At least it would give us a fair distance to go before we had to start worrying about slowing down or stopping. Plus I personally think that Pluto got hosed by losing planet status, planet card, planethood?

Anyway, why the sky?

Because, to ponder this weirdness of our agreeance to limits in a different way, if the sky were our normal, what would be the limit then from there? Where would we imagine we could reach if we started at the sky? If the clouds were clods and we could stand atop them and believe from there to the everything beyond them, then what then? Where could we go from there? What might we see if we didn’t allow the sky to be the line that we were unable to believe beyond? Who might we be if we were a people who didn’t so agree to such a thing as any such line in life?

For I don’t think we’re supposed to. See, we’re all called in Christ who is the image of He who created us in His, back unto a faith that walks not by sight and thus has no ability to imagine a finish, a finality, a firm form of fulfillment that we could reach and from there know or grow no more. And I consider that we’re called to such an inability to see the way because, as proven within this life in which we can see, do see, all we have seen are apparently reasons to stop short of what is as of yet still the greater unknown.

And my understanding of faith is that it doesn’t subject itself to such limitations. For again, faith isn’t the courage to ask questions but rather the audacity to not worry about the answers. Because in fact we should be so used to believing so big that the questions we ask have only answers that just don’t make any sense right now. Which is kind of like what Christ said in that for now we see only in part, know only in portion. But that one day we would understand in full when we’re finally at that place that we’re fully known.

But that’s the heartbreak of it all. It’s that we’ve stopped believing big enough to even ask questions.

Again we rather just resort back to those so rhetorical that they bring nothing new to life, chosen anyway for the simple sake of how they also bring no risk of our being wrong. Which is exactly why I still think we manage to find all this fear in life. It’s not because our fears are reasonable or logical or able to add anything to our life. It’s rather because it’s just easier to use fear as an excuse to try and justify some limit that we’ve allowed to form in front of our faith found always beyond them all.

Yes, faith is a matter measured beyond every limit and all fear. But that we’ve all known so much more of fear and the limits that it always seeks to agree to is probably why we still wrestle with the presently perceived impossibility of death being overcome. Because we’ve seen, met, known a great many people who are no more and thus are seen no longer. And this to us who live by sight seems to say that our not seeing them seems to prove something of the limit of life.

And if there is this, let’s call it a grand finale, well then maybe we would be better off living by fear than by faith. Because our every fear is found in trying to avoid something that could cost something. It’s this built-in self-protection system that relies on us to look out for ourselves trying to steer clear of anything and everything that may prove dangerous or disastrous or deadly. Yes, life here is lived trying to avoid death, and yet death remains the one thing in life that is firmly guaranteed unto all.

Or is it?

Why the sky?

See, in many ways any kind of limit is just that, it’s death. It’s an ending to something. It’s the stoppage of a movement or message or mission. Every limit is a point or place in which all momentum is ceased because there is neither any way to continue it as nor is there anywhere toward which to continue. And so every limit is just an ending. And thus the sky being the limit seems not much different than the grave being seen the same.

Because we see the sky as the commonly agreed upon limit of all potential and the grave is the commonly agreed upon limit of all people.

But what if we’re wrong? Which, granted, is actually a fear that is in fact quite justified. Because we are! See, so many agree, or least enjoy the cliché that says the sky’s the limit. But there are people in outer space at this very moment. A good number of folks have orbited the planet. A few dudes even blasted past the sky strapped to rockets and managed to end up walking on the moon. So why’s the sky still the limit? Same too of the tomb, albeit in much smaller numbers. But indeed, Scriptures reads that there’ve been a couple who haven’t tasted death.

So where’s the line and what’s with all this trying in vain to draw it wherever we want it?

Because the fact is that the sky isn’t the limit. Death isn’t the end. Pluto isn’t even an option for a starting point. Fear has no room in faith nor then any reason to keep interceding to what is only a continued betraying of it. But we let it, just like we do with every other limit. We allow all these finish lines in life, in love, in fear, in faith. But why? What is it about our perception of what we imagine possible that’s of such worth to us that we welcome basically only worry as to whatever may await beyond whatever we think plausible?

Is not that which is possible the same as that which is limited by the limits of possibility as measured inside every fear we have of something not working or getting messed up or being missed along the way to wherever we've not even the ability to imagine our being or becoming within all the days still to come that we've not yet lived and thus are themselves not limited by what has been?

See, truth is that we were always called to believe beyond our wildest imaginations, and yet instead we've gone the other way and listened and followed and fallen in line behind the blind that encourage us only to tame them if not simply leave them behind for what can then never be better pastures. No, rather we’ve come upon a life in which we’ve put ourselves out to pasture and pass on every remaining opportunity to see what is seen only from the sky that we too have stopped reaching for.

Yes, anymore we live some days as it tomorrow is the limit as that’s sometimes as far as some are willing to go. And simply put, it shouldn’t be that way. We shouldn’t be the ones to decide when we’ve done enough or found enough or failed enough to feel enough. No, we’re the ones who are learning what life is, mostly by foolishly choosing everything life isn’t through everything we do that ends up being a mistake. And so why then should a people so often mistaken, as we so clearly are, why should we be the ones who determine the limits?

I personally find that such is the freedom found in faith in that it’s the only thing that allows us to move past us. It helps us to get back to imagining again, and from there to even believing once more. And believe me, imagining and believing are pretty different things as they seem to have remarkably different ideals in mind. But that’s something that maybe only faith can help us learn again. And I say again because at one time we did this quite easily, this believing.

Anymore we rarely even imagine and thus are surrounded by more than we can fathom. And yet we never seem to see it because we keep looking. It’s contradictive. We keep looking for these limits in life, in faith, and when done that way, well, we’re probably going to find them. Because the sad fact is that whether or not any limits are there, our pride’s hatred of being wrong will only inspire us to make them up as we go so that we don’t look mistaken again.

But what if we just stopped trying to do anything on our own as it’s all done within what are our own limitations? See, we are finite. We are fleeting. We are failing and fallen and folly and foolish. We are here but for a moment, a life lived in what is but a breath before we breathe here no more but rather step to and through that open door that is faith, to one of two entirely different outcomes. And we haven’t much say in even that as we either embrace the faith that we cannot figure out and are welcomed into what He won as read of right here.

Or we refuse that version of faith in exchange for the other that relies on fear as opposed to the Father and thus refuses Him His reverence as given instead unto worry.

Either way, we may make little choices here and there, but having made plenty of them that didn’t turn out quite right, or right at all for that matter, I just don’t see any reason to continue embracing any limitation in life or how we come to live it. Simply because I believe that there is a Creator who simply must exist outside of the boundaries inside of which His creation exists. Yes, I believe that there is a God above who is without limit and that, having been made in His image, I too am convinced that we too should have almost none of these limits that we’ve agreed to in our lives.

Some we can’t outrun or deny, this much is true. But beyond death and destiny, I don’t really see any other limits that we should adhere to.

Because if God doesn’t have them, and doesn’t mention any of them within His Word as breathed for the benefit of our living a life in perpetual betterment, then maybe we shouldn’t accept the sky being the limit.

Nor then the grave either.

For here we read that there comes a day in which the perishable will put on the imperishable and too those who are mortal (which is all of us) will be clothed with the immortal. And this is a promise because He who created life is the same as the Son who came to save our lives from what we’ve made of them within all these limits we’ve made for them. Only difference then is that found between those two outcomes mentioned above. For both are experienced in the unendingness of immortality, for such is the reality of eternity having not a single limit in terms of time or anything else.

It’s just that one will thus be unending death as experienced outside the presence of He who is the Life, and the other will be well, other.

And I want the other. I want the better. I want to believe in that present impossibility of a life not yet seen in a place none can see. I want the hope of a home with Him in Heaven. Because without it, then yes, life is nothing but death and taxes. And personally speaking, I cannot even being to imagine or understand why so much time and resource and creativity would have been poured into we who are humanity. I cannot for the life of me wrap my mind around how life in all its beauty is supposed to be nothing more than just death as awaits all who are alive.

It’s just too cruel, too confusing, too confining, too confounding to be the finding of any possible meaning to our making of anything of any reason as to why we’re here. We’re here for more than just sucking up air, eating some food and being chucked in a hole. And so I can’t help but come back from that just a bit to see also that we’re then here for more than just reaching for the sky.

No, I want to reach for He who made it and remains so far above it that I cannot see Him. Because a life lived with limits spent asking only the questions that we already know the answers to is entirely too boring to ever have any meaning. And I simply refuse to consider that life is something meant to have no meaning.

At least not one that can fit below the sky.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold