Day 3666 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 8:18 NIV

Will be.

But not yet.

Because, like it or not, and most mostly don’t, we’ve still a life to live and lose within what is this in between bound between here and home by what are chains of change. And it’s because of our problem with the ways in which He helps us change that this middle is often muddled in what feels a huddle of a life lived on a fourth and long looking for some sort of miracle to just us get through those many moments that make us feel as if we’re ourselves fading into the fall of it all because of the many problems we’ve made.

For such is the weight of the wait as discussed a bit yesterday. It’s won within our weighing the wait of what is an anchor that’s held us outside of where hope always was.

Just don’t think we ever really knew that we didn’t have to stay outside.

We only did because the path aimed into His will looks like fire and failure and thus probably our finding and feeling frustrated failures who fail to find or feel the courage to count the joys of losing a life that’s already lost thanks to the many confusions and delusions we’ve designed and desired. Which is something, granted, of an interesting perplexing as posed upon the promised paradigm as compared against the present which is perfectly more problematic.

For while it may seem so true as to prove otherwise unavoidable, the somewhat corresponding truth is that while we will, within this world, have problems and troubles, triumphs and typhoons, so too have we that ancient hope as held in He who came to overcome whatever’s still to come as we go toward what helps us grow in He who came to overcome what is and was and will be on the behalf of we who were the problems, and often remain the same, that He came and overcame.

It’s a destiny as designed for all mankind, alas one that’s anymore so discounted and denied that mankind has rather a mind made for the moment and not usually much more. No, such is why we hate the wait, because time is money and yet money worth more than time, at least in these parts. And yet, that’s the problem. It’s that around these parts we’re allowed but parts, some pieces, a few portions and a picture frame within which to hang a photo of what we can only assume to be a life well lived and thus worth living. And yet, this picture is painted with 1,000 worries rather than words.

For around here words are considered even cheaper than time sometimes!

Though I suppose that such is all that’s bound to become having become so dumb to life’s design as mankind has inclined to remain. Indeed, we just remain. A people firmly planted on a foundation far from firm. Yet we are anymore so adept at ignoring the obvious as we rather focus on the oblivious in what’s become a life in which we live face-first into all that flirts with our feelings felt most fondly within finding whatever helps us feel the best the fastest.

It’s all speed and competition, looking to those same many that we’re competing against to tell us where we’re going and how amazing it’ll be once we arrive.

But when, where, why? Well, nobody really seems to know. Or care. Or consider, contemplate, commemorate, conflagrate or abdicate. No, we just stand our ground within what is a middle of such upon which our every hope is still waiting so close we can taste it. And yet how shallow a hope such as this must remain for it to remain within this place so filled with our every problem and every more parcel of pride sent packing into the foothills of foolishness fighting to find for us something to help us feel alive again without the failures we’ve found more easily within.

Indeed, life has become a contemptuous contest against ourselves to come up with who of us is best at either ignoring the problems we have, the problems we are, or who can rather complain loudest about the lot of both the above. It’s really quite the show, this life lost in the snow of what is a TV channel that’s needed changed for years. We’ve just lost the remote and haven’t the remotest idea as to where the batteries might be anyway.

We’re rather so drained and stained that we’ve each become windows of widows who steal into the shadows of the shallows seeking to start sinking just so we’ve not the need to fake the speed and competition anymore.

Because honestly, we never, any of us, really wanted it this way. This way of life so attuned to problem and pain. We never wanted to see our stains nor embrace that we’ve chosen them each and all. Never wanted to feel the fall or face the fails that formed the sails that blew us so far off course that hope was lost at sea as we sunk instead into the scene as seen inside every problem we’ve found thanks to pride painting the plans.

For truth is that our way only adds responsibility that was never ours to have or hold so close as we have. Rather we were created as rudderless ships sat atop a sea of sanctification as sought deeper through supplication as if supped upon the soup of salvation simply for the saving sake of someone else to steer the ship knowing we’d just sink it again should we ever again try to steer clear of the problems we’d probably face anyway. Yes, we were made to simply drift inside of God’s design without so much as a care in the world to every care in the world.

Yes, the hopeful truth is that we’re all made in the image of God and thus endowed by our Creator with a Spirit as limitless and uncontrolled as the wind, and as such we are souls meant to fly in what is a freedom I must confess we’ve never really known. Because the heartbreaking reality is that we’ve never really known that kind of freedom because we have, in order to better fit amongst the weeds who walk amongst the cares of this world, accepted certain limits beyond those common amongst man.

Sure, He created humanity to exist inside such things as mortality and morality and modesty and honesty and humility and the like, and thus we’ve here but limited time and expanse in which to experience life and therein learn all we need to about the little we feasibly can of all the above as mostly disregarded and thus discarded by most of those around us. And of all that we’ve to live this life looking to learn, mostly that all is mostly whatever we might possibly of who He is and what this means for us as seen and shown from within every action we undertake and every word we utter.

But beyond this we’ve sadly seemed to embrace such other limits as fear and doubt and this corresponding lack of courage to consider the commonly considered impossibilities of faith and hope and life forever free in a place unlike this that we’ve made into the main stage for immorality and every other idolatry known to a fallen man plagued personally by every problem our pride might prefer to propose we’ve not designed all by ourselves.

And these many limitations to the freedom in which we were made and to which we’ve been called in Christ to turn and return, they’ve themselves become problems of sorts as they’ve formed for us things that we consider ourselves unable to do, see, be. And this is where the issue of ongoing sin comes in to become the problem that it’s always been. It was before but only is once He opens our eyes to see the great many problems it’s designed inside a life we’ve lived without the courage to count the costs or chase better consequences.

For I’ve found that what we perceive that we’re unable to do is the very same as everything that we’re then unwilling to try. And there is no greater problem than that! And no, I’m not saying that as souls meant to fly we should craft some sketchy wings out of cardboard and head to the nearest high rise. What I’m saying is that God gave our spirits wings which have been clipped by sin leaving us stranded upon this hopeless land into which, since we cannot fly due to fear and foolishness, we’ve rather planted roots of fear, of foolishness, of doubt, of denial, of debate as if everything in life is up for compromise.

And all this seeking of compromise as counted inside such lies as comfort and complacency, competition and congratulations, it’s left us now unwilling to work or walk or wait or want for anything anywhere beyond where our self-imposed limitations of lust and laziness have left us stranded upon this sinking shore of a hope so unsure that we still seek it inside new things inside every new day. Yes, every fear, every denial, every frustration as felt in our insistence upon life going “our way”, it’s all become a root that’s left us lost in this rut in which we’ve come to only want that which rusts and ruins and has us running and racing and wasting away trying to seek or serve that which cannot support or save.

And it’s been this way for so long now that we can’t move.

It’s as if we can’t breathe. We often, do we not, feel like we cannot be or see anyway to our being anything other than what we’ve been for as long as we can remember? And again, what we think we’re unable to do is the same as all that we’re unwilling to try. Like change. Like being humble. Like being honest and admitting that we hate this way of life spent every single day seeking some new hollow ideal to replace the last we shaped into an idol that we’ve all but already lost the lust to continue looking at and after.

For such is the problem with idols. Not only do they turn our attention way from the Way that leads us home, but they also beg our tending so that they continue to matter to we who made them.

And thus in a way, our every problem has become something of an idol that we cannot seem to come to grips with having to let go our grip so that we can, only then, finally give up trying to make this go our way which has no way of proving itself possible. No, we can’t bear to admit that we’ve had a hand in sinking every root into what is this sinking ship of a world so sinful that sin seems all we can be too. And yet it isn’t. Because again, we were made in God’s image and thus made to be sinless. And so we can be something different, something better, something brand new in fact.

We can even be something that isn’t so static and stagnate and bludgeoned and bruised and battered and beaten and beating ourselves if bleeding is the only way to keep feeling alive on this side of a life lived forever. We just don’t know to wait patiently for the death of all this as must become before the beginning of all that isn’t.

That’s the message of the cross. It’s to come and lay down a life that’s not been lived right so that another might be taken up in its place as what is a free gift from He who took our place and paid our debt and set us free once more from inside that tomb that we’re asked to enter so as to share in both the loss of the sinful and the putting on of the saved. Indeed, Hebrews 10:14.

“For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.”

It’s a process, this putting us back to plumb and from there leading us along the path home. It takes time to unbury and then unblur our unbelief. It’s a matter of our problems proving us the perfect patients of patience having its way in us. That’s why the wait. That’s why the worry. That is why the worldly in us must die if we’re to fly. And indeed, again, He calls us to fly again.

But friends, if we’re to ever get off this ground we’ve come to call home, we’re gonna have to have our roots cut so that our hopes can heal enough to take us off life support. And it’s going to hurt. Because it’s pruning and removing and redoing and relearning and restarting and resetting and regretting and begetting the beginning of everything different. But I don’t see what other choice we have than that aimed into the storm of our settling our issues and facing our problems.

Both those we’ve created and those we’ll create of the help He sends.

That’s the sad thing that seems to make all of this so hard. It’s that we’ve come so far in the worst of all directions that we cannot seem to see the inflections of His injections of life into our lifeless. We can’t understand the need for the trials, for the fires, for the failures that we’ll find and feel as if we’ve become. We can’t realize from inside blind eyes just how badly we need to be broken.

How else can the light get out?

For that is what we were made to be, made in the image of He who in the Word is said to be but light so bright that He isn’t seen. And we’ve instead become so dulled and blurry that we live this life in a hurry to love what cannot help us hope. And that’s a problem. That we’ve lost our ability to embrace the audacity to hope in every impossibility. No, we know only to stand at the edge of effort or effluence and wonder what it might be like to do better, to be better, to go further, to hope higher, to hold higher our every hope so that none of them are left so lost as life is lived down here.

Because everything here is just blurry. It’s all hurting and hating and having and hustling into the bustling of a life lived backwards. Because we think the best behind us and the end only ahead. But friends, what if we had the courage to consider that the weather He wields is what wins our way to where we will be? To what we will be? To who we will be?

Yes, what if life was seen as a gift worth the problems faced within? What might we do then? And how much better might we do it if we truly believed that we could not lose it. For the Word says we can’t as He won’t lose any who are given Him. But we can lose so much of ourselves that we become empty shells stranded upon the see shore looking to hope in only what seems sure. And problems don’t, because we don’t understand them as the necessities they often are.

Indeed, we need problems in this world so that we can find the faith that refuses to fight against them. Because faith doesn’t have to fight, it just overcomes. It may struggle, but it survives. It may toil, it may try, and it will be tried, but only to help prove it true. Thus the furnace of problems that we go through. They’re there to make us better as they help us learn to believe through our circumstances rather than just up the point in which they seem to turn against us.

Friends, that’s the point. This life isn’t against us, we’ve just learned to live it fighting against ourselves. For He who created us is not against us so long as we are bold enough to believe in Him. And that’s why we need to learn to fly again, even if it brings about every problem and imperfection that’s kept us grounded this long.

Because maybe it’s only inside the struggling and suffering that we can finally start to see the point and purpose of His purchase. And He paid a heavy price! Surely it wasn’t for only our continuing to be confused enough to lose the hope we could have in He who did what we needed so that we can see the need to do the same. And again, we need problems. For if nothing else, they help us see that we alone cannot fix them. And only that will inspire us to seek a deeper measure of He who not only can, but who in fact did.

Don’t stay lost inside of the disarray of doubt. He died for more than that. And our problems and struggles and flaws, well, they didn’t really seem to change His mind then.

Not sure why they would now. Nor then why we should be afraid to face them now that we know He’s overcome them to what is a glory that still awaits to be revealed. For such is the design of His will. It only gets clearer as we get closer. And so yes, the best is not yet.

But it will be.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold