Day 3667 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Corinthians 13:12 NIV

A prisoner of hope.

Held in captivity by the obscurity that is eternity as counted against the muddied certainty of the scene presently seen inside the constantly shown and entirely too well known. And yet somehow still hard to understand. For such is the bountiful burden that is every hope any may ever have. It’s measured beyond the moment in what is a sheer audacity to consider the certainty of the otherwise unproven if not presently impossible. Indeed, any hope had is never a hope seen.

For that would render the curiosity moot and thus destroy the loot that is whatever it is that we’ve looked to through hearts willing to go through whatever confusions or consequences may await between where we are and who we believe we might be.

And this is a right difficulty in life, this stepping unto and steeping into a slipping on through the veils of confidence as torn to shreds of unimportance by the very fact that faith never asked us to be the ones who found the way nor to understand why it’s the only that can work. Rather faith hinges upon hope as held inside the scene of the unseen and entirely unknown, as somehow those become easier to understand than this apparent way of life in which we’re presently surrounded by those drowned upon delight and indifference.

Indeed, seems as though I awoke once more to walk yet again only again within a world that feels less like home today than it didn’t even yesterday. For that seems a quite common thread that’s continuing to sew my life together within the hem of Him who is a hope that’s continued to find me within every moment spent feeling so alien within this only place I’ve ever been as I daily gather more evidence of how this place isn’t supposed to be my home anyway.

Simply because so much of what is seen isn’t what should be seen.

No, all the hatred and hustling after the things that inspire the envy that inspires the hatred to deepen, it’s death as designed outside of the life of the Life as lived in love as found in His laying down the former because of the latter. All the commendation and commemoration of the current and contemporary as considered considerable simply because it’s common and filled with so much commotion that the ocean of His mercy still apparently makes no sense to many. It’s a contrarian to life itself as designed by He who is love and peace and patience and kindness and caring and compassion.

For anything then that is anything else and thus everything less than all He is is but a loss of life as He is life itself. And I can’t make sense of that. Not anymore. Much less now as in seeing how content so many seem inside of it.

Rather it seems tragedy personified a billion times over. All because almost every hope held by everyone is held here in the now and near.

But I believe that hope must be unseen, obscured, blurred by some sort of distance or difference that’s still to be designed or demanded or even merely decided upon as in fact this faith has already designed that which is clearly demanded. And thus it just falls on us to decide how the story will go as told from our point of view as so often in the past proven poised upon the petty preference for the impermanence of the present as opposed to the impossibility of the lack of such temporality to be held within eternity.

This world doesn’t inspire us to consider such limitlessness as timelessness. But I do believe there is a place in which time doesn’t exist and thus one in which all we’ll there do without the already seen and well-known harbinger of hope running out. See, that’s what I don’t understand about this world’s self-infatuation with the investigation of this instigation of this kind of instillation of a distillation that’s but a consternation as considered against the foundation of forever.

What here can last?

And thus what kind of hope is that that can be found here?

Now I’m not saying that life as lived within this land so lost is utterly without hope. For indeed, all of us have hoped within this life so bound by time for what have been a great many things, a few of which we have found or felt or figured out. Just yesterday my family and I finally tracked down a house after a four or five year hunt. And we’ve in fact hoped quite heavily in that. We’ve prayed our souls hoarse trying in hope to hope that He hears us and this pleading for some peace as found better outside of an apartment complex.

And now we’re but weeks away from moving away toward that hope as now held so close that we can begin imagining the colors we’ll paint the walls and how nice it will feel to have a deck to read outside on a rainy day. But still, as exciting as this light has been to find at the end of the tunnel of what has been an otherwise string of continuously collapsing counterparts, still I find a limit to the hope of it all. Because it’s known now. It has an address and everything! It’s a longing fulfilled, and while it in fact feels a tree of life as lived in such a way that we’ve not for the better part of a decade now, it’s still something stuck in time.

Because such is everything here.

It’s all but a rental in which we go almost mental trying to make it make sense as counted in cents and pennies on the dollar over a 30-year contract. And I can only seem to make so much sense of that. Because this belief that’s found me has bound me to the foundry of forever in which I find that I feel most alive only when lost inside thoughts of the unthinkable as bought by the impossible as already achieved by He who has no such limits as even mortality.

And when offered the suggestion that one day I might be as He always has been, trading then this life as what is but a three-day stay inside a grave as paid for by He who’s readying our place with Him, it seems a perfect idiocy to deny that hope for what’s otherwise been but a burdened odyssey of objectification and the continued identification of both those many objects we’d still delight to idolize and too the bodies of those many now lain strewn behind us in what are past considerations that simply didn’t stand up to the test that’s time.

For that is all this is, this is but a monthly test of His emergency broadcasting system. Only that we’re so now tied to our every hope tied here that we still assume His fear sheer and thus unable to prove anything other than some pesky nuisance that screams from a few misplaced sirens outside our windows on Wednesdays.

Or maybe that’s just the day they do it where I live.

But that’s the thing, it’s all different. Just like how some states celebrate daylight savings time and others refuse to lose the sleep. It’s all a choice made differently within distinctly different places by also distinct faces of even clocks that will now read different come this time Monday. It’s all man playing as if life is a game in which hope is so cheap that we can steal it away from eternity and bind it inside our favorite buffets and buffooneries.

Is hope truly nothing more than a weekend no-holds-barred at the nearest all-you-can-eat? Is it a car with more horses and leather seats? Is it something so easy to find as everything found by everyone else as wanted and won upon windshield stickers and double-hung windows? Does hope fit inside of shoes that are fairly snug but might loosen up? Is it something that comes in various sizes and plenty of colors as if a rainbow of cotton and polyester blends blending into the backdrop of backstreets and billboards?

Yes, can a sign along the roadside sing the sound of hope coming down a few miles down the road thanks to a vacation that’s a bit overdue? Is hope vaunted within a vocation that helps us to afford the vacations that we ache to take away from what’s become the daily grind of our trying to find a reason to keep hating a portion of our life simply for the sake of some time off every now and then, and hopefully a sunny weekend every once in a while?

Is hope measured by the mile? The minute? The moment even? Yes, is hope something that can fit between breaths taken of a life fading? Should we want it to? Or might we rather believe it better to weather the whether of whatever wonder may welcome us into it along the way to wherever He went to hold out hope for those who agree to do the same?

That’s all I can manage to think of to do with it anymore. Hold out. Wait. Hang on. Be patient. Be still as if the battle ahead is the Lord’s and the hope beyond somehow mine. It’s almost perfectly preposterous if you think about it.

Indeed, that He’d not only design this world to spin so perfectly in balance amongst the varying chaos creations as considered inside how those few between us and the sun are all but utterly unable to be solid in form or too those many further away from that heat are held inside the same darkness through which life-altering stones speed at speeds that no light can catch, but that He’d slow it all down in what proved a perfect synchronicity to His purpose as proven upon a cross.

Absolutely insane to even begin thinking about. Must be completely outside your mind to actually believe it.

But isn’t that where hope might prove even better?

For just the same as any hope held here being but hopeless at best considering the time constraint, is not the same to be said of any hope that we can understand? Ain’t that why kids are so happy all the time? Not worried about what it’s like to be worried or wanting something or wishing something would go away or suddenly change or that we could turn the right corner and from there chase the right choice and find somewhere along the road to better our voice that helps us put into words what our hearts say hope is?

Kids don’t have to finagle through any of that foolishness. They just don’t know that burden of the societally accepted difference and distance between the possible and the probably not. It’s the same to them, so much so that the stars are just lightbulbs that we could change if and when we get close enough on our rocket ships made of two-wheeled hopes complete with pizza box wings. Indeed, kids just believe without even the need of imagining. And that’s in fact a difference I’ve been wrapping my mind around for a bit for what may be another post coming soon.

But for now, why now?

Why here? Why so little as to love so much less than everything endless? You know, I talk often of my fears within these feeble attempts to translate them into the languages and lunacies of a society that I’ve strayed so far from that I don’t see any coming back for me, but among them is that I’ll reach the end and somehow have managed to gotten it all so wrong that hope is there something behind me rather than beyond me. Yes, I worry as to putting too much hope inside anything held or had down here.

And so I fight to focus rather on those beyond me, and in that I find this swelling necessity to hang my every worldly honor upon the clearance rack for someone else to have should that be all they think they need. Because I believe that this life is mine to give away as if the cup really can’t run dry. It’s not a testing so much of the Father but rather a trying to figure how else I might honor He who gave me so much more than I could ever need.

Simply because He brought me the promise of eternity. And that cross upon which said gift was bought, it’s now the very key that’s locked the door to what feels this cell of surrender in which daily I plunder the ponder of what more I might not need to try and know anymore about all that none of us will one day. Why do anything as if the world is our goal? Much less a backdrop to hope?

No, rather I’m a prisoner of the other side of forever, just here working the fields until the harvest’s ready to yield its yield. And even that is something I don’t worry about anymore because, as this verse says, all that’s here is but a part. It’s a fractured fraction of the faction of forever that doesn’t last. Because time can’t go on forever. But life can. And in between the two, life and time, I simply find that I’ve lost the allure of the lure of what’ll be lost and left behind.

Yes, why live for only a reflection of perfection as was never ours to imagine anyway? Why not rather hold out for the whole and in there hang your hope as if Heaven might be a home in which we will rest in knowing that then and there alone we’ll be known even as He always has?

Friends, the point is that while there may be some things that matter in these many moments measured by minutes and miles, in that since they can be measured, they thus can’t be that important. Not when compared against the extremities of eternity. And while we are all clearly free, as many can see many concede, to conceal our hopes to things held inside such a commonly considered certainty as the seen and known, so too can we hold out hope for that which isn’t so limited by sight or sound.

Yes, we can believe in a kind of hope that cannot fit upon this ground. And as I learn to in new ways every day, so too does every day find my mind further outside itself where I chase to waste every worldly way in which I’ve wanted or perhaps even won everything I’ve ever wished to have or hold. No, I want rather a hope I can’t even imagine as, to me at least, that seems the single best way in which to make sure that my understandings and their misunderstandings don’t dare get in the way and there hold me back from the Way.

I want to know what He knows, even if such a hope asks that I have no other along the way there. And again, that’s not that we won’t because there are things in this life that matter and make life at least somewhat meaningful. But friends, if we want life to mean something, to truly have meaning that is not limited or reliant upon anything or anyone that may have a limit or imperfection, then seek that inflection inside the suggestion that here isn’t home but that rather we’re here but as prisoners of hope.

Because all who are held in captivity will be set free one day. And simply put, I don’t want my freedom found or felt in a place where it will end. No, I want to rather hope for that freedom better as bound in limitless perfection alongside the Son of such suggestion as forever being ours not to find but to be found toward. Yes, Christ came to shepherd us unto His clarity as seen from the other side of eternity. Why settle then for anything bound in the obscurity of human curiosity?

No, let us not wonder about the worldly, for everything here is but a moment or two more. Rather believe for more, even if the rest of the world thinks you a fool for it.

For is it nor better to be a fool on this side of forever rather than the other?

Because here is seen and entirely well known. And I find no excitement in that, at least none that can last. So why settle? Let us chase the fullness of the Father and never again settle for all this that is everything lesser. Not because His creation is without meaning, but simply because time keeps it from meaning as much as forever clearly must.

After all, He died to open that door. Why then live for all that He said won’t fit through that needle?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold