Day 3691 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 2:1 NIV

Because He did.

Indeed, that Christ came how He came was intended to change everything in what was then a good work began that He’s said was started with every intention of carrying it on until its completion at the day of Himself. Alas I suppose that perhaps the overall confusion, as designed inside of our common delusion that has us all but bound and determined to do this our way so as to always find us feeling as if we’re the ones in control, that confusion of none of us knowing the day nor hour has stripped us of any such power and proven us rather entirely at the mercy of both time and trial.

Don’t mind the first as it’s so taken for granted that it’s quite easily ignored. The second though…

No, we’re not at all inclined to endure such things as trial for the simple torment that we see inside such portent as His even warning us that whilst within this world we would have trouble. We don’t want trouble. Oddly enough don’t really mind making it, but we really don’t want any made on our behalf. We’re indeed pretty dead-set against this external evidencing of our being the ones without the understanding as to our need for growing, nor then how it best accomplished.

For we’re still roundly and resoundingly convinced that life can exist without a little help from the rain that came to both wash and water both our dirt and that which only springs from it.

Yes, life is quite the miraculous mercy in that regard. For everything we see, or at least everyone and all we eat, it’s quite reliant upon dirt. Just that all we eat relies on things growing up through the dirt whereas we’re plenty content to just sink down into it seeking somewhere to hide all we’ve done that’s been done so much that it all but defines who we’ve become. Reckon we figure that if our lives are dirty and messy and thus we look the same, well, why not then go where we’ll be then known?

And thus it’s a pig’s life for us!

Tis amazing at just how amazed we are with such things as wallow and wander, worry and wonder. It’s as if we think that life’s to be best lived with a fair blend of both parties of such polarities. A little rolling around in the muck and mud mixed with a bit of walking away from what we’ve won from time to time. Spend some time worried about all that might go wrong whilst also wondering as to how it all might turn out alright.

Indeed, we’re a truly mixed bag of a strange breed. And while it’s not necessarily the blending process that He came with such lavish benevolence to end, it does in fact have quite a lot to do with the ingredients thrown both in and about by our continued trying to find something worth finding that makes a life finally feel worth living. As to how we think life itself not much of an experience or opportunity anymore I’ve no idea.

Just pretty clear that we’re worried only about everything here expect our lives and whether or not they’re actually lived right.

Though I suppose that such is bound to happen when a lost soul sinks low into this chance to grow in a place that denies any and all such change. As I said, we are strange breed buying up these grab-bags filled with anything from gold to guilt. I do understand the excitement in such surprises as those many we seek to allow remained within our brains. Our mind’s like a box of chocolate in that we never really know what we’ll get but have our hopes as held inside of all we give unto the getting of what we want while always pretending that everything we don’t want simply isn’t an option to accidentally choose.

Yes, a mental box of chocolate, just mostly melted and sometimes it smells kind of funny.

Problem is that there isn’t all that much to laugh about in light of all we’ve come to love our having continued to lose. Indeed, we live as if all of life is ours to let go as we grow through neither time, as again it’s a matter measured as having so little meaning that we can apparently afford to take it for granted as we sit idly inside these little cages of everything from confusion to comfort, nor trial as, well, we just see no reason to welcome it when we’re so confused that we actually seem to think that the safe comfort of our sitting still is most likely the best case scenario for our lives going well.

How do we know?

No, well that and too what do we know? I mean, we live as if we have life understood and yet we stand (sometimes, but sit or lay down mostly) amongst this greedy grove of groveling and gaining, the first endured unto the second ensured, or assured, or insured. We’re not really sure, but it’s fine so long as we’re promised a path, and preferably a present thereupon it, without any trial, trouble, torment or tempest. They just sound so testy, testing, tempting tests that try to tear our best to shreds as they leave us feeling so close to dead that we’d likely not know what then to do with life.

For what would we have left were we to lose the lust and lies that have bound our eyes and blinded our times to this tepid trying for only the tempting and temporary?

Yes, what would we lose should our way of life be lost? Seems unto us that losing our way of life is the same as losing our life because it’s the only way of life we’ve ever lived and thus we might not live since we know only to live this life this one way we have. But again friends, what do we have? Where have we been? What have we won? Where will our wins go when we’ve gone from whatever it is that we both think we have and thus have to lose?

Why are we afraid of losing what we have when most of what we have are such things as those lovingly itemized for us here in 1 Peter?

Tell me these things aren’t so very common amongst all of us that they all but define this way of life lived and loved by all of us. They’re in fact so very normalized anymore that we’re so very desensitized to their basically being sold on shelves at the store. And we buy their lies every single day it seems. Why? Why this fealty to such things as hatred and hypocrisy? Why this love for lies and mockery? Why so much time given unto the jealousy that’s worried only about what we want as had already by someone else? Why not want more than what’s sold in some store that everyone else visits to buy what everyone else will then want too?

Why not want what God has in store? Oh yeah, it’s that part about trials and testing such as this here asking that we rid ourselves of such burdens and breakings as envy and slander. Oh the horror! How might we survive if we didn’t think that to thrive meant to make our lives look like those everyone else is living? How can we make it if we can’t make fun of one another? How on earth could ever hope to exist without the content of hypocrites putting on their little shows for those with ears that only itch and eyes that only lust?

Why so worried about how things work on this earth when our Savior came to this place only to leave it behind so that He could go get the next ready for those who hear His words and put them into action by acting as if they matter more than whatever misery we may meet along the way or the shoes on our feet that we still think can get us there?

We’re so terrified of this trial that asks that we try something new. Because it seems entirely too hard, too heavy, too laden with this outlandish expectation of our laying down and leaving behind and thus losing forever what we’ve come to assume is how life’s supposed to feel. But that’s what I don’t understand, and yes, as always, about my own walk personally. I too do things that I know will make me feel miserable while also trying to avoid the things that I know would help me grow into a better servant, a better friend, a better son, a better brother, a better neighbor.

I tell you, it’s as if Paul wrote about my life instead of his for so too do I do the things I don’t want to, don’t like to do whilst simultaneously not doing the things I want to do, need to do. Simply because I don’t want to lose. I don’t want to hurt. I don’t want to feel afraid again. None of us do! It’s why we spend so much of this life living as if death is a question or an option or some horrid forced-retirement plan in which we’re put out to pasture, or rather in a casket, and there just left for, well, dead.

And we can’t bear the thought that our lives as we’ve lived them and loved them could be so feeble and failed as to simply be lost and left. It makes no sense! And thus it also makes no sense that we should share in what Jesus did here. I mean from wanting nothing of this world as if we are not of this world to the washing of our neighbor’s feet, we just ain’t got the time to spend learning how to understand or do or endure such things. We oddly enough have plenty of time to waste spent playing video games, but that’s different.

Why? Because we enjoy it.

Doesn’t matter that such things don’t really add much if anything to our lives. We’ve become quite content with having our minds numbed into absolute boredom. It’s fine. It’s fun. It’s normal and thus never novel or nuanced or enough to make us take notice of how numb and dumb we’ve become. So very much so that we care never to go anywhere we don’t want to, as often defined as any place that may ask us to do anything we don’t want to, as often verified by our either having to go with anyone we don’t want to or rather agreeing with those many who too don’t want to do what pretty much none of us want to.

We spend so much time focused on everything we don’t want to do that we don’t really seem to realize that life never had anything to do with what we want as what we want is what He don’t as proven quite perfectly and perfectly profoundly upon the place of ours He took upon that cross of ours that we simply never agreed we ourselves have spent an entire lifetime both carving and somehow craving.

Indeed, that’s the part that I imagine makes the least sense of all.

It’s not that we don’t want to take up our crosses, although we clearly don’t because we still arrogantly think we know everything crosses can do. It’s not that we’re unwilling to do the things He asks us do such as letting go and ridding life of such things as hypocrisy whilst somehow seeing humility as strife, though we so clearly are because we still see everything through vain glasses that are afraid of the rain but need the water to survive. No, it’s not that we can’t understand that we’ve made some mistakes, we get that as we know what regret is, what guilt is, what shame is.

The issue is that we can’t seem to connect the dots between our doing the things we want to do being the same things that sometimes, if not oftentimes, bring about those very feelings of shame, guilt and regret.

We don’t see the harm in envying one another because it doesn’t really seem to hurt anybody. Don’t see the issue in being hypocrites because maybe nobody really knows that we are as we’ve tried really hard to put on a perfect performance that surely nobody could see through. There can’t be any problem with malice as it’s merely “the desire to cause pain, injury, or distress to another.” And that’s just it, it’s all desire. It’s all internal. It’s just the thoughts we think and the dreams we have and the things we want and the things we’re willing to do to get them or reach them or do them.

But it’s all just thoughts, ideas, frustrated feelings ready to smack our boss the next time he asks us to stay late. No real harm in it so long as we don’t act on it. Right?

No my friends, and that’s the issue at hand. It’s that we’ve misunderstood harm, danger, deception and death. For they’re not merely ideas or theories or thoughts that we can control or avoid. They’re very real enemies of life and thus too of every human living it. And because we can do so little to overcome them or stave them off or starve them out, as shown in our pasts in which we followed pride to the making of so many problems and mistakes that we’ve become hypocrites who look down on others for doing things we’ve done ourselves but are now below what we think we’ve become, He came.

And because He did, everything’s supposed to change.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? We don’t want to change. We don’t want to learn. We don’t want to grow or admit we don’t really know how having honestly never really tried. Indeed, we don’t want to try anything anymore. We just want to sit right where we are and just see how it all plays out. But friends, since when was life such a game that we can either afford to make up the rules so as to never be the one to break them, to sit on the sidelines so as to never risk the injury, to determine what it means to win so that we never have to lose or to never let go of what’s keep us lost so that we never have to admit we’ve lost more than we thought we had to lose?

We’re at increasing risk of running out of time because time is running out. It’s simple math. But oh yeah, we hate that too. Indeed, we hate just about everything anymore, but still most of all anything and everyone who asks us to do whatever we don’t want to do. Now don’t get us wrong, we’re more than happy to do something so long as it was our idea first. But if anyone else brings it up, forget it!

Why forget better though? Why give up on hope? Why let go of what we need so that we can stay where we can’t? Don’t we get it yet? That He’s asking us to get rid of these things, and the many more just like them, because they’ll be done away with anyway? Because they’re going to be pruned? Because the branches in us that don’t bear fruit, the good fruit that He created us and waters us and tends to us so as to help us bear, any branch in us that doesn’t bear that good fruit will be torn out and thrown into the fire?

Or do we just think Him a liar? Some mean ol’ humbug that’s only out to dash our every enjoyment to the ground? Does it matter all that much either way? For again, one way or another all these such things will be gone as none of them are allowed or found in Heaven.

And sure, maybe Heaven’s just a myth and the Word just a book a bunch of people wrote to try and scare others into such a seedy idea as living humbly and loving mercy and walking as if there is a God above who is good in proven that, though knowing us anything but, came to save us anyway by literally dying for us so that we’d not have to worry about that worry anymore but could then replace it with working for such things as love and humility and grace and the hope of that place in which such things as envy and malice are not welcome.

What a nightmare!

Who would want to believe in something so good that it inspired them to do better, to live better, to love better, to look forever for better ways to live, even if they’re only found at the express loss of the things that only make us feel bad or consider making others feel bad?

Friends, I get that the Bible asks us to do all sorts of things that seem upside down compared to our way of life. But as we can see here, it also asks us to do something that are so logical that it would take a miracle for them to not make sense. Because they do. It makes sense to stop being jealous and to quit thinking about hurting others. It makes sense to stop preaching what we don’t practice or to actually just practice what we preach. It’s entirely reasonable to stop lying to one another or talking trash about others. It all just makes sense!

And so then what are we worried about that has us waiting in wonder as to whether or not we should agree with what His Word asks us to do?

Do we honestly think this is a choice to choose? Friends, we’re living a life we will lose! It simply then comes down to how and when. And that’s determined by just how soon we agree to humble ourselves to His leading or rather how long we live as if we’ll never have to.

The simple fact is that we all will. Why not then get rid of the things that keep us angry and frustrated and perhaps even willing to hurt others because of it? Sure, it’s not that we will, but what good does it do for anyone for anyone to harbor hatred or dishonesty in their hearts, plans, preferences or pursuits?

Won’t that just lead us to more of who and what and where we already are? I mean, if we like this life just as it is then I guess that makes sense.

As for me, I’m tired of being angry and confused and afraid to lose what I know in my heart I cannot keep. And so it just makes sense to lay it down and walk away. For while I might be afraid of leaving some okay things behind, if I can leave behind any of the bad things, the scary things, the heavy things that only weigh me down, well then I don’t see how I’ll not be better off.

Because life was always ours to lose. It’s just that in Him there’s a life to find. Who cares if finding that life He offers comes at the cost of this one? This isn’t perfect, and nor then are we at getting it right. So I’ll keep looking for that place without any of all that makes this one so hopeless and heavy. And well, may as well lose some of this weight while I wait.

You in?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold