Day 3693 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 12:12 NIV

Moving on.

Always into the greatest of unknowns of all time, or at least as conceived as of yet within what is our time that isn’t really our time at all but rather a small mall of stores selling stories of high-rise hopes being both leveled and levied for and too against what are but a people often pretending themselves of more power than either the past proves or the present can purchase. No, seems that rather than unfolding according to some plan we’ve paved, this new day and every to be still like it as given us ahead, they’re all something we’ve never seen in a place we’ve never been as a person we may fail to be.

For such is the story of life, of love, of hope and healing and joy and meaning and the reality that says even time has a meaning despite it leaving us without any left at some point.

And it’s to that point we go.

Which is kind of what we both talked about yesterday and too what we talk about every day. It’s this overall marching onward of life and love and hope for healing which brings joy and meaning that proves our reality something timeless in that we’re all here trying, just for what is what makes us all so unique and in such need of such help as His which has now freed from anything and anyone we wish not to remain. Indeed, the joy of salvation is proven within the change of time and season. Each with a meaning, but maybe none of them unfading.

Because the overall aiming of life is into the perfectly unknown as defined perhaps best in that every beginning begins at the ending of what we may or may not want to end. And yet we seem at least somewhat capable of holding out hope for such newness as this day now ahead of us. Don’t know what it’ll bring nor what that’ll mean, but we know that we’ve managed to make it through a great many that’ve proven even perilous or perfectly imperfect.

Not that we’d not wish all avoided the both, but let’s face it, if this life were always easy, what then might be the meaning of joy as unknown having never known trials through which to triumph nor then the purpose of prayer having then never needed such a listening ear to hear all that feels too heavy to hold?

Yes, what have we not told of all that we’ve not seen painted inside skies that have yet to come because of days that are still unknown?

Terrifying, isn’t it?

Indeed, I sit in a new spot today. Same laptop, same shoebox but I’ve traded the closet for a bedroom in what is a new house found at the expense of an apartment way of life that we made work alright for a while before the seams burst and we began to do the same as we found ourselves filling with both fear and frustration. Frustration over the sights and sounds of a world chosenly drown upon the common frown of a ground gone cold due to love leaving the area in droves.

Fear that either we might fall into the same mindframe or that we’d simply be stuck alongside a great many who seem now to have made this work we’re here to do so entirely cumbersome that I dreadfully confess how it’s impacted me so.

Yes, I’ve realized a great many things over this past week of packing up all our things and moving on to what is now the light that’s awaited at the end of this 3-4 year tunnel that’s proven of more pitfalls and problems than I would have ever imagined, let alone desired. No, seems that doing the uncommon, such as moving and trying to make every new idea and outcome come out as best as we know we have such little power to even pretend capable of proving, it’s of such oddity that I find now a new worry as to what I might leave unchanged as still unnoticed of all I’ve not yet unpacked or sold off at yard-sale prices.

For I know I’ve plenty to lose as comes with every move a loss of something. It’s just that we all hope always to lose the worst of us in exchange for the chance to change the lost of us for something fearfully found so much better that we believe only to worry that we might somehow fail to uphold this undue opportunity to stand for something by standing against the person we were once who did less than we have the ability to hope we can now.

Or maybe that’s just something a midlife chorus singing from inside a body worn and weary from lifting so much so heavy over the past week or so. Lots of cleaning too, and haven’t drank nearly enough water!

Indeed, that seems to quite sum the sun that’s risen over what’s this morning a grayish green field that’s replaced a parking lot. Such is the rare beauty of moving on, it’s something that’s always been there, perhaps not as close or as commonly seen, but there nonetheless. It’s just perhaps something only noticed and noted when tired and torn from a work won in the effort to move on.

God does indeed do some incredible things unto those who just pick up their feet go into this wild unknown that is a new day sown into the sewing of our stories back into His glories as given us new every morning. Shame how we can become so beat down by life and the many scars and their stores as scattered throughout. Not that we mind telling people all about all we’ve somehow survived.

We just hate those times in which survival doesn’t seem at all quite promised.

But isn’t it?

This reminds me of something we talked about a couple of weeks ago in regard to the story of the Israelites being asked by God to go out and surrender unto the Babylonian horde who’d come to do His bidding. Wasn’t theirs, and that was the problem. And yet this problem, as proven within the loss of at least a way of life, it was somehow promised to not involve the loss of life. Funny how we seldom manage to see clearly enough to tell the two apart!

For indeed, He told them that if they’d do as He asked them to that they would in fact “escape with their lives.” Which I suppose is where our problem lies too. It’s that same as asked yesterday in regard to the difference between loss and surrender. And as we then deciphered, it seems that division is designed inside of the presence of pride or rather it being finally sat aside.

As a quick recap for those who’ve now no idea as to what I’m talking about, well, what's the difference between loss and surrender? Is it not the very same as the difference between pride and humility? The thinking we have something to lose as opposed to the letting go of what we know we've never had much of a grip on anyway? The acceptance of defeat as opposed to the prose presented by pride telling us that we can’t lose as we could probably find a way to win.

But to what end?

See, that’s the shocking irony to life entirely. It’s that literally everything will turn out exactly how He wrote it to go. And where. And when. And even then who we’re to be, or at least should we agree to follow His lead and let Him then be the only One left to both the designing of directions and then obviously too the only One who determines the decisions to made along the way. For despite a great many things changing in our lives, new houses, new jobs, new worries over the fragility of both as proven in how many times we’ve moved or moved on to better opportunities, truth is that nothing has changed in regard to God’s will.

Suppose that all that can change in that regard is whether or not we ever learn to regard it with the reverence due He who came to lead the way that asks the grave to hold the place that we’ve all to go in what’s always an alien search for the biggest of all new beginnings.

Just again one found at the ending.

For that is life. It begins and it ends. It brings and it takes. It finds and loses. Tries and fails. Buys and sells. But all through it all the outcomes remain all in God’s most perfectly capable hands. Again, just whether or not we trust those hands that hold us to take such good care of our hopes as well.

And that’s what I’ve realized I need to work on more than I ever would have imagined were I not exhausted, dehydrated, confused, confounded having been found in a bed I’ve slept in for years in a new room that I’ve only slept in once. Because I guess we can only learn to do such things as those simple undertakings asked of us here should we realize that all of life is both always the same and too always undergoing change.

We just struggle with that because change seems a loss of life rather than maybe just the end of what isn’t supposed to last so that the beginning of what at least comes next can get underway. And true, these new beginnings we find or feel in life, they may not last all that long either. But such is the courage to surrender. It’s that leap of faith felt within letting go of what we know isn’t anywhere close to perfect for what’s then only the chance to see if something different might get us a little closer.

Still that worry over loss found often along the way.

Just like with those Israelites back then. God asked them to do the unthinkable, the illogical, the probably seemingly fairly foolish. He asked them to surrender in what was promised to be a loss of the way of life that they’d known in that place that they’d known in which their crops of food and children had grown in exchange for a chance to merely escape with their lives. Yes, He asked them to embrace exile as proven in a place they didn’t know for a period of time they wouldn’t choose at, again, what was the expense of a life they didn’t want to lose at all.

And I know what some may be thinking. That it seems or sounds as if God was asking them to give up and all but enjoy this ordeal. As if He’s asking them to join the enemy. As if He’s asking us to surrender to our enemies, our struggles, our sins. But no, He wasn’t asking the people to become Babylonians but rather to take this step in a show of the sort of humility that also would help them see that they weren’t quite so like those they’d been living like.

It’s the same as His asking us to surrender to the enemy of confession or repentance. It’s the same as His asking us to face the enemy of inability and weakness. It’s the same as His asking here that we spend some time in prayer, fasting from our trying and rather reconnecting to He who is far more able than we’ve ever proven ourselves to be. No, He’s not asking us to just embrace being as weak as we’ve become, but rather to realize that what we’ve become within the way of life we’ve come to live isn’t who we’re supposed to be.

Friends, the point is that He’s not asking us to surrender to sin or struggle, to embrace the enjoyment of time or trial, to even try so hard to understand where we stand and why it so seldom makes any sense. No, but to surrender to the consequences of our actions as if to show Him that we are finally beginning to understand that, no, we are not made to sin nor struggle, to live as if time is both all we have at yet too something just fine to take so for granted as we do, to see prayer as something only there to bring us whatever we want, or to continue thinking trials nothing but some offense to our every better idea.

He’s just trying to remind us that since we have seen or felt or experienced any of those undertakings or misunderstandings, to understand then that we agree that we need to be shaken awake however His will may see fit.

For again, the point as proven within the verse we discussed a while back is for us to do as probably quite few of those Israelites did who took Him upon His offer to “escape with their lives.” Us being the “their” now that we’ve found ourselves in a remarkably similar situation as faced by those staring down the Babylonians. It’s just that our enemy army is quite demonic in nature as considered of all things wicked and wrong that we’ve somehow come to love more than we ever have God up to now.

That’s the problem, and our surrender unto admitting that we deserve the suffering as borne inside such things as getting sober or confessing our struggles with pornography or our tendency toward “stretching the truth” to make it better fit our fear of people, or even welcoming the trials that inspire us into prayer that teaches us how to be patient as we wait on God, well, that’s the answer.

Perhaps the only way that we can ever learn that though, enough to truly rely on it, on Him, as much as we should is for us to do those simple things asked of us here regardless of whatever else may be going on in us or around us or ahead of us. Yes, maybe the only way that we learn the joy of hope, the patience afforded us best only in trial or testing, the necessity or prayer for both the giving of thanks for the hopeful joys in life and too the asking for help with those seemingly impending failures as found so often in our many trials, maybe the only way to get us there is by helping us learn the difference between loss and surrender.

And yes, it will take time because we’re pretty slow learners. It will bring trial as we seem to love learning the hard way. It might feel torment as try so often to fight against it to what then feels only our finding of our fragility and the foolishness that makes it so continuous. Indeed, we will break. We will bleed. We will love. Some will leave. We’ll want the hard times to hurry and those easy to take their time before they ebb to the hard flooding back in. Yes, we will likely often want this way ahead to unfold differently as we’ll at times feel lost, uncertain, worried, afraid, entirely convinced of our insufficiency and its every inability.

For the road home will be long, prove hard, become at times entirely too heavy, even with the help of a few friends.

But friends, He’s already made the way through all that He’s going to lead us to in days to come. His Name is Jesus. And He did in fact come to free us into a life lived so free that all we know we need is just a little bit of hope in which to rejoice so as to still the voice of our fear as felt and faced in those many trials and temptations already well on their way, and mostly the courage to count both our past choices and our present voices as the only evidence and efforts we have on which to gauge both who we are and thus just how much we need Him to help us begin to become today something better still.

And yet how do we find Him, feel Him, know Him there at all? By learning to rejoice in the hope that what we see and how we feel isn’t ever all there is to the story He’s written for us to live. By being patient through those hard times be them those spent moving heavy things into a new house you can barely afford or realizing that we can’t afford to try any of this alone anyway. By understanding that prayer isn’t just about finding the time to talk to Him when we want something or need something.

But that finally understanding rather that prayer is vastly more than just a part of life. It’s learning that prayer is life as it finds us, even for a moment, focused where we should be. Maybe not always on what we should be focused on. But it finds us where we should be:

At the end of us and there finally looking to God in the midst of whatever mess we may find ourselves in or fear more than well on the way already. Because the truth is that there will be trouble in this life, but with such things as joy and hope and the patience to stop and pray, I know we’ll come out better than okay. Even if many of these beginnings still to come only come at the end of something we’re not ready to let go or leave behind quite yet.

In the end, all we can know is that life’s rolling onward. May we dare be among the few who walk by the faith that imagines that rolling on is toward the best as opposed to the rest who’ve lost that forest for such trees as fear, failure, fragility and whatever other worldly worry we may know far more than we were ever meant to.

Because we were only ever meant to keep moving on.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold