Day 3696 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 119:71 NIV

The affluence of affliction.

It’s something that affords us far more than money might buy. It offers us a growth greater than physical stature or even personal statue. It grants a soul safety as something no longer assumed but rather something assured. It gives a heart something in which to hope that cannot then be taken away as if from a strong man bound and pillaged. It provides both providence and its provenance as proof of a person’s personal pursuit of something perfectly peculiar.

Indeed, affliction is a peculiarity all its own in that none can own it but it allows all owned by it the opportunity to owe a debt of gratitude against which no human attitude might compare.

No, for we all know rather well that human emotions are often oceans that cast us adrift in differing directions throughout the day. At times we’re happy as held inside the hope of hardship staying at a good distance for a little longer. Other times we’re upset when said distance has been surprisingly closed and we’re once more at the hands of hope as held yet again upon only the seemingly most distant of shore as seen through both fog and fear.

Yes, we all know fear perhaps more than any other feeling common to man. We’re so learned in it in fact that we even fear learning it would seem. Why? It’s humbling. It brings us low by helping us see the little we know as proven in all we realize we’ve left to learn having left life unlearned in a shockingly great number of ways despite the sheer number of days that we’re mostly still not interested in learning to number either. For to so learn the quantity might inspire a questioning of the quality.

And this would undeniably find us lacking in life as lost behind the every better we’ve not dared venture toward out of the worry won within our really not thinking we’ve much left to learn.

After all, we’ve all been at this life thing for a fair bit already, and so what more might we not know?

Rather how can we know what we don’t until we’re found humble enough to begin into the imagining of anything better than everything’s been?

Indeed, this has long been the excitement I’ve seen inside patience’s willingness to wait for me to want to walk away from whatever it is that I’ve been already. It’s that curiosity waiting within the wings of wanting more than just some life spent locked inside every step we’ve already taken to thus the very same places and people we’ve already seen and always been. Yes, there is this untamed understanding that’s long been standing behind our every reason to settle for less.

And yet having always loved learning I find now that even I’m somehow terrified of it.

I say this at what feels the end of a tunnel that my family and I reached so fast that I didn’t even seem to have time to wonder as to the light they say is always waiting. No, it’s rather as if we went to sleep one night and awoke the next morn unto a new life born in which none of all that I was entirely too used to is willing to work all that well anymore. I find instead this daily dread as to where to put my bed and how much stuff to hang upon a wall that’s in now a room all my own, owned by my parents.

We’ve searched for this little hideaway from nearly half a decade now, and throughout all the failures to find it and the frustrations over trying anyway, well it seems that I’ve never really imagined what it might be like to so track down inevitability’s elusivity. Guess I just got caught assuming I knew the answers before the questions were even asked.

Funny how learning never looked like that!

At least not of what I so vividly remember of it. Because for some reason I do. In fact I’ve found of late that I can scarcely ride down the road and pass a school without some youthful wonder as to what game they’re playing in PE or what the menu might be for the day’s lunch. And I know that it’s not quite wise to so wonder as to what I’ll never know again, and perhaps even less to so reminisce upon the days already gone that I sometimes just can’t help but miss anyway.

Often not even sure why I do but I’ve found that I often feel as if there’s just so much left unlearned behind what I’ve become that I need to retrace some steps and see if I can see what I somehow didn’t along the way.

And sure, that fear of not finding what I should have by now is usually mixed with another in that I often find myself worried over such lookings back, Lot’s wife and all. But it just seems from where I sit that I’ve lost sight of a great many scenes showing things that maybe we should miss having let go so easily as to leave them but vivid memories.

Indeed, why is it that we can remember some things so distinctly if not for their meaning something so important that maybe there’s still something left to learn? Another post already in the works!

But back to the discussion at hand. And indeed, as mentioned above the preceding aside, I do love learning if for nothing else but all the unknowns it conquers. I always enjoyed trying to prove myself the most absorbent of all the sponges sat in little seats attached to wooden boxes with reminders of learners before left scrawled atop the place where I was now left to learn what they once did. Even enjoyed taking tests as they offered me a way to prove that I’d paid attention to what those entrusted with my mental growth found most important.

Guess it’s just that now I’m among those aged enough to be seen as wisdom personified to the simplified minds of a younger generation. And yet it seems that all I’ve learned for certain since walking that stage and too away from every friend I thought I’d made is that I know all too well that with more knowledge does indeed come both more responsibility and thus too the enhanced risk of consequence, clearly meaning that learning is something of a quite consequential experience.

But still, I cannot seem to reconcile inside the idea that He allows us to learn, as He gives us so clearly both the ability and also a lifetime of opportunity in which to, along with the common lack of courage to try to. No, I figure that if He wanted us to stay as we are then He’d have not done so much nor continue to send so much that brings us unto, each day, either a bettered way or rather one only left unknown.

Yes, I trust that this life is meant for us to grow, and thus too that maybe what we know is at least part of how we can. Granted, there are again a great many things I’ve learned that I now wish I hadn’t, but even they now seem to show the evidence of the purpose of growth in that there are both things to achieve as well as plenty to try and avoid. Leaving me wishing both that I’d not learned some things but too that I’d then used that same effort, opportunity and intensity upon learning what I know now needed far more than the former.

And thus maybe life is simply a matter made meaningful by our learning the difference of every such division as that between what we need to know and what we’ll only eventually wish we didn’t.

Which is yet again something that only kids seem able to even try. For it seems that most kids enjoy the opportunity to do something such go to school as they seem to trust and thus believe their parents when they send them off on those yellow jet planes aimed into the atmosphere of everything better and thus they bigger. Yes, I believe that all kids ache to grow into the world they know to be far bigger than they don't even yet realize themselves to be.

They just know that there’s a freedom waiting to be won within the work that these giants called Mom and Dad and teacher seem to insist they need.

Indeed, again I always loved school for all the fun it was with friends and food and fancy rooms where you could play games and read books and meet the mystery of what new thing you'd get to try for the day. Science fairs and school dances blending into this becoming of a functional human meant to do something with all this ability and opportunity that’s been given unto us all. Graduation celebrations that mark the grandest accomplishment in a by-then nearly adult life.

Alas then comes the fall into a fear that follows us from there throughout the rest of this ride. Or at least for however long we’re willing to welcome it along.

For somewhere along the line to that more adult life it all becomes about the friends more than the fun of learning, and thus we fall into the learning to please people as opposed to pursue our betterment. And then it's just all seemingly downhill from there until we're so far gone trying to make people like us that we don't like school anymore because of the groups we don't seem to fit into and the bullies that we become who belittle ourselves into just wishing we could graduate already and be done with the whole ordeal.

Yes, even something once so exciting as learning, well, to the jealous and jaded it all just becomes a burden when you get bigger as there are no grades to earn but rather only paychecks that the government takes too much out of and bosses who don’t give us snacks or roll that antique TV in on some massive rolling cart at what was then the start of watching a movie rather than taking a test.

No, out here there is no reward for our best, no stars given as stickers in light of a job well done or any dance for which to dream of that pretty girl saying yes. It’s all just responsibility here in this life lived outside of all the learning that we as grownups feel something best assumed as already well accomplished and thus already behind us too.

Indeed, all we know now is to wish we could go back and experience again the excitement we knew in those days when life was easier and we didn’t have a car payment due.

What have we done? Where did it go? Where have we gone to have gotten this so wrong as to have learned to hate learning and thus the hope of our knowing the growing for which we’re still here? For why else would we be? I mean, if there was nothing left of any rhyme or reason for us to face another change of season, then of what meaning might we imagine for this life we’ve all but stopped living already? Are we truly just supposed to get old and more tired along the way?

Seems a miserable game to play. What happened to dodgeball or scooter hockey? No, maybe it’s not right to miss such things. But maybe we only do because we missed something. And maybe we’re all only still here because He’s up there waiting for us to find what all we’ve been missing here inside this life lived afraid to face the fight of either the letting go of what all we think we know or rather taking hold of that once tightly held hope of learning something more so that we too might become the same.

Something more.

Yes, I find that I feel that such is the only logical reason for our ability to spend a whole lifetime learning. It’s not what we’ve come to assume it to be, just some monster that often feels so mean by making us feel so dumb inside mistakes we make without that childlike innocence to make it cute. No, it’s so that we might grow into the humility that knows there’s always more to learn in regard to a life lived right having only gotten so much wrong all along.

But I suppose that such is why we now fear it so. For to us humility feels a hostility as it seems to seek our embarrassment at the hands of guilt or regret as grown by our alone being the fools who watered such worries into what’s now an entire way of life that we can’t readily admit we’re afraid to lose. Yes, we despise affliction, be it found in the form of failure or rather faced in the fact that we perhaps learn best by failing, only because it proves us more wrong than we’ve ever pretended ourselves right.

Yes, such is the often overlooked and utterly undervalued affluence of affliction.

For truth be told, seems that perhaps those who are poorest amongst us are the same as they who’ve not had the opportunity to behold the beauty of their breaking. And that be a great many indeed! All of us in one way or maybe even a million. For sadly most everyone in this world seeks only to avoid affliction as we believe only that it offers us only hardship and hassle. Or so it seems. And sure, indeed it does. Affliction is found by all in just as many forms. Fear, failure, foolishness. Pain, persecution, a missed job promotion. Broken promises. Promised made with every intent of not keeping them.

Friends walking away, others taking their place but lasting only half as long. Cars breaking down. Relationships breaking up. Moving into an apartment and getting used to it for nine years only to find yourself finally packing up everything you own as you and your family finally managed to find a house with more room than you know what to do with leaving you with a fear of both how you’ll ever manage to afford it and too just how much more you’ve now to keep cleaned.

Okay, perhaps a little specific on that last one.

But hopefully you get my point. Life is afflictive. It’s a matter of almost constant affliction and hardship and worry as won in both the wealth we think we need and the better health we slowly learn we need far more. Indeed, life here is hard, it’s heavy, it’s of such hatred that we love one thing one day but then hate it by the next as we instead learn to love its adversary. Such as opportunity. Ability. Our somehow growing inability to not take every opportunity for granted until hindsight shows up saying we missed something.

And again, it’s anymore so common to hate afflictions, such as learning is anymore seen for the humility it means, that it’s something all of us understand. We are all utterly terrified of everything from trial to having to simply try to enjoy our lot. We don’t know how. Only because we can’t seem to see the purpose of such things as pain and problem.

But friends, that’s what we see here in this verse for today. It’s that what a few have apparently seen through the hopeful lens of a humbled soul is through our common hatred of difficulty unto the purpose for which said hardships hassle us.

And that is our growth.

They help us learn. They lean us down and leave us the same so that from said bottom we might then build again a better life as bought by a bettered faith as finally placed not in ourselves, due to realizing our limits and other such lowliness, but rather in He who so lovingly sends both trial and tempest to test us into such failures as our finding of fear placed upon our again turning the wrong directions. Because we know perfectly well that we’ve done just that more often than not, for such is most of what you learn once you’re out of school.

But friends, even if most of life’s lessons are learned the hard way through such afflictions as failure or being afraid that we’ll mess something up, truth is that we shouldn’t be so afraid of learning or losing or letting go as we’ve so culturally become. Nor of trial. Nor of pain. Nor of lack. No, rather we should understand that such things are lessons left us to learn that can lead us to He who saves us better than anything else ever might.

Because He who is humility is only able to help a haughty humanity should said hostility refuse to refuse the effuse of effort needed to overcome whatever we’ve become.

No, the fact is that we all desperately need to be brought back from our having built up a way life lived afraid of the light that loves. And we know He loves us because He offers to help us learn. We just seem to get that confused because many of the lessons He teaches are taught with humility being a mandatory prerequisite.

But friends, there is no more loving thing than to extend the patience needed to both instruct us and thus take us too by the hand toward wherever He wants to lead. Because those places and people that He’s trying to lead us toward are the very same as what we’re all often afraid to either learn to love or rather leave behind. All because we’ve tasted comfort and think it the very best thing for us. But hey, sugar tastes great too, and yet if you eat nothing but sweet stuff, you’ll likely lose all your teeth and find a hundo or two.

Thus we’re ironically the ones who most often cause our own affliction by constantly agreeing to be afraid of what we need whilst also loving what more we don’t. We don’t need to be comfortable. We don’t need to be wealthy. We don’t need to be famous. We can survive just fine without a fast car or massive house. But we’ve reached the point in which we’re afraid of not having those things.

And too of anything that threatens to maybe take them away.

Friends, my point is that while the easy things, the safe things, the comfortable things in life might help us to feel better about ourselves because they ask nothing of us, they also then can’t offer anything to us. Comfort does nothing for us. Popularity doesn’t profit us anything. Worldly power or human affluence, it only matters for a moment before it’s gone and we’re forgotten. Why then live for an easy life? Why not rather experience a life that never stops growing, regardless of the growing pains that may mean?

For pain only teaches us to stop doing the things that cause us pain. Being weak inspires us to fight to become stronger. Being humble allows us to understand that we have only improvements to find along the way to where the ahead is taking us.

Let Him be the One who decides what’s best, not those of us who are so often afraid to try for anything better than whatever is already plenty passible.

Because He didn’t create us to survive on this lauded idea of good enough. He calls us to thrive through learning to be content in either plenty or in want. For life isn’t about what we have but it will be measured by both whose we are and thus too who we become.

So who are we? And if who we are today answers that question the same way as yesterday, well then friends, I’d say we’re far worse off than if we’d have embraced the misery that might have made us better by now.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold