Day 3745 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Philippians 2:8 NIV

Humility’s obedient appearance

To set such captives free as have become you and me, He who is the forever indeed chose to deny Himself his due, choosing instead to enter into the sinful existence of we who’s substance has become anything but the humility He is. All because He’s always known that humility is the only way to learn what we've never known, and thus find what we've never found, and thus be where we've never been as who we've thus never become. And now indeed, it's all through Him, and yet that we can't find Him is what's meant to be humbling.

For the hope of said humility is that He found us and thus that all we need to know is how to trust.

And yet what a humbling request that's become!

Because it’s one that comes in only a death. Because in many ways that’s all humility really is. It’s a dying to something we’d elsewise go on living for or striving toward or hoping in or holding high as if the apple of our eye can be within this thing we’ve made a life around trying to buy, leaving us so lost as to live as if it’s always on us to try to find what we’ve not found any semblance of outside of that ability to continue thinking that our continual trying is what will get us toward that where we’ve never been.

But how can we know where to go in order to be who we’ve never become on this side of that fine line as drawn between the death we’ve lived and the life He died?

After all, to die is something that we run from, not toward. Because it’s seemingly unnatural. It’s illogical. It’s plain idiotic if we’re honest. And yet we are while we aren’t. And this seems to say all we need to hear about why we’re here still so far away from who we know we need to be as was meant to become rather than who we’ve been instead. Yes, rather. That’s the matter we talked about yesterday in regard to how rather is the outcome of our every choice made.

Such as that seemingly always made in regard to our choosing to live this way of life in which to die is literally the very last thing we’d ever choose to do.

And that only because it’s apparently the very last thing we have to.

Yes, for all of us, and for most of our lives, we’ve seen death as the ending of life simply because while we know of people who have died, we don’t know those people anymore because they’re not here to be known further. And this is precisely what we understand of life. It’s a journey, a furthering, a continuing of living as done in action, movement, word, memory even. Indeed, only the living can remember the life they’ve lived.

Right?

Well, in all honesty we have no idea. We don’t know what the dead might remember as, again, they’re not here for us to ask such questions seeking inside the answers something by which the wisdom to better live life might come. No, rather wisdom is something we apparently have to win within this world in which our whole lives are seemingly lived.

Apparently.

Because the truth is that we don’t know even what our whole lives are as we’ve only lived but a portion thus far. And so all we can know is what we have known as the rest is simply all that’s left to still be learned. But that’s the apparent tragedy that we see in our death’s finality. For if dying is truly only the losing of life, then our death will mark the spot in time in which all we knew, and thus all we learned, and thus all the ways by which we came to know what we then chose to either live for or leave ignored, it’ll all just be gone.

But it’s become this that I personally cannot wrap my mind around anymore. For why would we all be here if all we could expect was to lose everything that’s ever mattered or meant anything? Why would life exist if the greatest expectation of life itself was to cease existing? Why have the ability to breathe air, drink water, enjoy food, share laugher, learn love if all the above were to only ever eventually become, inevitably, things that we lost and thus could do or know no more?

That’s a cruelty that I for one cannot fathom.

Because so much of life is so very beautiful that it takes us a lifetime to even notice it. And where’s the meaning in that? That is takes us so many years, decades perhaps, to finally figure out what life is all about, but only then to live as if we finally understand for what is such a short amount of time that we cannot then go on enjoying it longer? And if we will all one day reach that place in life in which we finally get what life was always about, only to then realize too that we’ve just about run completely out of the very time in which we could have tried to live that bettered life far sooner than we did, then what then will it matter what we did when we see that what was done only kept us from knowing what life was meant to be?

I guess you could simply say that it seems that I’m finding that perhaps all of life is more than I’ve lived it for, and thus that perhaps all life is is but a string of lessons in humility and whether we learn them or rather leave ourselves to be taught them without then the limited opportunity to do so in an agreeing fashion. For such lessons can be learned the hard way, and this we all know already, but I trust we’ll find that to be only as disagreeable as we’ve long considered humility to be as learned within the hardest of ways already.

Because we’ve made mistakes. We’ve gotten things wrong. We’ve taken roads that led us nowhere. Each of us have said things, done things, wanted things, won things that gave us only so much of absolutely nothing good that we seem, at times at least, all but unwilling to do anything anymore. Indeed, what’s odd is that each of us has all but lain life down in what seems a seeking to not keep stumbling over our own stupidity as met in the city streets as paved by pride and preference.

And yet we live still as if we can’t quite understand that necessity of humility as won within the laying down of a life. We’ve literally done it within our basically all but giving up and becoming complacent, and yet we live as if we can’t do it because it sounds like dying.

But friends, that’s the question: What are we living for?

Are we living for appearance or rather the appearance? Are we lost looking toward and thus living for what we can see, afraid of only our not finding then a way to have what we know is there? Or rather are we here as if there is something more to see that we somehow cannot manage to miss nor mistake even despite our inability to so differentiate what we have seen from what we don’t know we haven’t yet?

And I get it, it’s all so very confusing that it seems that to venture in would leave us no way out not losing. But again, that’s the very point of humility. It’s the loss of something that we could otherwise easily keep or readily find. Such as how we can easily keep holding tight to our way of life, and likely therein continue to readily find every reason we already know to keep settling so low as to only live for what we’ll all have to let go.

At the appearance.

For such is when all that was all along needed will be finally completed unto the answering of every question asked, and that whether or not we've any answers to give.

Because He didn’t just live to leave and never come back.

And thankfully we've been given this life of what is a meantime in which to learn to die to what isn't the Giver thereof so that upon that day of His appearance made we might then kneel to say that we sought to know Him no matter the cost nor how many times we may have got lost trying to do what none ever had the ability to. Because it's within that effort as given unto that interest that I must hope that He will heal our eyes, open our minds, revive our hearts, and save our lives.

And that through only the deaths we learn within this one.

Because that’s what humility is. It’s the death of our thinking we know better. It’s the loss of that life lived as if we had all the answers, even those to the questions we refused to ask or imagine we’ll be asked. It’s the laying down of our cardboard crowns as gilded in crayon and confusion, seeking there and then a life found outside of our every delusion designed inside a mind so mangled as to still seemingly misunderstand why we’re still around.

It’s not because we’re doing such a wonderful job at everything, is it? For if that were the case then this world wouldn’t be a mess so filled with hate that most days we can’t see straight enough to actually learn enough to ever prove we know enough to have found that other way to avoid what none of us have. Because all who’ve left haven’t come back. And so nor then have we any reason to assume we might.

And yet we go so gently into that goodbye as if saying it will be spoken so freely that, by then, we’ll have finally learned the humility that was always willing to leave what we all will.

Just only finding it when the leaving is forced rather than chosen as if a gift meant for sharing.

What if we all shared in His humility? What if we each became so very obedient to His hope that we emptied our lives of everything, of everyone that didn’t share in it so very much that it was all they cared to share? What are we sharing? What are we showing in what we share? Or do we even care to so measure a life that we will all lay down at some point?

Indeed, what can the point of a life be if never we find that humble audacity to lay it on that line He’s drawn seeking to there and then find out just who He is and what that really means?

And no, it’s not about testing Him, some sort of demanding Him to show Himself, prove Himself, come again and lose Himself once more so that we ourselves can see the show and only then begin to live as if we know He’s there. No, it’s about testing ourselves to find out what we’re made of as known only when asked that question of what we have to lose and just how willing we are to let it go.

A question which also helps us find the hope toward which we’re aimed.

Yes, where is your hope? Because honestly, if we can say it’s anywhere other than the grave, then we’re living to lose it at the hands of the death that we’ve already given it to. For we’ve long lived hoping in the fun and excitement that all sin is. But friends, all sin is is death itself as it denies the life lived the way the Way did, and thus leaves us living contrary to the outcome He found within that place in which our hope should now be.

Because if we can truly say that we’re living for Christ, then so too could we trust that to die is a gain that living a life in or of or for this world could never give. But yet we can’t say that if we’ve not found that share in His humble choice to lay down what couldn’t last in exchange for the hope of what will never end.

So again, where is your hope? And, more severely, are you willing to lay it down in order to find out just how trustable and truthful it really is? For that’s the thing about hope, it never dies. And so if our hopes cannot survive our letting them go, then we’re only hoping in death. And if our hope is still in something dead, then we have no hope at all.

For hope is willing to risk it all in order to prove itself as alive as no death can overcome. And that’s exactly what Christ accomplished in His laying down of a life as done in such an obedience unto the humility that is the hope of Heaven that even we heathen can have it!

But do we?

Maybe. But friends, the truth is that such a hope is only to be ever known in humility. And thus we will not ever know that hope if we don’t have the courage to bet everything on it now. Because if we wait to be humbled, then it will not have been a choice we made. And if we don’t make the choice to humble ourselves now, then nor do we have the hope of finding the life that He left for us to find in that place in which He left it all.

I guess that either way our answers to His questions will still be quite insufficient. But there’s just something better about having the ability to say we tried rather than we just didn’t think we really needed to.

He showed us that we need to. Whether or not we do, well, that’s on us.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold