Day 3747 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 7:15 NIV

Understanding

And yet as sought through only what always feels a sort of sifting through the wreckage of a way so wasted that all I’ve to base the very wins of wisdom’s winds upon are but past wants, present wishes, coming problems and current issues. And it’s this background for a life’s belief that has all but left me leant only upon me without even the foggiest idea as to why I would ever agree to do such a thing so vital in what feels often the way most feeble.

For understanding I’ve long sought, but it seems now that I’ve never had the affluence by it’s afforded.

Because understanding is something seen through both the triumphs we seek but also, if not more so, within the trials we don’t. It’s something learned through lessons both loved and loathed, the loathing more those with the growing as spent in our going through what we want not to endure, enduring it anyway out of what must be always a blind trust in either the process or its purpose. But so often we seem to get quite lost within the making of our own versions of each.

Indeed, most of life has become a belief in which we seem to mostly only ever believe that life is to consist of only what we think best and then the paths we alone must pave, but might not be able to, toward these many bests reached. And so it slowly devolves into just you and me living to seek what’s around the every next corner as if each one a store with always something bigger or better in store.

Because neither bigger nor better seem to be available where we are right now. Which seems strange when considering just how long we’ve been so sure that we’d have been there by this time yesterday.

For that is what our every day is spent consisting of, just our many hours being offered unto this idea that we know so much about life that we can both imagine its very best version, and that too we’re somehow already proven so very good at doing whatever it is that we’ve both done and yet never tried to that somehow we too can both know a life’s best and find it all on our own.

Only to have somehow not found it by now.

Friends, if we know what our best life would be, and we truly have the ability to make it happen, then for what are we still looking?

This is the part of our process that I just don’t understand anymore. And yet there’s that word again, understand. It’s something of grasping as to the baser levels of every belief ever began by he or she who did or didn’t find what they insisted they might within whatever their choice ever led to in that wherever their every decision aimed. For that’s understanding, isn’t it? Do we not show our basic grasp on a matter or moment within the choices we make in regard to either?

For we do what we do as if our doing it is the right thing to have done by the time it’s over. Right? That’s what our every choice really is and will forever be. It’s just you and me running free into this way of life in which we live as if we can always know both right from wrong and thus good from bad and thus here from home or that home is here and there is nothing else to really worry about.

Because surely we do all understand by now that every single choice, action, work undertaken and even our every word spoken carries with it a cost known as a consequence which is to be carried within what becomes the outcome of that inspired input as given unto a choice we made to do what we did. And yet we do still so very much that we don’t want to do, either having done it before and not enjoying the outcome or trying it once and expecting it to be that hard again should we try it a second time.

And thus we find that we’ve come into this way of life in which we live basically afraid of doing much of anything at all. For we understand that we’re either going to repeat past mistakes or make new ones within that trying to do something different than what led to those mistakes of the past.

Thus struggle and strife the seasonings sprinkled on top of our every season of life as sought in either sight or sound, lusting eyes or itching ears.

And our finding that we’re always caught somewhere in between the two, or most likely just trying always to serve the both, well it becomes what feels like more than reason enough to not trust ourselves to do all that much in the way of making choices. And yet when we stop trying to make choices, well then we basically stop living life as life is a chance chosen no matter what we do really. And it’s not even the big choices that count the most.

For one big choice carries one big consequence whereas a million small decisions carry a million small demands as given in our doing what we’ve then chosen to do a million times over.

And there’s just something about messing up once that seems a little more forgivable than does doing one thing wrong a million times or doing a million things wrong in sequence.

Which is what life is.

Indeed, as I said the other day, I truly believe that life is truly nothing more than a journey spent learning both where and thus what all life isn't. And thus one taken through mostly only mistakes being made and the misunderstandings that are so always willing to make them. And thus such things as guilt and shame but pit stops meant to inspire our turning around and heading back toward the better chance of finding what life is as was meant to always be lived without the mistakes in which such things are made.

But anymore it seems that we’ve become so very accustomed to ignoring guilt and denying regret that we just live as if they don’t exist at all. Not that we know they don’t, rather we just don’t like that they do because they don’t feel very good. And well, we highly prefer that which makes us feel good. And yet, sadly, as was likely bound to happen when lost in a place in which seeing is seen as the only basis for believing to be seen, we’ve come to widely agree that what feels good is mostly the same as what makes us look good.

And thus, as the superficial scoundrels we’ve clearly all become but can’t seem to quite admit that we are, we live for the performance more than anything else.

And well, when living your life as if nothing more than a performance in which everyone expects the lines to be made up and the choreography a little unrefined, so too do we learn to not worry all that much about making mistakes or saying something we shouldn’t or focusing once more on one more idea as to what might prove best unlike everything else that seemed the same but clearly didn’t get there. And indeed, these days we’ve so little shame that we can shake it off should it ever dare encroach upon our enjoyment of life void of the very refinement that life is meant to seek.

It’s truly as if we’ve all but completely forgotten that!

That truth that tells us that a life never stops being lived, or at least trying to do so with at least some understanding as to the obvious responsibility to do so in the best way possible.

And yet why don’t we? Because again, despite our having all become quite accustomed to this way of walking in which we all take wrong turns, we’ve all too quite equally stopped caring as to where those mistakes might lead us. Because I think we’ve embraced the simple fact that says we’ve been broken and confused for so long now that we don’t mind it. We can manage it. We can handle it. We can continue to find what we’ve already found, and while it may not be what we may have once considered best, turns out that we’ve found that easy and best are pretty interchangeable.

So long as you learn to not care about where you’re led by what you do as done because you alone made the choice to do it and thus will be left alone to face the music.

Because that’s what happens when you drop that quarter into the jukebox that life is. It will play the full song of whatever number you chose.

And thus we see that we’re all but dead already! Why? Because we’ve chosen to play the same song so many times that we ourselves have stopped listening to the lyrics. Because we think we know what this song of life is saying to us. We’ve done it. We’ve lived it. We got this! We understand how to live, been doing it for years at this point!

But friends, that is the point!! What are we doing? Is it truly living? Are we good with everything that’s happening? Are we willing to welcome the consequences that still come from even the things we’ve been doing for years? Because they don’t change! Sin is still sin, and each one thus still wins a death all its own! And thus every time we sin we earn another death.

Does it really matter then how many times we’ve done it? Or should the fact that we know so well how to repeat it be seen as now the reason to stop charging what we couldn’t afford to start with?

That’s why we stopped listening. It’s why we stopped looking for understanding. It’s because we know that if we’ve done anything, odds are we did it wrong. And even worse, we know then that our having continued to do those wrongs have never been able to lead us in the right direction. And thus we know why we’re still just as lost as we always were seeking that same something we always were.

We’re all trying to understand both why we’re here and why we do what we do in light of how we all realize that we won’t be here forever.

And yet we’ve even stopped listening to that truth because we basically realize that we’re already in that place that no life wants to be simply because we know that if and when a life stops growing in the knowing of what life isn’t, then the only life we can ever end up living is that that isn’t all that alive at all. And yet we seem to have mostly agreed upon this idea of understanding that has us standing still, still making all the same choices, but yet still acting as if we’re expecting something better to come from it.

For such is the fall into whatever this is that we’ve so fully found every reason to feel as if we just can’t give up!

Which is really odd because it began as a leaving behind God’s desires for us to do as He created us to, choosing instead to find out for ourselves why we should trust this God who we didn’t trust enough to lead us in the right way to begin with. And indeed, it’s very much as confusing a confiscation as it sounds. We choose to stop trusting God in order to try and find out for ourselves why we should trust in God. Gave up what we had not only been offered but in fact had already been given all so that we could begin digging into every pit of pride and preference trying to find a way to have what we’d been given and yet only chose to give up.

We literally let go of where we were in order to find some self-perceived better glory in another story that we thought we could write that could only ever, at best, get us back to where we were before we left.

Man we’re dumb!

For still we’re living still just looking to find what life is where life isn’t. And we know what life isn’t because we still experience so many wrestlings with such things as humiliation and the shame toward which it leads, if chosen long enough. And thus we too know where it isn’t because He came to leave that last place we knew to look! Because ain’t none of us that excited to try to find life in the admitting of the things we’ve done which brought not only shame to the One who hadn’t done the same but in fact the very suffering upon which our very salvation is contingent.

But He did it!

And so what then are we still looking for? Better yet, why are we still looking for what He already showed us He’s freely given us? Do we still not know if we can trust Him? Even though He chose to lay down His life for what He didn’t do as opposed to that far more justifiable asking for our lives at the cost of what we’ve done that deserved what He endured that He didn’t have to?

Friends, He did it to show us where life isn’t by dying for what life wasn’t ever meant to have become. But that it became, that we’ve become what He didn’t intend for us to be, such is both where we should be able to see what all life isn’t and thus too find, in that, every reason we need to trust Him to take the lead in helping us see what life should be, could be, will be if we lay it down and stop living as if we know what the past proves we don’t.

For again, life seems but a journey spent learning where all life isn’t, what all life isn’t. And we know this because, even despite our every effort given unto never trying, still we stumble into such things as learning and understanding. Still we come upon lessons learned in having made mistakes that help us understand a better way to do things that hopefully doesn’t lead to only our making of more of those mistakes. That’s understanding! And thus we can see that it’s also the very beginning of wisdom!

Because if we can come to see the errors we make, well then, as Paul goes on to say in the very next verse, we too then come into agreement that the Law is good. Because, if having tried to always prove that we’ve never been wrong, if we embrace those feelings of such things as shame, guilt, remorse, then we’re agreeing that we’ve been wrong. And if we can agree that we have been wrong then we can there find reason to seek a bettered understanding that can hopefully help us find a little more of that Way that both overcame the grave and thus too the Law which defined it as the penalty for what we’ve gotten wrong.

But friends, we can never find Him if we never find that humbled audacity to confess that we don’t know what we’re doing, nor often even why we’re doing it. We cannot be forgiven for what we won’t confess we’ve mistaken. It truly is as simple as that.

And yes, I do understand that even confessing our sins doesn’t necessarily make us feel all warm and cozy, especially when we slip up and do the same things again. But friends, so long as we can continue to see that we’re messing up, so too then can we believe that He’s the One who’s helping us realize it. After all, if it were truly up to us, we’d never accept that we’re doing anything wrong now would we?

No, we’ve done this that way for years! And yet, here we are, still confused, still ashamed, still afraid, still unsure as to why we keep doing the things that we don’t want to do whilst not doing the better things that we know we should be doing.

And no, I often find myself unable to understand it myself. But perhaps that blending of our lack of understanding with our realization that things aren’t improving is meant to inspire us unto the seeking of He who can help with the both. For He is understanding and He died to prove that His desire for us is to improve as we grow in that humility that’s willing to lay down a life so that His new version might grow in its place.

Let us give Him that room to help us grow by both confessing we need to but also that we just don’t always know how to.

And again, no, it may not always help us feel better about the failures we’ll still manage to convince ourselves to find. But still, there’s just something about trying to understand both that we can do better and agree then that we want to do better that sounds far better than not trying to do either.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold