Day 3750 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 7:18 NIV

The acknowledgement

It’s what sets into proverbial motion what becomes the very toppling of our every trying as set to the tune of the trials in which we’re torn and tried, tattered behind tear-stained eyes as met as if for the first time with this then alien ability to finally see that we had been blind to what every belief was always meant to be but was alas never allowed to become. For to us who’ve lived on this run as won away from the Way of hope himself, we’ve not had then the time to allow ourselves to become what we were always meant to be.

Rather all we are is now instead all that we’ll be found acknowledging as if the knowledge was truly always there within us.

Something itself of a treasure buried behind our every other blasphemous belief and yet that same realized inability to even make those become what we thought they could help us be.

No, rather life has gone quite wildly out here walking upon the wide open and veritably more free. But perhaps that’s the first domino that we set in place as we set out to sit in place within this fall from grace that we’ve all found in what’s been a life lived for first place as if our winning what we’ve none of us come to want is still somehow to be seen as anything of a good thing. No, there is nothing good coming from a life lived as if nothing bad can happen.

It just leaves us so shocked when the bad that we know happens ends up happening as a result of something our hands have held, or our minds have imagined, or our hearts have desired, or even our present has denied. And I find that anymore it’s often that last one that becomes for us the big one that asks, eventually perhaps, the most humility of all.

Why?

Because it’s one thing to sit in the acknowledgement of mistakes made in the past, for all of us learning and we find the ability to extend grace in light of that. But it’s an entirely different dilemma to so deny that better still after what should have been plenty enough mistaken to have become for us a forsaking of that same path being allowed to be still the only one upon which we walk. No, we should have realized by now that messing up is well within our wheelhouse as welded to want and wish, and mostly the wishing that our every wanting wasn’t as prone to problem as the past has proven.

And this weight of shame as sold by our past beliefs and bought by us in extended measure should have become, by now, the understanding that whether we do the good that we know to isn’t at all the lighthearted matter that we’ve so clearly made it seem.

For there is nothing light about that weight of realizing wrongs have been made, especially when you see that they were made by we who’ve all along thought that we were only making our way to the very fulfillment of our every hope, dream, design and desire.

No, that instead we’ve set our lives on fire as felt now within the fools we feel as faced within the foolish mistakes we’ve made, this should be evidence enough that good does not exist in us, and thus, that nor then can the better toward which that better aims. After all, if there is no good within all the bad we’ve done as defined in all the regrets we’ve won, well then nor can we ever hope to find, feel, force or see anything good in the everything still ahead.

After all, if you keep building with the same blocks according to the same blueprints, you’re going to only end up with the same outcome.

Which, oddly enough, seems the reverse to the obvious obverse as considered within that passage pointing us to sitting and figuring as to whether or not we have enough to complete this tower toward which He’s called us to escape into, a tower built of trusting in Him, and that often at the necessary expense of that life lived trusting only in us.

It’s just that this reverse side deals not with the faith that’s found us and thus asks us to set to the understanding that, no, we can’t finish this project as we’re but fools who know only to mess things up. Ironically understood a little better in that this side asks us whether or not we can afford to continue building our lives the way we have of the wants we have that have had no real worth once won.

Can we keep living this way and expect to find anything?

Or can we only find everything when we’ve finally come to acknowledge that everything we’ve found within a way of life lived so vastly lost that we lost every bit of any good we may have once had inside?

I mean, where did it go? God’s image was ours as in such we were made, male and female, just as He said. But look at us now! Even that line is one society is seeking to blur so badly that folks are even forcing it on children! Where’s the good in that? Where’s the good in us for having done so little as to allow it to come to that? Where’s there good at all to be found within what is this furthering fall away from both reality and He who created it, and only asked that we live responsibly within it?

No, I rather look back and see a story played out in which I apparently ran out of that willingness to shoulder personal responsibility long ago. For it seems I always had the capacity to know the good I could have done. I mean, why else would I know now that I didn’t do it then? And granted, ignorance is most definitely allowed a seat near the head of this table that has been this fable of a life lived assumptively able to have by now forced the good to show its face.

But friends, that’s just it! That still we seem to see quite little good around, and find that we feel entirely too little of the same, and that more days than not, this is evidence that there is no good left alive in us.

Yet that we can confess the bad we’ve done, in the mere experiencing of shame or sorrow, this is proof that we know the good side of those negatives as well. After all, how could we know what was wrong if not for the fact that we’ve learned of something against which to measure them? And yet, how can we come to measure anything in terms of the goodness therein or the lack thereof without some unmoving exemplar of at least the most basic form of simple decency?

And yet, how can we even pretend to understand anything of decency if not also finding, within that understanding, a grasp upon the widespread descent from it? And if we can admit that said descent is indeed quite widespread, then how can we imagine that it’s not impacted our lives as done only within the choices made within them? And if we can embrace that at least some of our choices were in fact made in what became a lesser than outcome than that for which we set out, then we should be able to see that the widespread impact of the descent away from decency has in fact impacted us too.

And if it has in fact impacted us too, then so too should we be able to finally see clearly the blindness in which we’ve shared that’s led to the badness we can accept that we’ve done.

We can see that we’ve done things wrong, right?

Well, this is that acknowledgement that I spoke of us as what becomes the first fall of ours as finally found away from what we’ve become back toward who we should have always been. But, then again, this acknowledging can only ever be done within the knowledging of knowledge as to the knowing now how to accept that we didn’t know then what our every past mistake now says we either didn’t understand or just didn’t care to admit that we did.

After all, none of us would willingly do anything wrong knowing that such mistakes become those weights of those things such as guilt and shame.

Would we?

Well, that’s where things get kind of murky because the truth is that all of us have long had the ability to know the difference found in that distance as designed between light and dark, wrong and right. But that we’ve all stumbled into our own shade of gray seems instead to say that we’ve been okay with a life lived as if living in the middle is what life was meant for all this time.

And yet we have that Word as spoken so clearly against such a tepid tempering. Lukewarmth He calls it, and it’s defined as something in equal tone as that salt He spoke of having lost its saltiness. Indeed, such salt is said to be good only for being thrown out and trampled underfoot, and so too this lukewarm faith is said to be of such bad taste that it will be spat out of His mouth.

Into the woes of weeping and gnashing.

Not quite something we should live wanting.

And granted, it’s likely not that we do, or at least that we don’t see it quite that way. But friends, that’s the wonder still in the way. It’s that as asked in, yet again, what are we doing? Why are we still living so torn by this trying to be the better we know we should while still doing the less than that keeps us, well, less than? Why are we still so stuck in place if we can embrace that this place we’re in isn’t the good we’ve long hoped it could have been?

Why still imagine that we alone can become what the past proves we cannot be on our own?

For good isn’t found within much of my past, but rather only mistake. And yet, that I can acknowledge that I have made mistakes, have misunderstood things, have said things, done things, wanted things, lost things that I should have kept hold of or never taken hold of, this seems to say that I don’t have any foggy idea what I’m doing! Rather it seems that I’m mostly prone to only a life lived making it up as I go. But friends, where can we go when we’re the only ones trying to make the way, and that way itself to be thus made up as we blindly grope our way along the wall of a life still lived making mistakes, thus getting plenty wrong?

How can we get anywhere when all we know to do is hide in the dark all the mistakes we make so as to still appear as if we’re doing okay?

No, being blind and living in the dark seems a double portion of the same position, just us stuck underneath a failed belief in our self-perceived ability to have become by now something we still so clearly aren’t inside a place that we just knew would be better than it is.

But that’s just it. If we do want better than this, and thus better than what our now obvious inability to do better can help us find, then we have to acknowledge that we have lived blind. We have to accept that we have been lost. After all, if I do believe in Christ, well, why would He have come to find me if I weren't as truly lost as my past always imagined I wasn't? And why would I imagine I wasn't if not for the fact that I knew I was?

For logic tells us that we don't imagine things seeking to better whatever is already good enough. Rather we imagine so as to fathom that something better that isn't.

And so my imagining that I wasn't lost, as proven now folly within my feelings of regret, this is now met with me having to sit and see that I was lost, but that yes, now I am found. That I was the one out of the hundred who walked away seeking my share of the prodigal's squandering, but too, that now the other 99, who themselves were found much the same, will share in that great rejoicing said to be sung inside of Heaven over this one sinner who finds life inside the repentance given us in His giving us of His.

We do believe He did give His life for us, right?

For that is the light as lain down in the single greatest love anyone could ever have. And we know this for a fact because the only other greatest love any could have is the laying down of their life for their friends. And yet, we still struggle to lay down our death for ourselves!

Tell me that we don’t have so much to learn about life!

No, I find that I know less of life by the day as I find only more of those many wrong ways in which I’ve tried to live it the way I thought I should, or could. Either way, the outcome’s still the same. Because the outcome is still just me lost and left there to either start looking for a way to find what I haven’t, or to simply keep finding excuses to not look for what I could.

I just know that I’ve done plenty of the latter, and so doing the same doesn’t seem able to matter anymore. For doing the same things over and over again will only bring us the same results over and over again. And personally, I’m just sick and tired of feeling like the failure that my past has proven me to be, at least in terms of such things as doing right and being humble and praising God and having hope and knowing peace and finding purpose and feeling worth it.

No, I’m tired of feeling as if I’m worth the very same nothing that I’ve always settled to do in regard to the better we’re all called to try for.

And He calls us that way within those feelings of guilt and shame. For we shouldn’t be so willing to accept those as the outcomes we’re meant to find or feel in life. No, those things are death, and well, finding death doesn’t do much in the way of helping us find life.

Thankfully the Life became the Way that helps us overcome the death we’ve allowed inside. It just comes down to our acceptance that we cannot become what we haven’t ever been willing to admit we never were. But friends, if we can admit that we haven’t been good at living a better life, then maybe He can take that humility and use it to lead us toward that better life.

Because of the acknowledging.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold