Day 3769 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 13:11 NIV

The imminence

It’s what should prove a matter unequivocally preeminent based solely upon the imminence of the as was always already imminent. For that which is imminent is also said to be impending. And that which is impending is seen as a matter made pending upon the purpose, promise, path or proposal of they from whom we’ve gathered or gleaned this idea of how soon something means to so show itself in what is a nearness so nearing that it’s very definition has grown endearing unto those, however many few, who have themselves agreed to its growing so close.

Alas, how close can anything come to become when we retain any refusal or similar disinterest in its existence?

Indeed, what possibly can anything mean whenever it remains seen a scene largely unseen for the sake of our seeking to leave unnoticed the notice as posted upon the promise of the paths already paved unto the promises of the coming of the day upon which all will be laid bare? No, in fact I dare imagine that nothing, no matter how vitally important, can ever prove a matter which matters at all when at first we delight to deny the very gravity therein.

And my fear is that we’ll only come to see then the greatest of the greatness of His great grace on the other side of what remains a grave for all to fill.

Leaving then the separating of those who leave it to be determined by those who came to believe it only the very beginning of everything so very better that it’s forever determined best. And the rest will have themselves alone to blame for having chosen their rest upon this both impermanent and thus impertinent side of that line as carved both in this ground and upon that cross by He who crossed that line and asked that we follow behind.

But alas, again, what can even that offer mean if it’s never even seen as a thing worth the time it takes to think? And, having all of us chosen wildly to refuse it so often, what then can we, should we continue doing as such, what then can we ever pretend to be a matter of any importance in regard to the deportance of our every soul from this soil unto wherever it is that we’ll all go from here? Indeed, how can we claim we care when we’ll not even consider that there may be that somewhere other that offers to store our treasure?

For that is what matters to all, this glitter and gold as mostly bought and sold by those who’ve long since sold themselves so very short of what is the coming start of the rest of forever.

A matter that unto most simply doesn’t matter because we’re not there yet.

Rather each of us have lived this life as if the impatient patient stuck in the backseat of a family vacation heading unto the rest and relaxation that we don’t really need as kids simply don’t understand such a thing. Rather children are again the best of those left able to see this life a fable meant to both fill and fade depending upon the random tide of the day. That’s what we talked about a bit yesterday, how children manage to exist outside of the common fear of time as felt in our frustration of either not having enough or having only wasted too much.

Both of which are basically the same, just seen from opposing sides of the same indifference.

But that’s the warning as posited before us within the passage as posted within this part of Scripture. It’s a call unto the loving of those around us within the kind of love that Christ has for all. And it is a very important call to answer in that, well, we have forever hanging in the balance. For His Word is read to have said that those who love are to be the same as found in fulfillment of the law, rather than our commonly shared failing in the upholding thereof.

Yes, love satisfies the statutes as sat before us by He who both made us thus retains the only right to judge us and our works in regard to whether or not they’re to be won worthy of an eternity shared within His sight, or rather so distasteful that we’re literally spat from the mouth of the same.

It’s all there in Revelation if you care to really get ready. That’s most definitely a book that will inspire such a pursuit!

But alas, that’s the problem as posited by those of us who’ve presented what’s long been a case of at best a passing interest if not, at most, a general dismissal. For indeed, all of us have lived, and that for years, as if we’ve years left to look, lust, lead and be led lost. We’ve seemingly come upon this commonality that’s to be soon proven a criminality in which we culturally seek only to dissuade, deceive, deny, debate, just generally decry the whole idea of belief.

Which is weird because all of us believe in something, just anymore that mostly we’re here only to argue over why we’re right and everyone else then wrong.

Thus leaving the loving of those around us on what is basically life-support and there in violent need of a heart transplant.

Alas, we’ve rather sought only to plant ourselves within our passionate presumptions as to the possibility of the coming of anything that we want not to endure, let alone actually actively admit we might really need. No, a people of pride know no such thing as to be in need for we are all all that we need. Right? Well, at least that’s how we seem quite content to continue trying to live.

Just a general rinse and repeat sort of situation.

Except we even argue now about whether or not it’s necessary to rinse before just throwing all of our filth into the places that we’ve created to do all of our dirty work for us.

Which is again weird because, well, faith offers us that as well.

Granted, it’s the grave and thus our acceptance of the grace that once allowed and thus still allows us to enter it alongside the overwhelming hope that there is a Way that it can be left starving for attention. And indeed, many here have held out such a hopeful belief. But then life got in the way, leaving us to fall away from the Way that we had been following in what was a belief in everything bettered upon that promise of a day in process, a day progressing ever-patiently toward us.

Yes, we were perhaps running a decent race in days now past. But alas the patience of His promise became unto us a degree of doubt as we agreed with the world that we could no longer hold out that hope as it continued to feel as distant as just before we began to believe.

I remember those days, sadly hear some of their echoings within the todays that I’m living still. Because I think we’ve all allowed in so much world that we just don’t know how not to. For this place is nothing if not entirely doubtful unto the danger we’re in thanks to the sin we’ve been living for all this time. And indeed, I think it’s that coming debt’s satisfying that’s left us running for the hills of hatred and hostility seeking there safety in the sheer numbers of those many who are themselves living for only the same.

And it’s anymore a hatred and hostility so near that we can actually see it, hear it, feel it almost every day.

Leaving us only more doubtful as to the coming of that day upon which all will be changed.

No, we see nothing much changing in this world. Everything’s just getting worse, or maybe better depending upon your own personal understanding of whatever better might be. But as for me, no, what we see anymore most certainly isn’t it! In fact, what this world’s becoming, and in ways I myself have sadly been, well, it’s becoming quite the remarkable backdrop for a belief to begin.

Maybe for the first time, maybe just beginning again.

Either way, that’s the nearness of what is the imminence of the imminent.

It’s that feeling as felt when we first drop all the pretense and allow ourselves to present a passable interest in what we’ve been known as only having been largely disinterested in. It opens our eyes to seeing, as if for the very first time, a new way of life so unlike anything we’ve ever known that it leaves us shaken at the suggestion that we’ll never again know this newfound joy, hope as met within that moment in which we meet ourselves willing to wonder both over the opportunity and too thus away from everything that’s long kept us in denial of it being there.

That’s belief! It’s a willingness to imagine again, just like we were kids again.

For again, I contend that kids are the last of us able to believe in much of anything. In fact, they seem the only ones able to believe that joy is so near that no amount of pain or punishment can keep it away forever. No, they may fall off their bikes and scrape their knees, but they get right back up and run again unto that belief that they can fly upon those metal steeds if only they could peddle a little bit faster.

Yeah, we’ve lost a lot in our having grown old. But mostly the ability to believe in the nearness of the mostly considered impossible.

But that’s my question for you for today. It’s just how near can anything be whenever we agree to disagree that it can mean much of anything? What can anything matter when everything’s considered a matter unimportant enough to even consider? Yes, even forever? What can a better forever than we know we deserve ever really mean if it means so little that some days we’re more than willing to remain mostly unready for our lives meeting both their end and then the very start of whatever comes after?

Indeed, just how near can something be that we’ve never even cared to know it there at all?

For as I asked at the close of the last, how can we ever hope to find what we never start looking for? Does there not need to be some sense, some scene of a severity seen, felt with regard to our faith if we’re to, upon that day, be proclaimed as found among those few who did live to lose what will then be lost in Him? Maybe that’s a better way to pose this ponder: What all are we living to lose in His return? And then too, what are we living to lose before He comes?

Because you see, that our salvation is nearer now than it was even yesterday, even ten minutes ago, this ought to be met with a growth in our appreciation of it. Yes, that the return of Christ draws ever closer should accomplish in us an ever-closing distance between Him and us. Not that we ourselves can close the gap for He’s already completed that. I mean, what else needs done when the tomb’s been emptied?

No, there’s nothing more we can do than what He’s already done.

But we can allow what He’s done to continue to become a matter of increasing importance in our lives as lived, in light, in such a way that shows we’re straining from the shadows into that cast of His presence. Yes, we can live more today as if we’re more like Him than we ever have been. And indeed we should walk in His shadow, follow in His footsteps, aim to uphold His example. Why? Because it should matter more by the minute. Because something so amazing as salvation and both the hope it holds and what He held in order for us to have it, well, it’s something that cannot and thus should never ever wane in meaning.

For it does not wane in merit.

No, eternal life only comes to mean more as this life comes nearer that closing door that all of us will enter. Why? Because only a few will be found of enough loss to manage to live through it. Eye of the needle. That is our aim. And our measuring against it, trying to fit within it, that challenge is closer now than it was ten minutes ago. Are we more ready than we were then? Because if not, well then, how can we know we’ll be ready when it’s here? And well, how can we know when it will be when He’s told us plainly that we can’t?

For still that promise remains in that we cannot ever know the day nor the hour. And so, considering that, why do we continue to live as if it’s something either generic or specific? I mean, that’s what we just discussed yesterday. It’s this idea in which we live as He’s coming back five years from now or ten years after that or just generally whenever we’re elsewise better ready for His visit. Yes, we live as if He will be at best again just visiting. For that’s what He did the first time, right?

Came for a while, said some things, did some stuff and then left.

And well, as people so prone to repetition ourselves, we seem often to only expect the same. Repetition. But you see, that’s what’s so terrifying about His second coming. It’s not only that we don’t know when it’s coming but that we have heard what’s coming with Him. And so we can’t think of it in light of the first even. Which even that was roundly unexpected, so much so that those who both considered themselves the best in terms of Scriptural knowledge, and too were considered the best by others, even they found themselves so vastly unready for His coming that they eventually led the very opposition to Him that led to His crucifixion.

Yeah, a lot can go really wrong when we think we know something!

Indeed, it’s something like those pop-quizzes in school. Remember those? It’s like they always came out of nowhere. Not like the tests that our teachers told us were coming so that we could set then to memorizing a bunch of facts that we just then regurgitated unto the paper upon test day. No, they came as if by surprise, our teachers wanting to inspire us to be always ready to always show that we were always paying attention, ready always for the unseen. Sound familiar?

Yes, or at least it should for His second coming will come as either a test we’re as ready as we can be to pass, or rather a pop-quiz that we know we might not. Either way, we can be sure that that day is nearer now. But again, just how near can something be when it’s never been anything we’ve even started looking for? How can we find what we never start looking for?

Sure, we can do as we did back in school and just live on luck. But friends, problem with that is that luck doesn’t exist. And so well, seems then a pretty flimsy thing to build our entire existence upon, let alone the promised scope of the eternal version thereof. And in truth, well, we know that already in light of all the times we were caught unprepared and found there that luck let us down. But, considering again that luck isn’t a thing, it was merely our living to let ourselves down.

How much longer we continue to do just that is up to us. But friends, know for certain that our exit from this world is nearer every second. So how many more do you want to risk on not knowing where you’re going when from here you’ve gone?

Because we all will. Go. Leave. Die. It’s a simple fact of life, and yet oddly enough one of fear that’s overcome by faith. Or at least it could be. And in fact for some it has been, for others it will be. But yet there’s this waiting to always contend with. Yes, what do we make of His patience? For that is perhaps the best and biggest question of all.

For some take His patience and the delay in which it’s been daily met as something of an evidence that He’s not there at all. Others understand His patience as gift given us in what is a purposeful allowing us to come more fully unto the repentance that both He knows we need but we’re only just now learning to see needed. And there are all sorts of considerations scattered in between the two.

But still, we’re getting closer to something happening. Maybe that something is just another day. But that sounds boring. Maybe that something is nothing but our eventually dying. Seems pretty sad. Or maybe that something is a new day met after we have died and there find that everything we thought we knew about life was either wrong or right. Sounds exciting, at least potentially.

And indeed, as much as it may make no sense to those singed of the sort, I personally want to live so convinced that I’m right about finding life after death that I worry not about much of anything that happens in this one. And sure, I might die and be wrong. But I wouldn’t know it, would I? For no, if all that happens is that we just die, well then nothing after that matters.

But again, I can’t find anything of any meaning in that. And so I’ll keep living looking for the growth in meaning of that promise He’s given us of our getting to meet Him and there be welcomed into Heaven.

May not make this life any easier, in fact, it’ll probably only make it harder. But when Heaven is the promise, everything else fades in importance. And when we believe that we’re closer to home with every breath we take, well then we’ll forget to even worry about how many we might have left.

For all that will matter is the first one we take of forever.

Yeah, that’s the kind of hope that I want to live with. Because it’s a hope that only gets bigger as we get nearer while every other seems only to fade with each passing day.

So who’s the crazy one?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold