Day 3776 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 16:33 NIV

May or may not

And that largely if not solely dependent upon the perspectives to be personally purchased within our own perusal of this blend of what feels both promises and yet even they worded as what feels like potential warnings. For indeed, depending upon how one chooses to read, there seems to be at least three promises and a warning, and all of that within the wording of what remains only a short collection of simple sentences. But the difference is defined in the design of their individual substances as seen, again, upon a personal basis.

For I personally count three promises and one warning.

You might see something different, which helps us to define this faith as the personal relationship that it’s meant to be. For indeed, God has designed this road to unwind in what’s a way in which we’re all going to experience drastically different things at always different times. Rarely will any endure the exact same misery in the very same moment, and even if they did, chances are they’d walk away from it with something entirely different as a result carried with them.

Because we’re all vastly different people living vastly different lives in what are perhaps vastly different places with undeniably different perspectives, priorities, preferences and percentages of pride being allowed to drive. And it’s this portion of pride that perhaps blinds our eyes and binds our time to being given over unto the misunderstanding of promises and warnings for one another.

And I’ll, as usual, be the very first to admit that I’ve missed the mark more than a million times.

For there have been things that I’ve seen or read or heard about that seemed or sounded quite challenging if not utterly chaotic if not even perhaps perfectly catastrophic because of it. And yet so many of these self-perceived disasters as designed inside what I heard as warnings aimed at instilling a worth to or wealth of worry into my hurry, well they ended up being so small and insignificant that I honestly didn’t even remember they were supposed to be a problem.

And yet other issues have been found at the hands of my amazing ability to blow things entirely out of proportion until they were so drastically miserable that I became the same.

And we all do the same.

We take what may be a simple word as spoken unto our hearing so as to inspire our nearing to the promise we’re meant to find only to find instead a warning so shaking that we haven’t any ability left to wonder as to where the point was going. Rather we just steal the reins and rush into freaking out over what may never happen at all, at least in the many ways we might delight to imagine.

All of which is so completely unnecessary that I think we’d be amazed at just how bad life isn’t.

Because if you asked us, well, seems like we can always come up with again what is our own unique blend of boredom, disbelief and indifference.

But I don’t quite know why we like life like this. I mean, what good has ever come from our worrying ourselves over the nothing that comes around after all? And too, what good has come from our not worrying over what did? You see, we’re just weird like that. We get a single idea in our minds and it completely consumes us until nothing else has a chance of getting through.

Kind of like how this verse reads that we’re going to have trouble in this world.

Trouble? We don’t want trouble! We don’t need trouble! Trouble is troubling! And what’s troubling about trouble is that it troubles our trying to avoid trouble. And we always try to avoid trouble because we hate being troubled by troubling troubles that trouble our desire to avoid trouble.

Trouble?

Do we ever slow down to consider what trouble really is or what kind of which He might be talking about? See, when we read of a promise such as this, one won within wording that seems quite the worrisome warning, we just resort to our lesser understandings of the elementary experiences we’ve had already. And so when we see Him say that we’re going to have trouble, we just think back upon all the troubles we’ve had in the past and the many things that have troubled us and may still be troubling us today.

All because, among all the things we’ve convinced ourselves to hate, change is perhaps chief of them all.

Yes, we hate change so very much that we seem to have quite drastically discounted the opportunity it can afford. In something like trouble for example. For the troubles we’ve had and the troubles we’ve known, they too change when our lives change in Him. For in Him we’re not really troubled anymore by the many worries and woes of a world gone cold. We don’t worry about things like money troubles or relationship troubles or troubles at work.

Not that those things go away or simply lose all their importance, no, just that other things become more important and thus render them unto lower rungs of what is a ladder we’re finally climbing.

Which is something we’re not at all used to having lived our lives thinking that home was something we were meant to find or force at the many rock bottoms we’ve known.

But it isn’t, and it’s our realization of that that will invite a new kind of trouble, the kind that we’re warned about within this verse. It’s the trouble that comes from a new way of life as lived in a place that’s still living the old way for the old things for old reasons that our now old selves used to worry about too.

It’s the trouble that comes from changing so much that even those who’ve known us for years start to see us as strangers or weirdos when we no longer agree to go along for the ride. It’s the trouble that comes from having eyes opened to see the many dangers and depravities being enjoyed and displayed in the world crumbling around us. It’s the trouble that comes in ways such as being hated, being excluded, being misunderstood, being alone.

Yes, these are the troubles that followers of Christ will have in this world. Why? Because they’re the troubles He had in this world, and when we’re called to share in Christ, He means all in baby!

We’re going to be turned unto a life in which we live not by nor thus for the comforts we’ve likely come to assume will always be there. Instead we’re going to find ourselves aimed perpetually toward a promise that, to us, is worth losing or enduring whatever we have to in order to find it. And again, we’re going to do all of this changing and reconsidering and reprioritizing in real time alongside millions who aren’t and simply may never choose to agree to.

And it will be hard. And that even perhaps increasingly so.

But you see, the point of this verse isn’t necessarily to get us lost in trying to figure out the warnings and promises as done from always our personal points of view. Rather the point is to help us understand that it’s never been the lack of distress or dilemma that should matter the most. Because we simply can’t avoid either and we’ve simply no promise otherwise.

No, the point of this life isn’t to find a lack of trouble, it’s to merely find a lack of willingness to worry about it.

Which is one of the better gifts we could ever allow ourselves to be given by He who gives it alongside the ability to grow in it. For again, it’s not that the life of a Christian suddenly becomes easier. In many ways is grows to become quite difficult. After all, there’s nothing easy about watching a world all but douse itself in gasoline and strike every match they can find. No, it’s hard to see folks continue to willingly waste our one and only shot at finding life after death.

It’s miserable. It’s heartbreaking. It’s troubling.

And so it only adds to the trouble the world will see fit to cause any and all who turn from the wicked ways the world simply will not turn from. Indeed, we will become foreigners and exiles in this place, and believe me, it’s a truly strange feeling when you start to find yourself feeling out of place in literally the only place you’ve ever been!

Troubling indeed!

But again, the point isn’t the preferred lack of trouble that we’ve all learned to look for in life. No, the point is rather the promise that even the troubles we don’t go looking for and somehow manage to find anyway, even they will fade and thus eventually be forgotten. Why? How? Where? With Him in Heaven because when we’re home everything that never was won’t matter anymore.

Which should inspire us to ask why it matters so much now.

Does not all the struggle and strife only continue to matter because we still consider such things to be the matters we’ve learned to wish we’d avoid? Is it not because of our continued tendency toward mistaking a promise for a warning, the wording of a warning as a promise we don’t want to have to worry about? Indeed, doesn’t everything we endure within this life within this world still matter so much because a part of us is still afraid that it might last forever?

Friends, what do we know of forever having never been there before? What can we know of forever having all but just recently started considering it? What then do we have to worry about in a life that’s promised both the troubles that we’ve been warned are coming, an end promised to be doing the same, and yet a share in the victory that overcame both?

No, we only still worry about nearly everything in life because of things like this verse and how it seems to sound to ears that are just entirely unsure how to take what they hear. Because yes, it is very much a promise as met within a wording that sounds a warning aimed at our preparing to face what within this world will be troubling as faced before the hope of a promise as met, as James 1:12 reminds, in the crowning of eternal life as given unto those who persevere what thus demands perseverance.

And well, the warning is won within what is the wording as is aimed at the obvious inevitability of the troubles we will all face whilst within this world. And it’s this discrepancy between warnings and promises that we’ve been talking about for a couple of days now. And this verse fits pretty well as what is but another example of both promises and warnings, or at least what are promises worded as what might be read as if warnings depending upon the worries of those reading.

For in this verse we see yet again a cohesive working of both promises and warnings as aimed at the preparation of a people able then to persevere through problems unto the promises that must always be proven only beyond them. For neither do any need persevere through what isn’t troubling and nor is a promise something completed whilst there remains even the slightest of probability for any problem to resurface.

And indeed, upon that day when the heads of a few are crowned with the glorious gift of everlasting life, so too then shall the same be ushered into their never ending reward as received in that gift of everlasting life being lived with Him inside the fullness of His goodness and thus the avoidance forevermore of all that was less than as met before then.

For we’re told that there is found no more weeping or crying or mourning or pain. And yet we’ll all face or feel all the above within this world which is but the preemption to the promise as promised us to be faced in trouble. And while this promise of our enduring hardship within this world is most definitely not at all something any of us would choose for ourselves, perhaps then the promise He gives can only be given because it’s given to those who, like He, must empty themselves of themselves in order to find what they themselves could never find or afford elsewise.

Yes, for the promise of Heaven to be found demands that they who do not have the assurance of a welcome due to past indiscretions, and many of them, nor then the ability to ever again afford what was so willfully lost to that most woeful of past, it must come at the exchange of a life for a life. His for ours. But too then ours for His. And yes, we are called explicitly to clothe ourselves with Christ even unto the having of the same mindset that He had as aimed at our betterment as proven within the putting of others ahead of ourselves.

Which is itself a command issued with a clear warning attached for any and all who thereafter choose to not lose their lives. And that warning is that whomever so desires to keep their life will lose it.

Something both promise and warning.

And so we find again that warnings and promises are nothing more than singular factions aimed at bridging the fractions and fractures found within our faith, our lives, our minds, our everything. They’re nothing more than God doing whatever He can to get through to we who’ve long lived doing only as little as we wanted and hoping to never have to find, face or feel any trouble along the way.

No, warnings come unto those who are accustomed to getting by upon the bare minimum. Promises are just the rewards offered unto those even fewer who humble themselves unto the heeding of His many warnings as done in what is a submission unto His will as remains what it always was.

Which is for none to perish but rather all to find repentance as such is the path which leads unto the promise of everlasting life.

And yet too it’s that very path which winds through what may often feel unending trial or tragedy. It’s that path that goes through struggle and strife. It’s that path, His path that will find for us trouble in this world. But since the promise is that He’s overcome this world and thus every form of trouble to be found or felt within, it simply cannot matter anymore then the steps needed to be taken as it’s the finish line we’re meant to find that matters most.

Yes, let us not worry as to how God intends to get us home nor then what we may endure along the way. Let us rather focus upon the promise as the problems are temporary, but both promises and warnings may well prove eternal after all.

And no, while we’d like to imagine that promises are the only things that can last, truth is that we’ve no reason to actually assume His warnings can’t. For friends, He doesn’t change, and so thus nor then have His promises of eternal life or warnings as to unending death.

So let us be careful as to just how quickly we refuse anything He may be trying to do to help us lose what will only ever keep us lost. After all, staying lost with even more trouble on the way, well, that’s a really good way to end up so broken and frazzled that all we can imagine to do is give up.

And well, I think we’ve already done that enough.

No, the time has arrived for our to maybe do something new if we’re to truly ever hope of finding something better than just a life worried over what doesn’t last alongside a failure to care about what’s promised to.

And yeah, we’ll have troubles in this world, and sure, that feels like a warning. And well, warnings may never be seen as having the same appeal as promises. But again, it doesn’t really matter what He uses to get us closer to home with a stronger resolve to ensure that our failings and falls are what we leave behind. So welcome the trouble as, even though a warning, it’s only one meant to better prepare us for the fight that always comes just before the tunnel runs out and the reward waiting at the end shows up.

So keep going my friends, and stop worrying about what might happen along the way. For again, it’s not what we go through that matters.

It’s where we get to go that should mean the most.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold