Day 3781 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 24:12 NIV

Nice try

But to what avail? What has been the life we’ve lived still behind this veil of opportunities veiled behind this belief in some dire hint of plausible deniability as defined inside of basically everything anymore? Indeed, what is the point of an existence when there’s always an excuse attached as sewn inside the ride from where we are to our never being anywhere else? Are we not tired of trying so hard to entertain this idea that there can always be another excuse meant to excuse our refuse of anything aimed into the better we know well that we still are not?

I’m personally sick of trying to hide my life behind this guise of a guy who’s doing just fine and thus knows nothing of the better I could be.

Because I know that I’ll not be weighed only upon what I became but also that as measured against what I could have been instead.

And yet I stay in bed. I droop my head. I allow myself to some days be led by whomever else comes along with a claim as to a way in which I might be happier than I’ve never been. And I do want that happy in my life. I do want to do more of what’s right. I do want to go to bed at night with my head filled with excitement as to a worry finally lost as to the coming of another tomorrow tomorrow in which I can hopefully do all I didn’t in the day now gone.

Yes, I’m over all of this sitting in place hoping always for another day in which to be all He made me to stay. For alas I’ve only stayed within this way that I’ve made into what is a string of days so mundane that I couldn’t pick one important one out of a lineup if my life depended upon it.

Problem is that I just might have to one day because it very well might.

But all I have toward which to point for some proof that my life wasn’t a total loss is just a life lived mostly lost looking for things or theories to choose and chase along what’s been a long line of more excuses than anything. All of them made both in the moments in which I didn’t do what I likely knew I needed to, yes, but perhaps even more so within the aftermath of that every path that I blazed into a number of days spent walking away from anything even remotely resembling personal responsibility or purpose or peace or passion.

No, I literally awoke this morning feeling just about as depressed as I ever have, at least that I can remember. It’s as if there’s a swelling weight on my shoulder begging me to sit with all the misplaced thoughts inside my head and clean that place up a bit.

Only issue is that I don’t know that I know how.

Because all of my life’s been but an excuse without end. Sure, I change the words to meet the messes. I find little ways to make routines seem not the ruts I know they are. I try all I can to convince myself that this new day at hand will be better than all those I’ve weathered within all those moments lost to whatever whether or not I wanted to allow to continue to cloud the outcome. Yes, I’ve always wanted some sort of fog to help me forget the clarity of the Gospel’s sincerity.

For I know with clarity comes gravity, but alas my life looks as if the only gravity I know is that which holds us to this ground we’re standing on for what appears to be one more day.

Yes, one more day.

Will I know within it the right things to do with it? Probably. Will I then do the right things that need done within it? Hopefully. Should my doing of what’s right always come down to such a blasé hope as that always known within the days before in which I’d hoped to have done better than I now know I didn’t? Should hope in better be always tied to all these excuses we have at the ready for why we missed it?

I didn’t know. Wasn’t sure. Wasn’t ready. Wanted to but got scared. Didn’t seem like the right time. Wouldn’t have gone right anyway. I’d have messed it up no matter what. I trusted someone else to take care of the issue. Too young to care. Too old to worry. Too small to matter. Too big to fit. Too weak to win. Too strong to show I care.

Yeah, so many things I wish I’d have cared about before 37 found me this unable to do anything about it now. Rather I just sit here every day trying to find a way to make my life seem like what I always knew it was supposed to be. But I had no idea. This isn’t what I imagined. Not saying that I’m not good with how it’s turned out, just never knew of all the turns along the way, nor then all that would be lost and the things I’d find that I wish now I could lose. It’s all just a cancer, this confusion as aimed careening through excuses and their lack of growth.

Yes, I want now to grow in all those ways that I once claimed I didn’t know I needed to.

All because I guess I thought I’d have the time to later on.

Well, is not later on always just after now? Thus hasn’t later on already come around a million times or more? Doesn’t this leave us holding still the bill for a life we’ve betrayed at the hands of hands that were afraid to touch the plow? Haven’t even had time to look back on all we should have done and thus could have been. Just busy instead still coming up with more excuses to put in our retinue of the same.

Is our having a retinue of reasons we’ve refused our growth in and toward His reward truly something of a routine we don’t mind repeating? Or is it merely a rut that we’ve not the guts to admit we’ve both gotten ourselves into and yet can’t figure out how to get ourselves out of?

That’s the amazing thing about this way of life we’ve come to live. We’re the very ones who make the choices that create the problems that we then have to come up with excuses to either try and deny or rather just weave together as if a rug of lies under which we live to sweep them. We literally lay all of these traps for ourselves within this constant continuation of what remains a proclamation that we didn’t know what we were doing, didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know what was coming.

Except that we make all this fuss about how we know what we’re doing, where we’re going, what’s going on and how we have it all under control.

Well, except for that coming part.

And in fact that’s right where our every excuse comes apart. They all, in unison, manage to fail so majestically right at that intersection of life and eternity. Simply because we’ve lived for years understanding, apparently, what life is and what that means for the time in which we’re here to live this life that we claim to have figured out well enough to live it well enough to die pleased with the outcomes we’ll then leave behind.

Problem then is that we spend so much time trying to find this amazing story to pass on to those who stay behind that we never give too much time into the looking ahead.

But friends, how much longer can we afford to continue this way in which we always put off until tomorrow anything that will then only be found within another tomorrow that’s become a today? Indeed, why continue to put off for later what will only prove then what we could have taken care of sooner? Why is it that we’re so enamored by the promise of later? Doesn’t sooner come sooner? And aren’t all problems seen as struggles best over as quickly as possible?

And thus shouldn’t our biggest problem be the one we seek to resolve before the problem itself can even become a problem?

What is this problem that isn’t technically a problem yet but one promised to be one before long? Is it not our continuing to do things that we only eventually want to hide, and yet those very things that, by the time we get around to feeling so guilty about are only things He already knows about?

Indeed, how long can we do it that way?

How many days are we so sure we have left to all but wager our forever upon? I mean, consider again the verse we just talked about a few days ago, James 1:12. It’s one with a blatant call unto perseverance, a call made in light of the obvious presence of storms through which we'll have to fight. And yet, as much as we might all like an easier life, as such is equally obvious at this point, I just don’t seem at all able to actually find that smoother road. In fact, I personally now only find the promises He gives alongside the call to persevere more than enough to justify the fight we’re already in.

Just apparently not quite enough for us to agree that we’re in one at all.

And granted, that call of James 1:12 is one made in response to the promise of trial, as likely felt as if a warning considering our now longstanding agreement to hate the challenge, yet oddly enough met with the promise of the gift of eternal life as given unto only those few who really do endure, persevere, press on, suffer, struggle, strive, stumble, get back up and refuse to fumble this faith in the many ways that we have already.

But doesn’t that kind of prove the point of the verse for this post from the other direction as well?

Because, having already failed this faith and He in whom we proclaim it’s placed, doesn’t this prove that we’ve then, instead of a willingness to try harder, only rather a tendency toward deferring the danger of making those bigger decisions in life? Again, just look back on the path you’ve taken to get you where you are right now. Or, in the event that, like me, you can’t quite remember all the twists and turns as taken at the hands of all the decisions you’ve made alongside the many you refused to make, look then at who you are right now.

Is it someone better than who you’ve been before? Is there an evidence of growth toward which to point should you be asked for some sign of life? Is there a collection of past mistakes so firmly confessed that they’ve been met with what is a repentance unable to deny? Or rather does your life today look still like that you lived years ago?

And sure, I imagine that in some ways it always will, and those hopefully the ones that don’t bring with them the penalty of death for our having lived life doing basically only always the same things again and again. But still, the point has always been for our to hold fast to what is good whilst allowing pruned the branches in us that don’t bear fruit. Thus the calling of all to judge the fruit being borne. For it tells all those who care to ask all about who we are without either of us having to say much of anything.

Which can be a good thing, especially in regard to that coming day upon which all we’ll be able to say is that Christ is King.

But that’s perhaps the problem too, isn’t it? That we’ve not really practiced that all that much? That we don’t have much evidence of having done so within the way we’ve lived our lives in light of the choices we’ve made within them that will be what show Him that He was truly Lord of our lives? That we haven’t really always cared anywhere near as much as we could have, should have about all that He shouldn’t have had to do on our behalf.

Why did He do it? Why did He die for me thousands of years before I’d even be here to mess things up as still to be made in mistakes I’ve not made yet? Why the now ancient promise of the coming day upon which He will say either “well done” or “be gone”? Why did He make it so clear? Well, because then we’d have no excuse. We’d have no reason left to have left unlost anything in us that continues to ask the cost of our winning more of sin’s wage.

No, He made it all so simple so that we could do this as if children.

Instead we do it all complaining. We do it all whilst frustrated at the challenge of change. We welcome His promises but ask them to bunk with preferences and assumptions still to be met with along the way toward what can only then ever be some in between here and home, and thus life and death.

Yes, so much of my life has found me sitting still still in that place I’ve always been as the person I claim I want now to only be who I used to be.

Why all the waiting?

Why all of this continual excusing of the things I know better than to keep doing? Why this ongoing refusal to do the better I claim I know I need to do, if not that I know in fact how to do? If we truly do know the better that we need to do and how then to do it, what then are we waiting for?

Does it even matter if really don’t know how to do the better we’ve clearly never chosen to do before today? Friends, all that will matter in the end is that He’s known all along who He created us to be, and thus the many and maybe growing discrepancies between who we’ve become instead. Question then will be that asked in an answer read back in regard to whether who we’ve become is who we’ll remain.

The promise being that not all will sleep but all will be changed.

Are we changing along the way? Are we growing in this faith? Are we trying anything at all? Or are we still all but stalled upon the surface of a life lived mostly for only the same?

Friends, there will be no one else to blame. No excuse left to use. We will have nothing to say upon that day when all is laid bare for all to see. No, all we’ll be able to do is point to the life we lived and hope that it is deemed worthy of that reward of being given a better version to be lived in the presence of His perfection forever.

Are we living for that end? Or is there rather still no end in sight of our not living that kind of life that we don’t really want anyone to see?

The fact is that He knows. He knows the good that He created us to, and so too then He knows just how much of it we haven’t done along the way. He knows the mistakes we make, and those we’re now on the path to making if we don’t turn around from a life still then to be found drown upon the doing of nothing new. And I think that’s exactly what will cause the most disappointment on that day.

It’s that He came to do a new thing, and simply asked that we try it too knowing perfectly well the life toward which it would lead. Yes, He died that we might have open eyes unto the ability to now focus more on our coming eternity.

Whether or not we do is all on us.

He knows those who are His as He’s long since weighed the hearts of all of us. Only question that now remains is whether or not we’re His as answered in whether or not we live as if we might be.

Again, He knows.

Do we?

I mean, we all claim to know the right things to do. But friends, knowing and doing are very different things. One gives us a better answer to give whereas the other only leaves us unable to give the better answer.

So let us live as if we will be asked what we did with this life. Not because He doesn’t already know. No. Rather simply because we should want to show Him that we not only know the right things to do, but that we’re unwilling to do anything else having already done that everything less more than enough.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold