Day 3786 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 15:2 NIV

Even more

For even though we’ve all settled for ever less even longer than we’ve likely known of the more He’s long had in store, still He apparently sees reason to lead us to and through both time and season that each change in ways that should inspire our doing the same. Why? Even more. This truly seems something that all of us always want and live our lives looking for. Even more. No matter what we have or how great we think it is or we are, what still do we always find a way to remain convinced we need?

Even more.

Yet even still, despite our own personal measurings and treasurings of times and tides as all but tarnished before they even arrive thanks to a personal resolve to not involve ourselves in anything at all that asks of us anything at all, still we find ways to want the more that we seem to always know is out there somewhere. Problem is, and a sad one to be sure, that we continue to look in only the places that we’ve already been or always known.

And though we try the same less even more, we seem to neither find the more we’re looking for nor the ability to stop believing it there.

We just know that both more is always available and yet that we haven’t any idea how to get there.

Because we never are, are we? We’re never actually able to arrive upon a concrete contentment within the content of the current. There never comes a day when we have no desire, crave no delicacy. There’s just always something more for us to want as met alongside that same old unwillingness to do anything that might actually help us to find that place or time in life in which we are content, in which we are fulfilled, in which our plans are finally finalized and we can then finally feel as if we’re okay.

We know nothing of okay simply because we’re seemingly entirely okay with continuing to continue combing through all the places and faces that clearly haven’t any okay of their own to offer.

Mostly just our own as in the places we’ve been or plan still to go or the people we’ve always been and have all but no interest in really changing all that much. No, we’re roundly convinced that all the better we need to find life’s very best is already planted within us. And, while we’re somewhat on the right track, the issue then becomes that we spend our lives watering and nurturing the worst of all the branches that are what make us this tree of we.

You have your own and I’ve a tree of me. For such is how He planted this garden that are His children. He created all of us to be both His and thus bear fruit in keeping with our living as if we know this to be as true as water being wet and as sure as the clouds bringing some of it. And yet even this we manage to hate in light of how such things as clouds block the sun we prefer and rain ruins the parades we’ve planned and thus something as naturally beautiful as nature working to grow all of the life we need to go on living our own is something we know only to hate for the change it often insists upon our plans or preferences.

And thus we find the reason why we need Him to burn, prune, trim, tear, rip, ruin, remove in whatever way, form or fashion that may be needed from us all of this cancerous lack of readiness to be found before He who is either our Life or merely the forever remover thereof.

See, that’s what truly amazes me about all this. It’s that we’re all literally going to have, someday, this entire life and land removed from our lives. It’s what we refer to as having to die. We’re all going to lose everything we have, all that we are, the more we still wanted and/or hoped to be by then. Indeed, all of us will one day never again see this land or live these lives.

And yet we live as if we just can’t bear the thought of letting go of at least some of it before it’s literally all taken anyway.

And this refusal unto the share of His sort of surrender has us all just lost and looking still into all the nowhere’s that better has always been found by we who are still looking.

Maybe we try something else.

Like letting go. Giving up, we are quite good at it after all. Indeed, what if we did for Him what we’ve long proven we’re really good at doing? What if we gave up all this trying to either find what we haven’t or prove that we have found what we know we’re still looking for? Yes, what if we, rather than holding tight this withholding of life from He who is the same, what if we gave it all into His hands and, hold onto your hats, questioned nothing He did or asked we do?

Yes, what if we truly surrendered so much to the hope brought to us by He who bought for us our very freedom that we ourselves experienced even the freedom from having to find what we think better is?

For friends, what if we don’t actually know what better could be? I mean, this seems quite the contrary to our every single working as undertaken under the sun under which we’re all still looking for something more. But what if there’s always even more than all those something more’s that we’ve spent our lives looking for?

We have actually managed to find a few along the way. And yet, ain’t it strange but still we look?

Indeed, all of us have managed to track down at least some of our ideas as to what better was only to get there or get it and realize then that, while perhaps better in some measure, it’s still just not quite the kind of better we were looking for. I know I’ve done this more times than I can count. I’ve chased after all the plans, prizes, preferences or presumptions thinking them each able to bring my life more than I had or was before only to have them, hold them, truly come all the way to saying I know them as fully as I could have ever wanted only to feel still this emptiness inside.

Seeming to mean that I both know next to nothing of what better is, where it sits, or how then to stop watering the worthless branches in me that bear only the fruit of my finding what I wanted just to get it and realize that it was never actually anything I needed.

Yes, there you have it! The issue at hand is that we spend our lives tending the vines of want as sewn by the world we’re in whilst then always ignoring those branches of better that He planted in us long before this world came along and choked Him out.

Which explains the lengths to which He goes to continue giving us chances to come to know that we are worth more than we’ve settled for in a life rather lived as if felling ourselves trying to find ourselves is the only best way to find the better we’re all still looking for.

It really does seem quite the idiotic way to go about something so hopeful as improvement. Life has basically become just about us blinding swinging our hatchets of hope trying to tear a hole through the overgrowth and undertow of a life lived amongst billions of others who are themselves doing exactly the same. We just all awake every single day to try one more time that next big idea as to what we can do in order to maybe find what all we haven’t.

And despite the return on investment, still we just keep doing it.

We all seem only to all but demand that we be the only ones who decide what stays and what goes. And yet friends, we’re the only ones who’ve been trying it that way all this time and finding so little of anything better that we’re still looking for exactly that!

Just how much longer will we insist that we can do this alone when the reality is that we’re just plowing through life knocking down everything we don’t like never once stopping to consider as to whether there might be some value in it?

How much longer can we afford to just discount everything the moment it even hints at being hard or bringing hatred or proving so heavy that we can’t hold it alone? How much longer will we try, in vain, to hold this all together when the wreckage behind us proves we’re literally the very ones tearing it all apart?

No, it’s time to put down the matches and machetes and let God do some pruning.

It’s time to stop all this pretending like we know what we’re doing and for once let Him do what He knows needs to be done in order to find that day when our better is finally and forever won. And if you still don’t believe that He could know better than you where your better is found, ask yourself why He died on your cross while you leave your version sitting motionless on this ground. Why did He pay that cost for we who’ve long been lost to finally be found and there find all the reason we need to let Him do whatever He else He plans to?

His plans are so clearly for our good! And this is clear because He died to prove them so!

And so what are we still doing putting off the putting on of all the better He weathered that storm to send our way? He literally died so that we could finally stop trying to find what our entire past says we’ve never found. Which is better. Which is peace. Which is hope finalized. Ever thought about that? How hope is something we’ve only ever known the beginning of? That our every hope is always still a work in progress progressing toward still something more no matter how many of our past hopes we’ve actually come to have?

We always want even more, but only because we still focus on ever less.

And yet this is what He wants to prune in us. It’s all of this time in life being given to things that either bear no fruit at all, or even worse, bear the kind of fruit we’ve all already known. And make no mistake, all of us have already found or felt our fair share of the fruit of fear, of failure, of foolishness and friendship with a world that makes such things seem okay to be as normal as they are.

Friends, there is nothing either okay or normal about living in fear or continuing to fail or welcoming still all the foolishness that is the very foundation of both! There is nothing good ever coming from our continuing only everything that hasn’t brought us the better we know to be there.

No, better can only come when we’re finally not the ones trying to find it. Simply because we’ve looked in far too many places to have found so little of it!

And all He’s asking is that we stop failing to find what all better always was. For He made it perfectly clear where better’s been waiting right from the beginning. It’s in surrender. It’s in sacrifice. It’s in suffering. You know, all the places we’ve never looked! Kind of explains why we’ve never managed to find it, doesn’t it?

Better is something we were both created to be and thus meant to do, and yet we’ve learned only to always settle for everything less than His definition of best. Why? Because we’ve been watering weeds. They grow in want, in worry, in wishing and whining when we don’t have what we wish we did. And we’ve now so many weeds alive inside that the only fruit we can seem to bear is that of doubt, a harvest of fear. And sadly not even the kind of fear that can accomplish anything.

No, the only fear we grow is that that keeps us in hiding trying to keep pretending that we’re both okay and that we truly like it this way.

But friends, nothing can come from that that’s anywhere near the better that’s always been even closer than our next excuse. All that can ever come from fear or worry or want is just an emptiness where hope can’t exist. And while the vast majority of those around have all but killed themselves trying make that seem normal, we alone are responsible for the fruit we find in our lives.

And while it’s always looked just like that being grown in those around us, that doesn’t mean that such is how it’s supposed to be.

Because He created us for better, that’s why He put the idea in our minds and leaves it always still on our hearts. It’s to keep us going after that growing that He created us to do and be and give away when our harvest of hope has come in and we’ve got more than we know what to do with. It’s just that we’ve got so little hope anymore that we refuse to share what little we have as we know quite well that we may not find any more for some time.

Why continue to live that kind of life? Why continue to fight day and night to pretend we’re alright with this kind of life in which we always want even more but only find ever less?

Friends, we need to let Him prune from us all this worthlessness as won within a foolishness that continues to live as if we who’ve never found our better can manage to be the ones who not only track it down but learn to grow it going forward. I mean, look, I’m 37 and I’ve been living all those years trying to find what I’ve still not found. And it’s literally only within the last 10 or so that I’ve started to grow in the coming to know He who is the better I’ve always been looking for.

And yet here I sit within the understanding that even should I have another 37 still to go, even still I could never know the fullness of His promise nor the purpose for which it was given in the way He gave it unless and until I give up on my trying to prove my ability to come up with something equivalent. I can’t. Because I know that I know too much about watering weeds to ever fully trust myself to not fall back into doing the same.

And so I will awake every day I’ve left and ask Him to help me see all there is still inside of me that’s only keeping me from knowing Him better and better making Him known. For that’s truly all that matters to me anymore. Simply because nothing else has ever managed to have the staying power that my hope in Him has had. And so I’ll ask Him every day to prune away anything in me that isn’t bearing fruit, and I’ll welcome the fires He sends to burn away what I’ll likely doubt needing to let go.

And when I open my eyes and see the forest of my life’s plans all burned to the ground, I’ll hopefully have found a way to be thankful for the one tree left standing.

Because when all else has failed, fallen or come up short, I know the cross never will.

Simply because I know life’s never been about our having more trying to prove that more is better. No, life is rather about our having less and finally then realizing that only when we have less can we truly give it our best. And as I closed yesterday, so I’ll do today.

Because He who gave His life for us to have ours deserves our best, not merely whatever’s left in the wake of our trying to find what only He was all along.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold