Day 3811 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 12:18 NIV

To help or harm

Such is both the question we answer and often times the question we ask. Alas, we don’t usually see it as a question at all, that neither being asked nor thus in need of being answered. And that because we’ve become quite accustomed to this all but generalized reluctance to assume any responsibility in life. And by assume I mean as in assuming it upon ourselves, and that choice chosen to be ignored as we all seem to collectively assume that there is no real responsibility in life. And that made both already perfectly clear and yet somehow clearer almost every day.

And that because we continue to watch the masses fade away into this waste of days in which we’ve all words we say but somehow they without anything much being said.

It’s truly amazing how we can take something so freeing, so beautiful, so opportunistic as our uniquely human ability to be linguistic and use it for such superficiality as, again, always talking about nothing.

Yes, we love talking about nothing as this concept of small-talk offers us this ever-present filler that helps us feel as if nothing is wrong as would be likely far more evident were we to ever venture nearer the silence that slices more sharply than even the truth might. And I say might because, well, we honestly know of the truth’s tendency to wound through what’s often, at best, a mostly theoretical figuring as to these faint memories of a time in which it seemed the truth was perhaps more commonly spoken.

These days it’s so common to lie and be lied to that we all but expect it. Indeed, we’ve become a people of this amazing ability to arrive at honesty through what’s this maze of misinformation, malcontent and a mostly misplaced importance as placed, rather than on the freedom which the truth causes, and the healing offered always best within, in a basic contemplation as to the feelings and expectations of those with whom we’re at the moment found conversing.

Yes, we live this kind of life in which everything we say is based upon the moment, each word spoken chosen only because of its likeliness of not trouncing upon the daring of this other to enter a nearness unto our existence, which is usually lived so solitary that we scantly understand how to interact with one another anymore.

We feel such experiences best kept digitalized and thus done through comment sections and, if we care just enough, private messages.

Indeed, we’re a people of screens, both those through which we live as held in hands and too those of which we are which cause us to be but mirrors which bear the reflections of the requests and interests of those around us.

As to why we took our eye off the prize of the promise of a life lived in peace forever, it’s pretty obvious as the cost for admittance is, well, an admittance of all we’ve done that shouldn’t have been done and all we said or sung that we probably shouldn’t have even known the words to. But as for why we continue going this way into what’s just an ever-continuing of the current contention in continuum, well, that probably deserves some more puzzling.

Because it is most puzzling indeed!

For as we just discussed just yesterday, the reality we’re in continues to say that we’re running low on days and thus out of words with which to say whatever it is that we believe might have something to mean to those who happen to hear what we’ve chosen to dare to choose to share with those we can only hope are even willing to hear what our hearts are finally at the point of basically screaming thanks to this undying, unyielding sense of urgency seen upon this scene of a society itself seeming to scream for help without ever really nearing the audacity to just ask plainly.

No, rather people all around are living this kind of life in which they seem to think that setting themselves on fire is a more surefire way to get the help they know they need than just asking for the help they can’t admit they want without going through all the gasoline and stuff.

Yes, we seem far more interested to just keep suffering, screwing things up, missing opportunities and leaving improvements unrealized than simply accepting that all of the above are only so miserable because growing kind of has that tendency toward misery. They’re not called ‘growing pains’ for nothing after all! No, rather growing is painful, and that mostly because of the pride which has to die any and every time that we happen to allow ourselves to admit that growth is actually needed.

And no, that just doesn’t really happen all that much anymore. I mean, not that it was really all that popular before, but thankfully history was lived without photography filters built into cellphones that all but defined the life people chose to live for and through. Yes, history was lived with far less human interaction, and thus everyone had likely a little more time to think, to wonder, to pause upon the cause of their own personal plight and this feeling of this need to maybe try and get it right.

Nowadays we just rely on photoshop to erase the flaws and mistakes and autocorrect to ensure we don’t sound like the generation of illiteracy that we’ve basically become.

All because it seems that, despite having more access to both information and one another, we again just don’t have all that much to say.

At least not that’s in really any way all that helpful.

Rather we seem to just enjoy hurting one another as if our words are only capable of inflicting and never inflecting. And the difference there is that to inflect means, on the technical side, to cause to bend or deflect, to distort and cause to move out of line. And linguistically, to inflect deals with the changing of a word’s form as done to alter its apparent meaning to better fit the general mood or tone that someone is going for.

And so to inflect is to basically inspire this overall redirectioning of something or someone as is done in most likely a conversation so as to hopefully help reach a bettered destination.

To inflict is basically to infect as it deals more usually with the experiencing of something unpleasant, such as that which is harmful or hurtful.

Thus we see that within every single conversation we have we have the opportunity to perhaps direct someone toward something. And yet that something can only ever be either better or worse. For such is the reality of tongue as it holds the power of both life and death and, as those who so clearly love it as proven in just how much we continue to use it, we are all most definitely eating the fruit borne therein, thereof, thereon.

But friends, that’s the questions that we’re both asking and answering every single time we open our mouths to say anything!

What fruit are we bearing?

And, most importantly, is this fruit, that’s obviously first grown inside of us up until this point in which we just can’t keep it inside anymore, is this fruit that we’re now willing to share (which is another odd reality that I’m sure we’ll discuss eventually) is this fruit that we’re finally sharing able to help those who are found in hearing of whatever we have to say? Or are they only to more likely be harmed for our having said what they probably didn’t want, need to hear?

Or are we mostly only still worried about mostly only what most only want us to say?

After all, fear of man isn’t only a snare but one that just doesn’t really ever agree to let go. Which leaves us having to either agree to stay afraid of man or all but lose a leg, a limb trying to break free.

And if we have broken free from living afraid of people, as is done most glaringly within this heartbreaking tendency to always turn our words toward the pleasing of ears ever itching, well then why ain’t there more limping?

For if we have wrestled free from a life lived in the captivity of that past slavery to human desire and demand, where’s there any evidence in our conversations that might suggest that we learned our lesson, and that, as with every other lesson we’ve ever learned the hard way, this one too cost us something. Something such as new way of speaking, or new words spoken.

Yes, where are our new words spoken? Or are we basically still just saying the same things we’ve always said, and thus still all but conceded unto the perpetual lack of improvement for basically anyone involved?

Indeed, just how involved are we in this life, in this land, in this love to which we’re called to lend our hand, our hearts, our hopes and the words which may convey them best unto those who are still at risk of being here left when the rest, we few, are called home? Doesn’t that matter to us? Not that we have that home to look forward to, no, that part is really quite amazingly hopeful and offers us the down payment of peace as placed in this place in which we can walk forward knowing that whatever happens here is but for a moment or two more at most.

No, doesn’t it matter to us that most of those around us don’t know that hope, don’t have that peace, don’t know thus how to ask for what they likely don’t know they don’t have?

Friends, that’s why we’re still here. It’s to both continue working out our salvation with the fear and trembling as found in our realizing a little more every day a little more of all the ways in which we continue to fail and fall short, but also to help those around us who are just agreed upon their continuing to fail and fall short.

And stay put.

We are here to go into all the world and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ unto those who, though they may have heard the Name, live still lives the same as they did before because nobody ever really had the audacity to speak the truth which could end their captivity to such things as deception, dishonesty, this tragedy that is this ongoing fear of man and what mankind wants to hear, see, be, do. We’re supposed to be those who’ve supposedly broken through this nonsense.

Why then are we still talking about sports and weather and politics?

If not only because those things still matter mostly to most?

Indeed, we just seem to keep on falling into this trap of repeating this past in which we’d spoken never about anything worth speaking about. As if nothing else can matter than whatever man has chosen to think might matter. Friends, when did man become of this ability to know everything? I mean, is this not what we’re saying every single time that we talk about something? Because the truth is that we only ever speak of things that matter as, well, there’s just really no point in talking about things that don’t.

And yet we almost exclusively talk about the things that don’t!

Why is that?

Why do we continue to waste our words upon winning petty arguments or gleaning someone else’s thoughts as to the latest political headline or their opinion of the day’s weather and either how much we need the rain or how we just all seem to hate it for some reason?

Yes, what is the reason behind what we’re saying?

Is it to help? Are our words able to bring healing? Do our conversations speak hope unto those who hear them, take part in them? Are we making any sort of positive impact in the lives of those who hear our words? Are we making any impact at all? And well, how can we when all we seem willing to talk about is only what everyone else already knows or wants to hear?

Why keep rehashing the past as lived walking in the pretenses and preferences of people who are dying?

Why leave them heading that direction when we can take the very same words we all know how to say, how to spell, and inflect them in just such a way that causes someone else’s curiosity to inspect them as if they noticed something novel being said. Yes, would that we had the courage to say something new, something hard, something so untried that it infects the lives of those who hear it with this endless interest in learning more, hearing more, being then more for having themselves learned, heard something new!

Something like healing and hope. Or peace and purpose. Or mercy and goodness!

Oh my goodness!!

What if we truly sought only the betterment of those around us, and too realized that their improvement wasn’t always began the way it ends but that rather sometimes to build up you’ve to at first tear down every single one of these “arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God,” all so that we can take part in helping others to themselves “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ”?

What if obedience to Christ was all that mattered? Sure, it’s definitely not all that matters to most as to most it doesn’t matter at all. But friends, since when were we here to look at the odds and refuse to do anything hard?

That’s not a life lived in obedience to the One who looked at the odds and shrugged it off as He always knew He could only ever lose what He already intended to do away with.

Yes, Christ stormed into this earth speaking the truth that at first truly does hurt as it really does offend the pride that’s spent a life thinking that we’re doing better than alright. But then He laid down His life to show us each personally that the life we’d been living was not only not alright but was in fact deserving of death in light of our having chosen to dance in the darkness of such things as debauchery and deception.

For He created us to be holy and honest.

Anything less is just everything dead.

Are we truly okay with leaving people dead when we claim we know of the Life that has no end and promises us a share? How can we know Him if we refuse to make Him known to a world that’s made it known that they neither know Him nor want to meet Him?

Who cares what people want? After all, we want always to be comfortable, to be at ease, to feel at peace in a life never moved, never changed, never grown past the infant stage in which we crave only the milk that goes down without our having to chew, to eat, to hunt and kill and beg for someone to help. Yes, why is there so little being said that’s at all able to help those who just may happen to hear?

If not only because we’ve bought that lie that tells us nobody’s listening?

Friends, people are listening. People are begging. People are hurting as that is all that can come in that way of life lived so far apart from He who is the Life that all they do is lie and hurt and hide and steal and kill and destroy one another via all these arguments and the arrogance always behind them.

What are we doing to help them?

And when will realize that our words can truly bring life out of this death to the same that we’ve all lived for? The reality is that people all around us are still living for, in, of that same death we’ve all known. Do we truly know something new now?

Or is not the fact that we’re so afraid to talk about it only proof that we’re still unsure ourselves?

Either way, our words will still either help or harm. I just pray we all come to see that we’ve already said enough that’s hurt enough before we run out of time to say something that might hopefully help.

Because again, we’re running out of days.

And thus we’re running out of words.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold