Day 3816 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Corinthians 8:2 NIV

Paper and plastic

For it turns out that sometimes in life we don’t even seem to be told of the choice and rather just listen incessantly to this incessant voice telling us to chase the waste that is the want of both. Or at least that seems all of the sudden the life that I’ve come to know. And while I know well now what I’m pretty sure I’ve known so far, what scares the life into me these days is my knowing that I don’t know what I don’t know. And that even about what I’m pretty sure I think I know.

Because how can I know for sure?

After all, I awoke today already questioning all but everything that I’ve been doing, wanting, winning for most of my life. And well, what do you do when, at 37, you find yourself standing with or within this understanding that the life you've been living doesn't make sense anymore? When it seems as if everything that you've thought mattered might not? When you feel like all of the sudden everything you've tried isn't really worth trying? When all of these massive priorities and monumental pursuits just fizzle away to nothing leaving you questioning why you ever put so much into them in the first place?

What does that mean?

I’ve done so many things in and with my life, all of them things that I obviously thought well worth the doing. And they were! I think. Or at least the good memories that were made seem to help me believe that maybe at least some of the choices I’ve chosen weren’t quite as mistaken as others have since proven themselves to be. And so maybe hindsight ain’t so bad after all as maybe it can help us see the simplicity that we should shoot for more often in life.

Still though, it’s a movie that seems mostly to show only the many mistakes I’ve made in what is the fear that I’m probably making plenty more even still. Because, well, of all the things that I’ve thought I knew, think I know, it seems the one thing I know for sure is how to get things wrong. And how to waste a rather significant amount of time doing it!

Indeed, many of my life’s mistakes, choices I made thinking them good choices to make, they’ve been some of them measured in decades. Maybe that’s the case for everybody, that we all find ourselves inside the same sort of patterned ruts running after routines that still feel safe or seem to still supply what we’ve always hoped they always might.

But do they? Are they? Will they?

What if they don’t, aren’t, won’t?

Have we the humble courage to even consider such what if’s?

I know I haven’t. Because I know I haven’t. Rather I’ve mostly lived only full speed behind running after all these ideas, these ideals, these idols that have only left me behind in what is perhaps a race to first place that is to be run backwards. But still not run blind! And yet that seems to be exactly how I’ve come to run this race in what’s long seemed a perseverance but alas one spent pursing what’s not quite dishonest gain but disingenuous perhaps.

And that on my part, not that of the path I’d picked. For the truth is that most things in life are as clear up front as they prove to be in the fall out. We just manage to always find ways to blur, skew, confuse anything and everything in order to make it match up to whatever it is that we want it so badly to be.

Like paper and plastic.

There’s been this now long running disquiet in my life that’s left my life entirely unsettled. And when I was younger I think that thought seemed cool as when you’re young you find excitement in the chaos, in the crazy, in the choices you can make more easily as you bounce back faster when you’ve more energy and more enthusiasm.

But I’m literally sitting here at what is just over 3 weeks since learning the hard way that it’s not whether or not I can jump a fence that counts but that I can’t guarantee the landing that matters most.

And yet that’s sadly so often what it seems that it takes for us to learn many of life’s lessons as learned about such things as contentment and humility. We have these lives that unfold almost backwards in so many ways. We start out in what are called our formative years learning all of the foundational gears that continue to spin well into our mirrors that eventually turn on us and show us for the old folks we’ve become.

It’s not that we still can’t jump but that fences probably aren’t the best places to test that theory as to whether or not we’ve still got it.

And yet, at the time, I thought it the right thing to do.

Indeed, on one side stood a still young guy who works out and trusts himself to be in at least fairly decent health. But on the other was an older man lying on the ground with a severely twisted ankle suddenly questioning why I thought that was a good idea. Funny how fast the shift happens sometimes!

Alas, terrifying too just how long it can take.

Because again, I sit here at 37 all of the sudden rethinking so very much of what I’ve always thought I always knew. Is this the mid-life crises they talk about? Is that even still a thing? Is 37 really the mid-point of my life? Or was the middle of my life maybe 20 something and I’m on the downhill side?

I don’t know.

That seems to be becoming a newly long-running theme within my mind. I don’t know. And it’s amazing how quickly it’s become so common as it feels. For I, like all of us, I’ve spent the better part of my entire life thus far thinking I knew enough about enough to manage everything I was up against. And considering as how I’m not in a grave or a jail cell, well, it seems as though I have managed it all fairly well. But then again, I again awoke questioning so much of everything I’ve long thought I knew.

Perhaps only because of yesterday’s post.

Indeed, we just talked about how “desire without knowledge is not good” as proven in “how much more will hasty feet miss the way”. And that last post left me thinking: Do we even know why we want what we want or rather that we only know that we want whatever we think we might? And I understand that that seems like a really packed question to ask.

You should hear some of the ones inside my head that haven’t managed to make enough sense to be shared quite yet!

But hear me out…

There’ve been times in each of our lives, many of them, in which we seemed all but concretely certain that this choice, this decision that we were choosing, that we were definitely okay with making was the one so right to want, to make, to want to make that we simply couldn’t comprehend any other possibility, feasibility. We were just adamant upon this path being proper and thus the one most profoundly capable of promising profit, prosperity, the promise for which we’d sat to sifting through these many options or offers through which we had to sift in order to determine and decide which one we thought was right.

We just knew that we wanted to do this thing, have this thing, believe in this thing because, of all the things from which we had to choose, we chose the one that seemed the best based upon whatever it was that we apparently knew in regard to the situation or circumstance in which the choice in question was chosen.

And indeed, it honestly doesn’t even really matter what the thing is/was. No, what my point that I’m getting at is is that we’ve all done so many things, wanted so many things that we were simply convinced were right, were appropriate, were best capable of upholding the faith, the trust, the hope that we’d thus chosen to place inside them that we chose to want them, to do them, to choose them from amongst the many other choices and alternatives that we could have and even now perhaps should have said, done, chosen, wanted or won instead.

All because only once we’d sat to choosing them did we find that to have done them, gotten them, experienced them we only found that they were either not quite what we’d colored them up to be or simply not at all what we’d fought so hard to get in our minds they should have become. And that’s the bottom line that I’ve been digging toward. It’s this reality in which we daily manage to imagine things into either amazing experiences or absolute disasters simply because of a pride so blind that we still believe that our beliefs cannot be anything other than what we want them to be as based upon only ever what we know or assume we might.

But that right there is perhaps the most singularly undermining truth in all of human existence.

It’s this insistence that what we know is what we know and thus there cannot be anything else that might possibly prove us wrong in such knowledge and our self-proclaimed self-achieved knowing thereof. We cannot be wrong, and if you don’t believe me, just go tell someone they are and prepare for the tidal wave of all the ways in which you’re wrong to think they’re wrong in regard to what they think they either know or have figured out or have long understood or even just recently realized.

In truth, it simply doesn’t even matter the amount of time a person’s knowledge has to them been known. Doesn’t matter. Once we become convinced that we know something, it’s known. It’s fact. It’s resolved, done, finished, over. It’s known. But you see, the issue then is that found within all of this learning that we somehow continue doing.

And granted, it’s quite heartbreakingly evident that many, if not most, almost go out of their way to leave unlearned as much about life as they physically, mentally, emotionally can. Not to be rude but to look around at how things are going and the amount of growth still not growing in all of us, you’d think that ignorance were a new olympic event and everybody was gunning for the gold.

But it isn’t.

No, rather what is an event is this life in which we all will win a crown and find a reward. And that’s my question for this post. Is what you’re winning or hoping to win, as based upon what it seems that you believe you know enough about to go after and fight for, is it able to prove something better than all the other choices you’ve made based upon what you once thought you knew that only turned out to prove to have since become all those past desires, decisions that seemed so right, so flawless, so fantastic that they surely couldn’t have proven as mistaken as they’ve since proven?

Or better yet, again, do we even know why we want what we want or only that we seem to know what we think we might?

And make no mistake, the difference couldn’t be both bigger and thus more dire. Why? Because thinking we know something only causes us to stop learning more about whatever it is that happens to be the topic at hand. Once we think we’ve got something figured out, we’re wrong. And yes, that’s a quote from a movie, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Because the fact is that we’ve all known quite a lot thus far in life only to have been proven impressively wrong along the way.

What then makes us think that such cannot happen again in light of just how much it’s happened already?

And sure, maybe many aren’t to the point in their journey toward humility, one that we’re all on to what will prove very different outcomes, in which they can be that honest with themselves as to admit that they have been wrong about things they thought they knew before. But still, the point remains the same in that we’ve all had times in life, many of them, in which we thought we knew something only to be eventually proven wrong.

Or we’ve wanted something that we only ended up getting only to somehow find ourselves only increasingly disinterested in having or keeping. Or we’ve chosen to set unto the doing of something that we thought was okay to do only to meet regret in hindsight helping us to see just how dumb we were once again to have done what was never the right thing to do after all.

All simply because we thought we knew what we wanted, what we were doing only to be shown through such things as guilt and regret that we neither knew what we were doing, how something would turn out, what was right, nor thus what was wrong. All simply because we were wrong. Because such a thing happens far more often than our arrogance can imagine in this life in which we’re built to keep growing in knowledge and understanding.

For the problem is that we somehow learned somewhere along the way to get the two either confused for one another or simply to equate them as all but the same.

They are not.

Knowledge and understanding are not the same thing. Knowledge is something as simply achieved by facts and figures. Understanding on the other hand is the deepest depth to which knowledge might venture into what is the conclusion of a matter. And the conclusion of the matter of faith, which is what we talk about every single day here, is that all that’s been written about it across the centuries and millennia in which man has been trying to understand that which is impossible to know in light of how we’re none of us at what will prove the conclusion of our time nor then our experiences and learnings met within is that we’re here to fear God and keep His commandments.

Everything else is just filler meant to help us figure out how to do that best.

Issue’s then has become that we spend all this time trying to find and force a life to go our way because we continue to think that we know what we’re doing as is done always only to get what we want which is only always what we think we might like, enjoy, appreciate or achieve. But friends, again, how can we know for sure what we think we know when we’ve still time left which might, as has happened before, only prove us wrong once more?

Again, I think it may have literally happened to me just this morning as I rolled out of bed halfway to 38!

Why? Because for months now I’ve been wrestling with what has to be the most worthless worries that are sadly the same as those I’ve worried about since I was a kid. For so long now my life’s been about what I had and what more I wanted and what to do with it once I got it. But as I rolled out of bed this morning it dawned on me that it’s all paper and plastic. It’s pen and pretend. It’s stuff that you can stack, and while that still seems cool to a kid that’s finally at the point in which they can buy stuff and have stuff and think then they know the stuff they want to buy so that they can have, at some point it just gets kind of sad.

Why?

Because for months now I’ve been wrestling with what is the most disgusting misplacing of a mind’s ability to think, to reason, to revere.

Yes, I’ve given so much time to thinking about what I have, what I want, what I want to do with what I have that I’ve not given nearly as much time to much of anything else that I know in my heart has always mattered more than stuff on a wall ever could.

And maybe that’s the difference in knowledge that this verse is drilling toward. Maybe it’s the distance between what we think we know and what we know we think. Because perhaps both our hearts and our minds are both quite mutually deceptive, leaving us in rather drastic need of not spending quite so much time worrying about what we think we know but rather seeking to know more of those random thoughts that we seem to find ourselves thinking about almost as if out of nowhere.

Because maybe those thoughts are that still, small voice that the Bible talks about.

Maybe those thoughts that seem to think quite differently about things that we’re all but certain of are His way of trying to say, “This is the way I want for you to walk, so walk in it!” And maybe it isn’t. But friends, those thoughts that seem so contrary to what we so often think we’ve got figured out enough to know have to be coming from somewhere!

And it definitely ain’t coming from us seeing as how we’re again a people who are quite quick to be content with complacency’s comfort!

Indeed, once we think we know something for sure, we’re just so sure about it that it would take an act of God to change our minds.

Friends, again, maybe that’s exactly what’s happening in those times we find ourselves thinking those strange thoughts that seem to leave us questioning everything we’ve ever thought we’ve always known! For again, He’s not in the winds that tear apart the mountains that we spend so much time building in our own way. He’s not in the earthquakes that shake idols off our walls for us. He isn’t in the fires that breathe the flames that help us remember His Name and how it’s not signed on a piece of paper that we can frame and hang on the wall.

No.

He’s instead in the gentle whisper that quietly asks, “What are you doing here?”

I can’t tell you how often I think about that passage as I can’t number the number of times that it feels as if He’s asking me the same thing as He asked Elijah. Because so often all it seems that I’m doing here is still spinning my wheels in a life still chasing the same material existence that I thought was cool as a kid. And well, there’s something about that that seems to almost counteract the childlike faith that we’re called to have.

And so maybe that’s why He continues to upend our knowledge and what we think we understand about it. Because maybe what we know isn’t what matters most but rather that we know Him.

But friends, how can we know Him if we think we can?

The God I know of is entirely, eternally too big for us to figure out. And so maybe we shouldn’t get so impressed with all we think we know that we stop listening to all that He’s trying to help us learn about the more He’s always been.

After all, how else will we ever know unless we start to admit that we don’t?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold