Day 3822 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Corinthians 7:10 NIV

The catalyst

Such is the consideration, and every single one thereof, of which God makes us cognizant through what is a fear that finds our fealty to the very fatality of so many failures we’ve found as if friends that we’re then unwilling to let go. And indeed, letting go is something extremely hard for us to do as a people who think that life is about what we have and hoping within. But friends, there come times in life, many of which we cannot possibly see, in which you and me we make these choices that are all but choosing cataclysm, catastrophe, chaos and confusion.

Alas we seldom see them due to the delusion in which we’ve so clearly set to design ourselves in what’s for too long been a life we’ve seen as ours to do with as we please.

Leaving then only the moment to make our choices for us via the feelings we have and the foolishness we are. And we are indeed so very filled with such venomous folly that we hardly even realize it anymore. After all how could we, seeing as how folly is the very lack of good sense or sound judgement? Indeed, even those seem anymore things that this world all but mocks as it mingles in still this mixing of moments and memories that we think our emotions are best able to write into a being remembered right.

But friends, how can moments become the right memories when they’re built in choices that are lacking good sense and sound judgement? Can such a shortage truly prove the portage of a person across the divide between His will and mine? And if it can, as our pasts so clearly contend we’ve most often conceived, well then why all this birthing of everything so personally betraying?

Do we truly want to keep finding this growing of such things as guilt and regret in our lives, in our minds, in the minds we allow to still live our lives as if doing so will prove a better result than all the millions of failures and fallouts we’ve found that way in the past?

Might all those mistakes be but such a personal map to everything better that we actually do come away from this with something that we can do to break through whatever we still are into whatever He apparently still knows we might become?

And is not the fact that who we could be is still but a might can only evidence of one more reason for the vital necessity of our fearing Him only?

I mean, again drawing from personal tragedy, I too look back upon a past lived mostly only doing what I wanted in the moment in which all that mattered was, you guessed it, what I wanted. Alas I now see too this ever-present fear running alongside that arrogance as always found and felt in this chance of my missing out or falling short. I knew what I wanted, or at least I thought, and yet I also seemed to always know of this possibility of hearing no and that wanting having then only nowhere to go.

And so I so often accepted a half-defeat in this middle ground it seems in which my dreams and desires both fought for these fires that we call passions only to at the same time have to come to find some way to douse them dry as my life turned the same once again.

Just high and dry, always left with the realization still there of all I truly wanted as hoped for in the very best of what I could have ever hoped for in a situation, but drying on the fragile limbs of that hope as it drifted away into the never will.

And I’ve been through a lot of those never wills in my life, just still haven’t tracked down that ever-elusive someone else to blame for the choices I made and the mistakes they became.

Indeed, I really do think about that quite often, that life I’ve not lived as lived without the mistakes I have. And I know in greater measure every morning met the mistakes I’ve made and the bed they’ve built. For it’s from that bed that I again awoke with a desire to change so deep in my heart that it had even just written in my head a couple of dreams that bookmarked the nightmare I’d made there in the middle. And I’ve always grateful for those dreams He lets me live through of the life I’ve not lived through.

Just then increasingly afraid of even them being one day done just like every yesterday I’ve ever had in which I now see I could have tried harder or lived smarter or loved bigger and thus played any role other than this of the beggar praying another dream is there tonight as I lay down once again in the wake of a life not lived right having left me with a closet of could have beens that I’ll never know for sure.

Yeah, I sure thought that I’d have been something else by 37, and while I’d not change much about who I’ve become or what’s become of life, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I change almost everything.

Why?

Because who I’ve been that’s resulted in the lived I haven’t lived, well, I carry with me always now this realization of my tendency to traverse what should be in exchange for the never should and thus remain continually aware of the chance of my feet chasing again after the air that just isn’t worth breathing. And that because you can’t breathe through a screen or live through memories of the dreams you don’t have for the things you never fought to find.

All you can do is just waste away within every what if that never seems to stop asking you that very question.

What if I hadn’t settled? What if I would have asked? What if I never quit? What if I never started? What if I stopped shortly thereafter? What if I lost the interest? What if I found another? What if this other could have helped with the stopping I wise enough to know to want? What if the help I needed was never mine to figure or find? What if I hadn’t hidden, like Elijah, in this cave I’m still running to from time to time? What if I hadn’t been so blind? What if I had been blind to what all I now wish I’d never seen?

What might I have seen? What might I still see? Could those have beens become the not yets of a life still underway?

Or are we perhaps just strong enough to actually erase God’s plans and pencil our own in?

I truly hope not, but friends, the amount of regret I feel and as often as it finds me leaves me only thinking that such might be the danger designed in between freewill and freedom. Because the truth is that the many things I still regret are those I fought to find in the freedom I’ve always had to want them. And the regret is then designed inside the hindsight that’s only now helping me to see the life I haven’t lived because of the one I chose instead.

And again, while I’d not change much, I’d sure go back and do a lot quite differently if I could.

It’s just that we can’t, which is what pours the foundation of our life’s every regret. It’s a horror met within our wanting something so badly now that literally cannot come because we can’t go back in time. Rather time knows only the forward march, and these days when found carrying regret, it seems it only knows that forward in double as life just races onward into the love of God whether or not we’re ready to welcome it leading the way.

Sadly the reality is that more often than not we’re not. And again we see this inside our every past and the many blank spaces they have despite how filled with fun and friendship they seemed at the time.

Strange how that one worked out! For at once I felt the very star of my very own show in which I had the world at my fingertips and so many chances that I perhaps really could have been whatever I wanted to be. Even experienced that a time or two in which interest met the effort needed to make it real. Just then don’t quite have it in me to understand why I didn’t understand the connection back when it may have mattered in what could have been the changes I might have made.

Guess it doesn’t make much sense to worry about it now seeing as how none of us are getting that do-over our heartbreak often seeks.

And yet maybe it’s never even been the do-over we wanted that was the reason for the heartbreak we found and felt within its place.

Perhaps the heartbreak is what we always wanted within what’s been a blind realization that we needed it without the humble courage to ever consider why. And maybe the why is because we just can’t learn quite as well when life goes according to plan. And perhaps that’s because our plans are as thin as the paper they’re often either written on or lost in trying to earn. And maybe then that’s why we have to lose an entire life before we can find what we should have done with it to begin with.

And perhaps all of this is nothing but the perfect will of God using our imperfections in character and choice to speak that still small voice that still asks us what we’re doing here and why it is that we’re so far from where He’s asked us to go.

Yes, maybe it’s only our fear of Him that can ever really know that life we could have always known as then found in our becoming deathly afraid of living the same exact way as all those days we’ve already had in which we’d only given either up or away every chance He sent for our to have been everything we never were. I know that thought scares me to death! And that said death is that of any thought that dares try and convince me to settle for safe and easy ever again.

Indeed, if it’s easy then why do it? And if it isn’t done in the risk of something, then what reward can it possibly have?

Man, I wish I’d had known that before now!!

Because I just can’t shake this feeling that it could have found me living as a better son, a better brother, a better friend, maybe even somebody’s father. Yeah, that used to be a dream of mine as I think it is for all us guys. But rather than a son or a daughter all I seem to have played a hand in giving birth to is the regret I carry in knowing that I’ve likely missed that chance because I was busy settling for cellphone rendezvous in which I was the only one who knew I was there.

Well, guess God knew too.

And well, I think that breaks my heart even worse than knowing there was better way to have lived my life than the one I chose instead. All because as much as I myself wish I hadn’t seen what all I have nor chosen to keep going back, I wish even more that the One who died in my place never had to see me make that choice so many times either.

For all I know He instead had the very same dreams that I once had for what’s become a life in which I always settled for something easier. And thus, for all I know, so too does He regret my having never chosen it, that life He died for me to live as set free from the things I’ve done anyway.

And if I have caused Him any sadness or regret, which imagine I have, well, that’s just too heavy a thing to have forced on another who’s always tried only to help me find that way of life in which I was running down the road with all I hoped to find inside this life that I always knew He had something so special for me to get to.

But I guess that just gives us finally something in common, me and Jesus. For the cross contends that He was so heartbroken over what I’d become that He gave His life for me to have the chance to give it away.

And now I find myself some days almost to tears thinking about what all I gave away in order to find what I can’t seem to get rid of fast enough.

Yet, as always the Painter of silver-linings, it does seem as though I seem to see a bit of hope in this story of a life lived finding only sorrow. And that is that perhaps wisdom is what’s growing in this coming of me to my finally knowing of the life I haven’t lived as met in this new resolve to not let that happen again. For here we read that Godly sorrow leads to repentance which leaves no regret. And indeed, I’m so both angry and ashamed in regard to who I’ve been that I’m now not willing at all to approach the rest as I did the past.

No, so much as it depends on me I will not let another opportunity at anything better pass me by. Not that I have any real say within that hope that He does continue to let me try still for that everything better I know I’ve never been. But if He does I will do my absolute best to not let it slip again.

Because Godly sorrow seems to be written in this wisdom that’s writing inside of my thinking a new way of doing just that in which I find myself as being now more willing to endure loss or suffer a selfish tragedy than I ever was before. Why? Because regret sucks. I hate thinking through the things that I feel He keeps reminding me of for some reason. Because I simply know the reason is for my to learn now what I only thought I knew then.

And well my friends, as we’ve been talking, such is what wisdom is.

It’s the getting of itself which is always known then as the lack thereof as you can only continue to try to get what you always know you just don’t have. And as I know I have my share of guilt, my share of shame, my past so filled with and lived in regret, I know that those things truly aren’t the wisdom I thought them once to be. Because wisdom doesn’t result in such things. Rather wisdom grows despite such things to dispel such things in a life finally lived free from the doing of whatever has caused the knowing and feeling of such things.

Indeed proving that wisdom is not what we know but that it merely uses what we’ve known to help us learn what we’ve not ever wanted to.

I do wish there was an easier way, but even more than that I wish I had seen back then that there always has been. That easier way is God’s way. It’s His will. It’s written inside His promises for our lives which are for our good and that so filled that the good should be overflowing rather than something we still seem to mostly struggle knowing. Yes, that we still so often seem to see so little good in or of our lives is only proof that God still has room to grow in us and we in He.

Alas such a growing is only known in the humility that comes from wisdom which is both the fear of God and the getting always more thereof. And while maybe part of the fear of God is found in our finding of all the mistakes we’ve made as measured by the life we haven’t lived compared to the one we’re so often ashamed of having chosen instead, does it really matter how miserable it gets if the getting of life miserable makes us finally get up and learn to fight for the better life we can still live?

For yeah, the past has passed, and though we do all regret it, there’s nothing we can do about that. But we can take that past and the regret in which it was paved and use those broken ways to inspire us to try harder should there be a next time. And while I do believe that we only get one chance at some things in life, with God there’s always a chance for us to be wrong.

And though I, like you, stand always pridefully afraid of my being wrong again, truth is that I’ve been there before and I know how to get through it. May not like it. Probably won’t enjoy it. See absolutely no need for it to happen anymore. But the fact is that it will happen. We will mess up. We will make mistakes. We will listen to only the wrong voices that crave still the many vices we’ve vied for in life.

But as of today those many mistakes haven’t proven the end of our story. Rather they’re just seeds sown in a kind of sorrow that’s meant to blossom into this harvest of us bettered by the belief that God can take what we’ve torn apart and perhaps never even tried and turn it into something better than we could ever imagine.

And yes, it will be hard to imagine that He can help us make up for the many opportunities we’ve left untaken and the many improvements we’ve thus never known. But friends, we’re still here for a reason and so He must have something still left for us to find or see or be or do. And while it may not be easy, the regret we’ve found was often only the result of something easy we chose.

And so maybe wisdom isn’t won within a life that’s gone perfectly but rather in a humility that’s finally willing to not only accept that we’ve messed up but then a ferocity that’s not quite so willing to do so anymore.

Not that we won’t, but just that when we do, well, we’ll have that fear of God that is the beginning of wisdom that helps us see those many regrets we have as the death they’ve been to the life we once wished we could have lived, and may wish still for that very same could have.

It’s just that wisdom don’t wish as much as God doesn’t settle. No, His will will be done, and it’s wisdom that knows to appreciate that rather than continuing to either fight against it trying to prove we can. We can’t. And that life we haven’t lived is proof of that.

So let us stop fighting against the wisdom and repentance that He continues to offer as they’re truly only there to lead us into the best of what still can be, even if by only helping us remember the best that never was in that life we’ve lived doing only what we’re now ashamed of.

Yeah, there’s no life in that.

And only wisdom’s sorrow can help us see there never was.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold