Day 3832 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 59:8 NIV

The danger

It’s that to be designed in our delight to decide to attempt the design a life built atop the delight of decisions decided upon at night when we’ve the least light by which to see what we’re doing and thus the worst ability to determine where we’re going. Indeed, it’s something akin to writing a story with a broken hand. The ideas may well be in mind, and the mind may seem them all so clearly that there’s nothing that could possibly be lost in translating them through the pen unto the page.

The problem is that the hand which holds the pen has proven unable to uphold the task of writing well these swell ideas well in mind.

Rather what comes out it to be only shaky at best and smeared the rest. For a broken hand has lost its power to hold steady the stream of all these things to say as said by a mind that made the ideas into this idea that they needed to be shared unto the benefit of those who may read this thing that’s existed so long inside our thoughts that there are just now entirely too many thoughts to think but must be shared in order to see, through public vote, if there’s really anything there worth thinking.

And it’s something that we’ve all lived doing. The sad part is that we all seem to fancy ourselves as something of a modern Shakespeare in which we live only to leave here the vast trove of our trough of thoughts we’ve thought and thought others might need to think. And we do this through what’s obviously one of the most mainstream mediums made for making the thoughts we think into theories that may sprout inside the minds of those who hear them.

We use our words as walked within the steps we take along the journey we’re on toward wherever it is that we’ve clearly determined to go as decided by a heart that itself listens to the mind telling us all that we think we know well enough to know enough about all that we’re doing that we’re right in this endless wanting of ourselves being the only ones leading what is in fact the way to take toward wherever it is that we’re to end up.

The issue then is that reality says that we don’t have any foggy idea where we’re going as told plainly in a past in which we went all over this place seeking for the substance of some sort of something that would at least give us a story worth telling unto those themselves living only yelling all about how great it’s going to be when they finally get where they’re going. Which is the very same mystery as the one we’re ourselves seeking inside the same mind still thinking that the heart isn’t deceptive and thus we’re in no danger.

And what is this danger that we’re supposedly not in?

It’s that we’ve already been in, left twice, went back to thirty seven times, cried about forty three, prayed over once, left behind again and yet somehow awoke right back there today.

All because such is literally the only path we know to pave in what is a work done always at night so as to hide all that we do that we may well end up having to only wish we hadn’t done so that it couldn’t be ever seen as what is another mistake that we’ll then have to pretend that we didn’t really make along what is a path that we’ve now messed up something in the neighborhood of eighty two times.

For if we’re going with the math mentioned in the paragraph just preceding the last, there were only four times we even approached handling this whole ordeal anything near appropriately.

Because we prayed once and left thrice.

Except that at this point we can manage to do all eighty six in the span of a couple weeks, if not even a few days.

For indeed, we’re a people who seem to understand quite clearly that we’ve both plenty of time on our hands to do with as we please but also that we’re not pleased with the wasting of the little time we have upon the things that fail to bring us either what we want or where we’d like to have been by now. As for how our present understandings are always supposed to help us to go right to where it is that we’ll tomorrow hope to be, I don’t have any idea.

Because by this time tomorrow we’ll again be well into our next 86 and probably finding all sorts of new thoughts and theories as to what our life’s best outcome is supposed to be.

And we should know this by now because we’ve been doing it this way for what’s basically been all our lives.

Which defines the problem that we’ll thus continue to find walking within this night in which nothing is good and we don’t sleep. Simply because we still think it’s on us to prove the ability to live the dreams that we’ve all but forced ourselves to dream into these immaculate experiences of all of life’s best conveniences as given us in only the mundanity of all modernity as chosen always simply for the vicinity in which it’s so easily found and thus the little we have to do to imagine it all into something that we can hopefully not feel bad about settling for.

This time.

Because surely we’ve learned from the most recent set of 82 all the things not to do in what is at this point either writing a story or paving a road, or maybe the both as they are pretty close as they each can help another take a journey either to or through something else as made by someone else who’s probably onto writing or ruining something new.

Leaving us each us sifting through the ashes of every life that’s already burned out in this search for something to make sense about what is the clarity of our presence mixed with the confusion as to its purpose.

That’s why we keep looking.

It’s simply because we know without question that we’re all here for something. Problem is that we’re only looking to and through whatever everyone else is writing or reading or saying or sharing or seeming to get right or denying has gone so horribly wrong that even they have found themselves turning back to the very God they’ve blamed for their life having thus far not gone their way seeking some sense of His solace as sold in the blood of Jesus and thus bought by none of us as it just doesn’t fit the narrative that we’re tweaking seeking a meaning that might make it mean both what we want and what others might like.

Leaving us again walking all but alone at night seeking to find some hint of light in the life of those around us who themselves are cold and lonely writing a story that just keeps going wrongly despite all the work we’re all putting in to paving this path that at least should look like gold thanks to the glory we hold and the brush with which we write our best before we erase it again and start all over for the 87th time.

And if you haven’t noticed by now, yes, there’s a confusion in this that is almost physical. Because it’s absolutely mental, this all but spiritual accosting of ourselves with what have long been the accusations that our vocations were something of only vacations from the same, and that simply to try and either save or stave the path we’ve paved from only proving yet again that it knows only how to find every one of life’s dead ends and pitfalls and fallouts and failures found in the folly that felt our foolishness wasn’t foolish at all.

I mean, surely we’d have had this all figured out by now!

After all, we have both no idea how many licks it takes to get to the center of that chocolate-filled sucker nor that we’re the ones who are the sucker and there’s no candy in sight.

Other than that we’ve painted on the walls and halls of this hell we’re in seeking some sort of the help we know we need whilst welcoming absolutely none of the same that comes from anyone who doesn’t carry our name. All because we’re still convinced that, as the apparent authors of our lives, it remains on us to find the way to get this right though walking at night because that’s both the best time and place to try and hide all that we’ve gotten and still get wrong.

Yes, we love the dark for the many rugs it gives under which to sweep the latest mess we’ve made of a life we still sell as going so perfectly well that we’re already working on our next entry into what we plan to be a best-selling series of all the sights we’ve seen and the thoughts we think are truly worth others reading and knowing and allowing to inspire their very own going only to the mirror to find their own life’s meaning.

Because such is the path we’ve paved throughout all these days in which our way was the only one apparently able to help us find all the better we’re still looking for.

Simply because that’s all that can happen when the only time and place in which you walk, write and work is only at night so that you can hide all that you say or do that you don’t want to be seen in the light of day’s honesty.

Yes, we love the dark as our deeds are the same and thus they fit and blend right in and leave everyone else completely themselves too in the dark as to the decisions we’ve made and the disasters they managed to become.

And indeed, having done this so long now, all this making of choices as chosen because of our blind trust in listening to the same voices in our heads that have been lying to our hearts that lie to our minds and thus combine to ruin our lives, well, such is only the pattern we’ve paved in what are routines so deep that even the darkness is impressed at the mess we’ve made of a life we could have just lived instead.

And having chosen to lose our minds rather than live our lives as done not at night but in the light where all we do could be seen as if it will be one day anyway and we thus just want to skip all the feeble and futile failing to hide what will come to light, all we now know is to awake each new day only to do the same unto it as we did the day before.

All as if nothing has ever once happened that might have happened in what was then and remains now the hope that someone somewhere might see something in it that inspires them to do something new because of it.

Maybe even something like their too laying down that way of life lived at night and no longer trying to hide all they had both already gotten wrong and never planned to get wrong going forward. All in exchange for that much simpler way of just slowing down and trying with all their might to just do right from the beginning of every new day as if that was all that mattered thanks to the past being paved into a memory already known by everyone who saw it, lived it or heard something about it.

And indeed, He who’s lived our past, or at least paid the debt they owed, He’s the same as who walks with us now into every fire we start and every lion we provoke and every giant we think a joke much like the life we live as if the same.

And it’s because of this that thus we’ll find that in every life all will turn out leaving us to see plainly that while the deeper the dark offers more places to hide, it too only makes everything else harder to see. And while we've all plenty we don't want seen as has been paved into the past path we’ve walked and the story to be read of both all we’ve written and the more we’ve only hoped to fall through the cracks left between the lines, truth still remains that it's hard to get where we're going when we can't see anything.

Again, you’d think we’d know that by now having all of us come to know so much of the dark seeking every possible place to hide our every bad choice made and our every ability to make them again.

But no, rather we do make them again, and then again, and then again until we’ve hit that 89 that may actually be 98 as we might be upside again.

Or maybe 99.

Which means we might be the one that Jesus came to find.

But maybe not as, well, surely we’re not this lost again!

Oh but friends, chances are we are. Because honesty tells us that such is all we know to be and find and feel even then still the only thing worth our trying to be. All because having been there so many times before, lost is thus the easiest thing for us to stay. And being able to stay something, be it lost in the dark or hopeless in heart, while it might not be exactly what we were hoping for in or out of life, it’s just easier to embrace where we’ve been than to endure what we know it would take for us to find the better we’ve not seen yet.

Because what it takes is what Jesus showed it would.

And we’re just not quite ready to lay down a life that we’re all but certain is finally right on the brink of everything going right and falling into place and thus us not falling again.

But friends, we have already. Fallen that is. And that is because everything hasn’t gone right. Nothing has fallen into place. We don’t even know the place we’re in. And we definitely can’t seem to ever find any actual reason to stay.

Why?

Because despite it being so much easier for us to always just stay wherever it is that we’ve pulled off this journey to start writing our version of our life’s story, truth is that we’ve not managed to find that piece that we call peace. Now we lie about that, just like we do about pretty much everything else. We tell the world that we’re completely content with the content of our current. We post all about how great things are going and how awesome we’re doing at whatever it is that we’re probably only doing for the picture needed for the post that nobody really reads.

But what of all the other things? What of the emptiness we feel in all the dreams we’ve had go up in smoke from the fires that we lit ourselves? What of the anger we meet in those rare moments that we look in a mirror expecting to see our very best friend but only see our worst enemy, the one who keeps starting all the fires? What about the peace we don’t have through those nights in which we can’t sleep thanks to the nightmares we’ve literally lived as recently as the day just gone?

Indeed, what of all that’s gone so wrong that it’s all inspired us to live so long in the dark that our eyes can’t see anymore having all but permanently adjusted to everything from a lack of light to a lack of life.

For the truth is that the two exist only in one. Life is lived in the light of truth whilst darkness only offers us a semblance of safety from the truth that would dare to claim it could set us free from what we’ve become all but convinced we don’t want freed from.

And why?

Why do we want to continue paving this path we’ve walked in the past that didn’t find the peace or hope that we’re still then looking for? Are such things just not worth the fight it takes to find them? Or are we simply convinced that we’ve already found them in this hope of our mistakes staying hidden and the peace we feel in hoping they will?

Friends, I don’t know where or when it happened to you but I know it’s happened to all of us. There was a point in life in which we could have turned back toward the light but instead chose only to stay in the dark. And it was done for what was the very same of what are a billion different reasons we’ve come up with and shared with one another trying to make that make sense.

But it can’t.

There is no sense to be made in trying to keep hiding what the Word says we can’t. Because it makes no sense to keep running from the hope we want back into all the darkened places and people that we’ve been in which we know it isn’t.

And indeed, those paths are all so crooked and craggy that there’s simply no way for peace to be known upon them. And again, we know this because we’re the ones who paved them! We’re the ones who wrote the stories of our pasts and find ourselves now all but scrambling trying to make them not look so bad. We’re the ones who trusted our broken hand to hold the pen thinking it could draw something worth dreaming about.

But all we got is some scribbled existence all but void of substance.

Is that what you want? Just to keep living that way of life in which peace is found at best in pieces that still don’t fit together long enough to feel like the real deal?

It isn’t!

And that’s exactly why Jesus came whispering in the dark trying to convince our hearts to hope in life again! It’s because life isn’t what we’ve been living as there is no life to be lived in the dark.

There’s only death.

And friends, our inability to find anything else other than those feelings of shame and regret, death themselves of every better we thus know could have been, it’s only left us then either lost and looking to stay or lost and aching for a better way.

He offers us exactly that, but we have to agree that we’ll never find it where we’ve been looking and writing and trying to do so before we can ever admit that we need Him so much more than we need to try one more time to find what we haven’t a thousand before.

Simply because it’s hard to find anything in the dark.

Perhaps most of all hope in what you’re doing and the expectation of peace waiting to be found in that place you think you’re going but can’t guarantee as you can’t see for sure.

Let Him be the One who sees the way. After all, He both knows how blind we’ve become because of all the dark we’ve known, but He also knows how to give sight to those who see they need it.

The danger then is becoming so blind that you refuse to see.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold