Day 3834 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 59:10 NIV

The dead

But thankfully for now just in our heart and in our head thanks to thoughts unthought about betters never bought as having ever been worth our having become. Rather we’ve instead become so cold and numb that we live as if dumb to what is the drum of life that beats inside the chest we have as if treasure itself as held inside a life to live in which we are alive, but barely at best. Yes, anymore our best is death in thoughts unknown of a life we’ve sewn into all we’ve known of the better we never were.

My worry now is that never were is quickly becoming never will thanks to our continuing of the same paths and ponderings that have led us to where we still are.

And indeed, that we are still where we have been, at least in some ways, this seems only to say that we’re not seemingly all that interested in the living aspect of life. Why? Because life lives. Life breathes. Life sees the sights of life that fights to keep living the life it was given to be living. Yes, life grows and flows and continues always there on as it knows that hope that holds our hand or that our hands hold isn’t much of a hope worth knowing so much as it seems we have.

Because what we hold is what we have but what we have can’t be held for much longer.

Except for the life we’ve squandered on the lack of better we’ve desired to be designed inside it. Yeah, I fear that what we’ll find is that He will let us keep all of such things as, well, He’s nothing if not just and fair. And friends, this is where we should have by now found and felt our fear of Him and our not being there wherever He is with the better He gives in what was and remains a promise so complete that even time hasn’t much to say in regard to its potential.

No, nothing of Heaven’s hope will run out as He who bought it for us and brought it to us didn’t run from the cost incurred to secure our safe salvation into this formed and forming new nation newly founded upon the foundation of new information as daily given in the wake of both mistakes made and the betters they always make the way for us to be.

But alas we cannot so glean this scene of a new life seen if we’ll not see that our old was what charged that debt that He’s now told us has been so fully paid that we’re now fully freed from every ounce of who we were once.

Simply because He can’t forgive what we can’t admit is in need of such a kindness.

And indeed, though there are a great many such failures behind us, the issue’s become that we’re so numb to nearly every measure of our life’s better that we stand still still in this whether or not to accept the gift He brought in light of the cost by which we know it bought. For the cost was life, and well, since we think still we’ve just the one it’s hard for us to fathom letting it go into the Son which has already set on the life we’ve known, know still in many ways.

All in exchange for that we haven’t as isn’t held as worth very much to the rest of us drunks as drank upon the stank of a world staved inside the maze of mischief and mistake being made hand over fist in a life that still manages to fit in the place He came to help us see we were not meant to be.

Only because of what this place has become.

After all, what’s there to a life worth living if it’s only lived as those dead who refuse to lose their death in exchange for everlasting life?

Indeed, none of this is what God hand in mind when He at first sat to creating all of what we haven’t ever seen, or apparently even found reason to look for. For then He looked at all He’d done and deemed it good, so much so that He even rested upon the seventh from His work of invention with intention a creation created to be His people in His place poured in His grace. Yes, man in a garden so very good that nothing else was needed.

Much less the death we’ve since all but demanded.

And that simply because we continue to buzz the tower showing off our power as put on display for only all the world to see just how great we are and just how far we’ve thus not left to go in a life apparently no longer meant to grow. After all, I suppose there is some logic and reason to that. I mean, when you’re as good as it gets, well then what’s there left to get in terms of growth or hope?

No, if we’ve truly arrived already at the very end of our every better, having thus become our very best, then yes, there is nothing left to find and we’ve indeed then plenty of time with which to only regale the lost with all we’ve found in the very same life lived in the very same place as is still filled with so many who’ve somehow only managed to find nothing in the way of our confident contentment so confined inside a list of things we hide from those who never care to look anyway.

He or she in the mirror being sadly chief among them.

For indeed, such is the delight of the dead! It’s to live a lie so lost inside a life not lived that we don’t even seem to see the lack of hope looking back at us whenever we happen upon a reflection of who’s but a victim not of circumstances but chances never taken in a life thought safer and easier and thus less prone to failure if we’d never try for much more than we already have and already were.

Just embrace the waste of the rest of your days, spending them basking in your apparent best rather than striving within them to see what’s still left to see of the life we’ve not seen fit to live quite yet.

Will we ever?

Well, never will if our pride has any say in the matter. Because such a thing as our arrogance again only leaves us ignorant of all that it doesn’t know it doesn’t know. All because it refuses to learn what it can’t bring itself to admit we haven’t yet. All because ego survives only on the assumption of our personal gumption having gotten us as far as we can possibly go. That’s literally the only story that every pride knows.

It’s just this tale of the tail we chased and managed to catch having, again, done our very best to have become already our every chance at anything better that we thus cannot find any further. For if pride thinks itself as having already arrived at its fullest potential, well then what’s left for a life’s perusal? What’s left to hope in if all we’ve hoped for is what we’ve already found or felt? What better can we be when the very best is what we already are?

What more can we know when we know everything there is to think we can?

No, knowing something is unto us the death of us thanks to the finish line it draws in minds not then able to see anything left to learn. And indeed, we do sadly have so many such finish lines in life. In fact one could make the argument that such are all these boxes labeled “expectations” that we all live checking to make sure they’ve been checked off.

Problem then is that it was One who made the argument in response to the rest of us having all lived all but arguing with Him as to the very meaning and purpose of the life He created!

Can you imagine that?

That the created could contend against the Creator in regard to why and for what the creation was created by the Creator that created the creation for a reason thus not known to the created but by the giving of grace and growth by the very Creator which created the means of their creation? Does the pot ask the potter why he was pleased to pour them as the pot they came to be? Or is not the fact that we’ve come to be plenty enough reason to see that we should be thankful for whatever comes in life?

Most of all our ability to so endlessly grow within it?

And yet, such is perhaps the one thing most taken for granted. And why? Because we’ve just apparently better things to do with our lives than live them well. In fact, judging from what most everyone is doing these days, seems we’ve got better things we think we could be doing than living them period.

For friends, this existence we’ve settled for ain’t much of a life worth living.

I mean, what’s so amazing about money we can spend on things we can buy that can’t buy us time, meaning then that money isn’t life but only distracts us from the living of such? What’s so special about the socials on which we post our fake and scroll through mostly everyone else’s? What’s all that impressive about a people pleased and impressed with celebrities and politicians who literally have no idea the underlings are even alive?

And indeed, what’s so alive in us that we’re honored just to be given this new day in which new life is once more ours for the taking, done best thanking He who gave us this extension for some kind of reason that must have something then to do with something we’ve still do as is thus undone from the day before in which what we were may perhaps then be only what we’re not meant to stay today?

Why else would we have all this time we’ve still left to live this life if not to live this life in some new way doing some new thing as all made necessary in light of the old we did that should have done us in, and in fact would have by now if not for both what He did and this day being perhaps the why?

Yes, why would Jesus have chosen to die if not to do as He’d already done in having come from Heaven to meet us heathen where we were?

Do we not see it yet?

That He left Heaven and embraced the fullness of human limitation so as to be like us in every way so that we could become like Him in the same? And where did He have to go to find us in all our fullness?

The cross.

And why?

Because you can only reclaim a life already lost by the losing then of life the same.

Yes, such is why He came and left! It was to both meet us where we’ve been living as who we’d become but to then lead us onward into the better ideas He’s always had in mind for these lives He that gave us to do with everything better than all this lesser we’ve settled for doing instead.

And save me all the, “it’s not all that bad” nonsense!

Friends, ain’t none of us known that kind of happiness that would choose the grave so as to save even just one lost soul from losing it all.

We won’t even lay down the cardboard crown that we still wear around because we think it makes us look important to those too busy wearing their own to see what we’re doing with ours.

And indeed, that’s the ultimate question in regard to every life’s purpose:

What are we doing with it?

Are we growing in it? Or just still groaning in it? Are we learning from it? Still only running from it? Are we improving things? Not seeing anything in need of improvement? Are we expanding in hope? Or has hope run out of ways to extend beyond the known? Indeed, do we have all of life figured out? And is this then what we’re truly content to think we’re here to make of it?

Are we are far as we can go?

Or are we merely as far as we care to try?

Friends, life wasn’t made to die, that’s just what we chose to do with it. We’re the ones who’ve chosen to give up every single time that anything in life asked us into anything hard, anything scary, anything humbling as to us such just sounds too much like the humiliating that we’ve already found and felt our fair share of before. But that’s my point! Having found and felt such things as humiliation and fear, what then are we still doing here in this way of life that’s so undifferent from the day before that you can’t tell the two apart?

And what then makes us think that He can tell us apart from the people we were then that did then what we did in those days now gone that only left us feeling humiliated since?

No, to become different is an ability reserved for the strong, or at least those strong enough to admit they aren’t. To improve is a gift given to those of the humility that knows they haven’t yet but desperately want to, and that soon. To grow in hope is only a hope held by those who refuse to hold that hope is held. To learn is the work of the few in life that know what they don’t know is what can and will keep them down.

We’ve just become so used to falling down that we’ve come up with all these ways to think it justifiable just to stay.

Save the embarrassment and skip the effort!

Friends, I know our tendency to fail whenever we try is something that’s long kept us terrified of living life. All our work done trying to keep others from seeing who we’ve been and sadly mostly still remain has left in our brains this idea that we can’t risk trying too hard as such will just mean we’ll mess up even more and thus have more to hide than we already do in this life spent only trying to make ourselves look good to those who don’t care.

Yes, among those who think themselves strong, we are all thus truly dead as life isn’t a matter of strength but rather of a humility willing to grow in that understanding that says that it’s not by man’s power that the same might be saved from what we’ve long thought we had the power to do. No, such a hope as our souls saved is a call rang from within the grave asking us to come and leave all we’ve done to please the flesh that’s all but left us for dead.

And that thanks to only all of these thoughts we’ve left unthought of all the betters we’ve never bought as having ever been worth our having become.

Friends, I’m tired of knowing the better I can be alongside every reason I’ve always used to never find out for sure. I’m tired of trying to only keep from trying anything that sounds hard or looks scary. I’m tired of thinking that it’s my thinking that matters, but even then only those thoughts and about those theories that oddly enough always bring me their glories thanks to the stories they tell of my life already going pretty well.

Indeed, I’m tired of thinking that a life spent in a lack of living is a life worth living, much less one honestly going good.

I’m even tired of trying to pretend that I’m good, and that at anything!

Rather I want to know better, no matter what it takes to get there. I want to know who I can still become because I still know entirely too much of who I’ve been. Yes, I want to see what I haven’t seen of the hope I haven’t known in the life I’ve lived in which hope was always known as nothing more than a passing enjoyment of something else that was dying alongside me.

I’m tired of dying to the better life He created me to live.

And I’m just increasingly thankful that He continues to keep cognizant of it.

Because it’s only when we can see the death we’ve known, the dead we’ve been that we can then become the better we haven’t been willing to be in all those days in which we were only willing to stay whatever it was that we already were.

Why stay where Jesus went to get us back from where we’ve gone?

Why not rather strive to go where He went from there considering the price He paid for us to have that hope of that promise of that place of everything better finally not having gone to waste?

Yes, I am amazingly amazed that He continues to give me new days in light of what little I’ve done with all the ones I’ve already given away to the becoming of the little to nothing better I remain today. Guess it all just means that He’s got something more for us to see that can’t be seen by eyes thinking they already know the way but have to still rely on the walls we’ve built to get us there.

Friends, how can what we know lead us to the more we don’t?

And if we don’t yet know that way of life that doesn’t end, well then why continue to settle for the one that does?

Doesn’t that seem kind of dumb and thus leave us all but among the dead?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold