Day 3835 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 59:11 NIV

The rattle

It would seem that despite the lack of life being lived by those who’ve denied the same there remains this constant chaos as likewise chosen by the frozen in fear of faith and their finding there something to save from what they’ve become having always been but numb to the new that He came to do in every life in which such was a need if the soul inside was to be freed from both where the vessel in which it was had insisted it go and too from hopefully at least some of what it had then come to know of what life was never supposed to see.

Indeed, there’s a nonstop noise in our world, cities all abuzz with the sound of the drown seeking to drink deep another day’s worth of delight.

Alas, as time continues to pass and so too we away it seems that anymore our everyday is finding us only filling up with the fear of faith as mixed with a failure to find whatever it was that we perhaps once were looking for and the frustration we feel thanks to our failure to have become by now what we haven’t quite yet. And yes, it’s hard to blame us for feeling so angry and upset in regard to the overall trajectory of life and its general downhill aim.

Then again it’s long been our own name seeking its own fame for our own frame, both that of our body but more so our rebellion.

And so it’s kind of hard to blame anybody else either.

Which is what I consider the cause of this chatter as coming from a culture spinning out of control. It’s this constant state of disappointment mixed daily with the appointment of lacking the ointment of any hope as held always further off thanks to the world around us and the heart within us both leading us only further away than the day before. For indeed, it does seem to seem that nearly all of pretty much everything is getting harder, heavier, worse and wearisome.

Guess we all just feel as if we’ve collectively then no recourse but to refuse the outcome we ourselves played a part in coming out like it has. And sure, while we’ll all make the case that our choices were made with our life’s best in sight, the fact is friends that everything’s still managed to fall apart. And well, I just don’t know how that could have happened had we honestly known anything of a life’s best. For if we all truly knew what best to do with this life we’ll lose, then perhaps we wouldn’t be so lost as it seems we’ve still found the way to become.

And make no mistake, lost we most certainly are!

After all, it’s literally impossible to find what you refuse to look for.

Which again, granted, we would all claim that the best life possible was always our goal. I mean I’ve even seen t-shirts and doormats emblazoned with the very idea. To live your best life, a life somehow only to be defined by what we alone think best for us. And yet perhaps that’s the problem that’s caused all this volume. Maybe it’s not only what we’ve found while thinking it best ending up being quite starkly less but that such a search as seen only inside has thus left us to die all alone.

And well, that just doesn’t do much in the way of making this life feel like home.

Rather it feels like war, a raging in which everyone is racing always after their next best guess as to what life means and thus what best to do with the little of it we’ve left. But friends, my question is do we have any left at all? Because to be honest, I don’t really know that we could make that case, let alone make it stick. For the fact is that I just can’t seem to buy this lie that so many still try to sell of this all going so very well that we should all be overjoyed with our having joined in what is basically the melting down of every better into nothing more than a worry about the weather.

For indeed, such a wasted conversation seems to always find its way in ours as had with others. It’s like we don’t know what else to talk about. Like nothing else really matters much. Like our bringing up something other might make the other feel a bother by our having then become the betrayer in the matter of our having met. All because we’re all so easy to offend that our best offense is just to defend what we’ve done as if we’ve done nothing wrong and deserve to hear nothing then of how we might have.

Inconceivable!

Absolutely preposterous!

Yes, such is our stance as stood upon these lives we’ve lived letting life slip right through our fingers and thus out of hand. It’s that we’ve done nothing so wrong as to contribute to the dilute of life itself into this tale of how we’ve toiled and tried to make a life not filled with lies we ourselves have had to buy, selling ourselves on the whole ordeal both the biggest challenge and yet apparently the easiest to accomplish.

After all, all of us have done it. We’ve all managed to somehow, and that more than a time or two, convince ourselves that we were doing so good at everything we tried that we deserved trophies just for being here in what we felt was a life so amazingly lived that we perhaps even earned a pass on that whole winding up dead part of the show.

Yet here we are.

We’re all barely hanging on in a world doing basically the same. We’re all passing blame for the problems we see. We’re all denying we see any of them in us or how we’re living our lives. We’re all wasting our time in these matters of politics and popularity, living as if we actually think that others care to try to know we’re here at all. We’re all furthering the fall both away from faith and thus into more disgrace thanks to grace being a cornerstone of faith itself, and thus lacking when faith is the same.

And well, it seems that without such cornerstones as grace or faith or the kindness and compassion and their corresponding efforts given unto the likes of mutual edification and spiritual growth, nope, this house can’t stand no matter how high we continue to try to prove that we can, in pride, push this thing into the sky.

Indeed, we just keep rolling this stone up the hill of misplaced hope, only to get so angry when it starts rolling back on us that we resort once more to use one more day doing the very same things that we’ve come to do with nearly every single one of them.

Just last night I stood at my bedroom’s window staring out into the dark of the night, gazing both at the stars and into a stark realization as to both how small I am and yet how always angry too.

Don’t know why.

I’ve got an amazing life! I have a family that loves me more than I do myself. I have a new house in which we’ve come to live in recent months at the end of the apartment way that we all came to hate. I have a small business that’s done pretty well for its first year, need some rain though. I have a room filled with things that God’s given me the ability to enjoy and appreciate. I have a field behind our house filled with fireflies that dance through the tall grass and coyotes that sometimes call out their lonesome cry as if to remind that I’m not the only one who feels lonely sometimes.

And all of this because I’ve a God so big that loves me so much that He chose to come find me through a cross that cost His life in order to save mine from what I’m still doing to it.

Such as finding all these reasons to be angry or upset or discontent.

Don’t even know what the reasons are! I just know that I know I feel angry more often than I should, more often than I want to. After all, who wants to feel angry? Who wants to be upset? Who wants to go through this life as if this life is such a burdensome burden that we’re daily left burning with this near hatred for life itself in light of how we have to live it in what is a way that so often isn’t going ours?

But then it hit me as I thought softly about the side of me that I’ve not seen in quite some time.

Maybe the problem is that we’re not alive.

Maybe all this chaos we see and the confusion we feel, maybe they’re evidence of the substance of a life already over. Maybe all this hatred that’s spinning endlessly around us and the anger we feel it justifies within us, maybe they’re just proof that we’ve lost the plot. Maybe all this noise we hear of people everywhere screaming and yelling about all kinds of things but mostly at one another, maybe it’s just the song sung by a billion lives having come undone.

Something known as the rattle.

The rattle.

Indeed, it’s said that upon a soul’s exit from this existence is existent a rattling sound heard crawling from the vessel they’re then thus emptying. Scientifically it’s recognized as the sound made by individuals nearing death, caused by the accumulation of fluids in the throat and airways as is otherwise unable to be cleared as normal due to the overall state of this soul’s temporary vessel losing its strength as it loses its consciousness, and one that thus typically indicates that death is imminent.

And this sound is said to cause distress or discomfort in those who hear it as they are witnessing, literally, the physical end of this life.

How could it not?

For we’re a people alive who thus vastly appreciate life and then clearly want it to continue to be lived, especially by those we’ve loved and who’ve loved us in return. And yet perhaps that’s the problem we’ve come upon in our world today. Maybe we don’t know how to love or have never felt the real deal thereof, leaving us then unable to offer what we either don’t know or have forgot. Maybe we’ve become so consumed inside ourselves that we cannot offer unto others what we neither care they offer unto us.

Yes, maybe we’re just dead men who mind not then that others around us are dying too.

Because as much as we are a people alive that should then appreciate life, maybe we don’t as maybe we aren’t quite as alive as we’ve seemed to socially surmise. Rather it seems that much of what we hear anymore all around here is but the rattle of chattel confined in the confines of a life literally on the line that we all have lived as if wasn’t there at all. How else might you explain how many times we’ve crossed it as if so doing meant nothing? Indeed, how can you explain our fealty to sin considering the lack of life found lived within?

And sure, some may make the argument that the best life to be lived is that one in which we’re free to do only always as we please. But friends, considering our communally promised end, and all the doing of whatever we want before then, what then can be proven best of that? For even a life lived without limits ends, proving then it limited anyway. And so perhaps that’s what’s caused all this noise we hear anymore down here.

Maybe it’s the sound of a million souls screaming out this palpable angst as met along the way to what is this one more in a string of days so gone away to our having become nothing we wanted to be.

Maybe it’s just our death rattle reaching our throats from hearts that have all but given trying to keep going toward the better that so many so clearly don’t care to reach for anymore.

Seems we’d all just rather whine about how bad things are getting instead of getting our hands dirty in the doing of something about how filthily we’ve come to live.

It sure seems that the world is loud with sounds of wailing and weeping as people are freaking over their lives approaching that moment in which they’re to be over as well. And well, I guess that makes sense considering we’ve always considered that the best way to prove we matter is to make sure other people hear us. It’s just then that I don’t think that all this screaming and yelling and fighting and failing to be the better we’ve all but collectively given up on trying to be is really what anyone in mind in that regard.

I mean, it does help folks to know that we’re here, that’s for sure. But only then that we’re unhappy here, and somehow not sure why, but also that it has to be someone else’s fault. For it can’t be lies we tell, nor those we live. Can’t be the lack of growth we’ve found, guess not the excuses not to either. Surely it isn’t the lack of comfort we feel as, well, we all seem quite content to never question the content of our still current contention against the Creator. No, seems we’ve got a lot of good going for us as we’re undoubtedly the most highly advanced we’ve ever been.

And apparently the most accomplished too.

Just ask us if you don’t believe us.

Yeah, everyone all around is ready at a moment’s notice to make known all the amazing things they’ve done and how awesome are those tasks and tinkerings still underway. All of us will readily regale any and all with this tale of how we’ve found that fount of a life’s turning out just the way we’d planned for it go. We’ll even tell you all about all the more dreams we have for this thing still seen as ours. So it seems that life as we’ve chosen to live it is going too perfectly to cause any of these problems we seem to have that we seem to feel the need to shout about.

Must be something else then.

For something sure has everyone quite upset anymore. So much so that, despite the effort given unto screaming and such, doesn’t seem that very much is being actually done to fix anything we’re yelling about being broken.

Other than blaming somebody else, that is. And that somebody else is often boiled down to being Jesus as He’s who dares to hint at our needing freedom and forgiveness. The first of which we think we have already, and that making then the second unneeded as, well, if we are walking in this freedom to do as we please alongside the lack of consequence we want found, then forgiveness is unfounded.

And so too the cross.

And thus life is just our loss still to lose. And yeah, that’s pretty heartbreaking. So much so that I can see as to why so many would be so upset all the time. After all, as fans of living life, it does kind of suck that life’s both coming to its end and apart as we get closer.

Just can’t see why so little is being done about it.

Especially considering the little asked in order to find life continued. I mean, confess and repent, that’s literally it. Believe in Christ who gave His life that we might share in His laying down of that version lost in exchange for that kind found, and that forever. But no, no seems we’d rather just whine all the time, complaining about how ungreat things are in this life in which our best life is always being lived.

Strange that.

How life as we live it can be apparently so very amazing but yet we still manage to find almost nothing but unhappiness and discontent to talk about, always thanks to the doings of another.

Obviously.

I just know that we’re all so unhappy anymore. I’ve been here for 37, halfway to 38, and I truly don’t remember any other time in my life’s time in which so much felt so unsettled and unsure and, well, quite disconcerting to be sure. It’s literally as Skillet put it in one of their songs from a while back:

“All the faces are filled with so much anger. Losing our dignity and hope from fear of danger. After all the wars, after settling the scores, at the break of dawn we will be deaf to the answers? There's so much bigotry, misunderstanding and fear. With eyes squinted and fists clenched we reach out for what is dear.”

And indeed, it’s as if we all seem to know what matters most to us, but yet most of what we seem to do is just resort to the tearing apart of those around us based upon what may or may not matter to them. And all so that we can find this sense of validation or justification for what we want to matter most to us. That’s why we spend so much time fighting anymore! It’s because we’re all trying to prove that our lives are being lived right, but that often by only pointing out how others are going about theirs all wrong.

And so thus we just exist in this barren belief that we’re the best at living life and yet even still life is falling apart.

But rather than do anything that might help, nope, we just yell. We scream about what we want and why we hate what we’ve found instead. We whine about how bad the world is getting while doing nothing to address our contributions to justice dissolving thanks to our disinterest in living justly ourselves. Indeed, we’re all but uniquely indifferent to the lives we’ve been given.

Proven in just how much we complain about them while doing nothing to change them that would then leave us less to complain about.

Rather we settle for the rattle. For merely talking about a walk we’re not walking. For only screaming and shouting about things we’ll do absolutely nothing else to fix. For again just resorting to blaming God for allowing evil to exist and wickedness to be an option.

Friends, God didn’t create this life to have gone this way. We chose it every single time that we got in mind an idea so good that we couldn’t let it go.

We’re the ones to blame for how bad things have become.

And we just can’t keep seeking then the help we need for the hope we’re losing if we’ll not sit with what we may have done to cause the better we’re not to have been missed along the way.

After all, we’re living these lives our way which always wants them to go our way.

Right?

Well, if so, then no, we have nobody else to blame as it was thus our way that got us here. And it’s our way that will keep us here with nothing left to say.

And nothing left to share but in the rattle.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold