Day 3842 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 3:3 NIV

Unchanged

And it’s not us.

For there exists a mindset manifest amongst men in which we think so much about such things as equality that we’ve lost the understanding of the quality of equity as is seen for its importance only within the undertaking of edification as is the standing call placed still unto all. And this line of thought and theory has left us all quite clearly of the mind in which we seem to find that our being like God is still something of a possibility, even if not one that we can seem to prove very easily.

For the ease of task matters not unto those elsewise convinced that the outcome will prove of the promise for which we hoped along the way through whatever may come our own.

No, for there’s also a staunchness to at least some human belief that is in fact so wanting to achieve this idea, this dream that we, even though vastly lazy and often even more lost, even we become of the willingness to endure whatever it may take to help us reach the home of this hope we’ve held finally in the distance as is meant to be covered by all of us who are, as lost and lazy, in need of change amazing.

Issue then is unraveling this now rebellion longstanding in which we’ve all stood ourselves as if statues that, though not quite proven divinity, have at the least this apparent nobility that seems to afford us an affluence of just enough arrogance to continue contending against the God of all creation in what can only be understood as a thinking that we might somehow alter the course we’ve chosen without His help so as to achieve His desire without relying on His intervention.

In other words, we think we can save this ship even though it’s always been our very own thoughts and words and worries which have been ripping holes in the hull that is a heart now so torn apart that most days we don’t even realize we’re at sea and here sinking in what is a sin without bottom and a tendency toward complacency vastly similar.

Rather all we seem to see are a community accomplishing for one another every new reason we need to keep doing nothing new. In fact it could be, and perhaps will one day, be argued that such is all we’re truly able to prove faithful at. Just the doing of nothing new at what is then a visible denial of He who came with just such an intention in mind. To do something new. And in fact this was in fact such an intention of His that He even told us as much as plain as the rain.

And yet still we live as if perceive it we don’t.

But perhaps it’s never been the lack of perception that’s caused our fealty to all our problems and too our ability to always make more. No, maybe the issue isn’t that we can’t see any reason in which we might need to share in His doing of something new and how such means our doing something different. Because logic tells us that we can only continue to find what we’ve already found if all we find are reasons to never change.

And it also tells us that Christ had to have died for something more than our doing of all this less.

But alas, even though such is the message contained within common sense, as is itself something of a dying ideal, so too then are we dying to our ideals as are left still in a life still lived as if we’re far more important than we are.

Why else would we still be so very often so very worried about such feebleness as what we want or how we feel?

See, I’ve been lost in that never-ending race for all my life. And as I sit here now at 37 inside what is a whole bunch of brand new that my family and I have for years prayed through so many struggles and frustrations to finally find, I’ve found that my tendencies are still the same as when I was 15. Or 13. Maybe it was 8. Truth is that I can’t remember when nor why I started out for this approach to life. No, I just know that it’s both managed to stay all along the way to where I am today alongside an inability to reason out why.

Because despite my growth in faith, or least that of which I hope I’ve as had as I feel I have, still I seem to feel also this warring inside as sparred between who I am and who I was meant to be. And maybe there is an increasing overlap between the two as indeed I do somedays seem to notice the novel and new as found or heard in the things I apparently feel are important to say or do. But still, I can’t help but feel as if I’m mostly just missing something.

But yet that human tendency toward feeling as if something is missing is often assumed under the guise that this something missing from our lives was the same as something which was always there before. And this understanding of the emptiness of where we’re standing has left us quite often looking to what is the past to help us better approach the present, if not in fact perhaps define the future.

Leaving us but pillars of salt cast amongst a crowd the same.

Only confused as to all we’ve lost or have left to lose because it seems sometimes that we see others move, or even think we feel as if we might have recently too.

But from what and where to? Indeed, what, if anything, has actually changed in us that’s able to be proven by a change in our lives and how we live them as if their living is finally something that we understand as being worth more than we ever considered before? Yes, what in us and how we live is of such newness that it perhaps doesn’t even make any sense to us? Or are we rather only willing to go as far as our understanding is able to make it?

Never once then seeing that it was always our understanding that both hamstrung our hope and thus held us here in wherever it is that we may have happened to finally break down and settle in amongst a world of heathen all but unanimously living as if life is worth nothing but yesterday repeating?

And has not our choice to so often do the same only come from that frame of mind as made so mangled in the middle between our refusal of equality and that as is based upon our longstanding misunderstanding of equity? Do we not feel as if we’re all owed something simply for being here and trying, even if said trying is only ever for whatever we may want for only ourselves?

See, that’s the danger in this kind of thinking done by committee if not community. It’s proven in that we can only then ever think whatever most others are about whatever it is then that most of us are even willing to think about. And this all thus leaves us as those on the thrones in what is then a life in which we consider ourselves as having become equal to God, thus utterly discounting the differing depths to which He’s proven willing to come and get us from what are all these different places in which our lives have gone so wrong for so long.

No, rather we only worry over this numbers sort of safety as is seen clearly the same something that humanity has all but always relied upon to prove us right.

And that then paying no mind whatever to whatever we may get wrong.

For such things don’t matter to those who refuse to consider that mistakes are even makeable by such majesty as we’ve long seen ourselves to be. I mean, it literally becomes, perhaps only eventually but inevitably nonetheless, all but an impossibility for us to even pretend we care about either wrongs we lose the ability to imagine we might choose nor then what we might owe unto those whom we’ve wronged in our doing the same as isn’t done from our point of view.

And thus life just dissolves in us devolved into thinking that depravity and degradation are both as harmless as basically everyone around us lives as if they are.

For again, this many people can’t be wrong.

Or can we?

You see, that’s become a thought that’s managed to find its way daily into my thinking without my often noticing it coming. For still I find that I somehow manage to do those things I wish not to as are only noticed after I’ve done this thing or said that word or had that thought that I’d thought I didn’t want to say or do or think about anymore. And yet still in those same times in which I still cross those lines, I can only there do so so long as I still think of myself as the only one to answer to in my life as is then answered in how I delight to live it.

Leaving me once more on the throne and yet seeking for evidence that I’ve grown enough to even consider that I might belong even where I am, even though it’s wrong.

See, it’s truly something of a collapsing confusion this delusion as is daily designed by the very mankind with whom we so often walk in step in what is a lack of understanding as to either where we’re going or why we’re supposed to be so okay with it despite so much going so wrong.

As considered via that random stranger we pass in the streets that just has this joyful glow that we know we’ve never known.

I’ve thought about that a lot over recent years. It’s that surpassing peace that I sometimes stumble upon whilst walking the streets or aisles or ideas of this world. For every now and then, infrequent to be sure, I find this person who just exudes this clarity of life and purity of hope that is spoken without words and yet still understood without question, known without a doubt.

Where does it come from? How can I get some? Why don’t have any? Why’ve I cared so rarely?

Why instead have I so often cared only to emulate the idiocy? Why have I rather given so much time to trying still to find both what I already have but have too either already lost or sold or come to have and hold only to then and there choose to again let go so that I could be free to endure the reach for the same something more that I can both apparently see but still can’t seem to find?

Yes, why has so little changed in my life that’s thus left me still so teetering between the faith of God as had in me and the faithlessness of man as had in Him?

Or is not perhaps my wrestling with such a clearing discrepancy only evidence of a life’s changing?

I hope it is but truth is I don’t know for sure as, well, I’ve never been this way before. I’ve never really wandered to nor then through so many of these thoughts I seem to anymore be unable not to think. I haven’t ever seen much reason to see the reasoning behind at least some of what I’m doing now. Instead, my wanderings and wantings and reasons and reasonings have long been almost exclusively some manner or measure of whatever mankind was doing or thinking or trying to find.

What then does it say that I can say that most days I don’t care about what this world is doing anymore? But what then does that mean when considered against those times in which I do?

See, this is the life confused as is caught between that which we have been faithful to and our realization that there’s nothing there to remain so entwined with. For such is the gravity of all faith in that it’s not merely a series of ideas or some horde of hopes as had for however long we might care to try. In fact, I’d almost dare say that faith doesn’t have much of anything to do with our trying at all. Faith, if seen properly for what it really is, it actually can’t have much to do with us period as it’s rather a hopeful reliance placed in another as is chosen for perhaps reasons we can’t fully nor then always understand.

Rather faith is the very substance of those things for which still we hope as are then to be only ever evidenced in all that remains unseen as such is where hope is always best to keep kept. In the distance. For the future. For us further along this line that is a lane in which we daily find we’ve lain plenty down and yet still have left plenty more to lose in what is faith’s narrowing of our lives in accordance with the measuring as is to be done either now or later, but rather done now so as to be found later complete as opposed to still with room left to grow both in whoever or whatever that has by then long held our hope and too then away from all the rest that tried to but we learned to refuse.

But that’s the challenge isn’t it?

It’s the refusal of the many hopes that we see humanity still reaching for. And it is hard because we also see them finding them, and thus far faster than our version of faith seems to. Indeed, in this world we’re all seeking for a reward as such is simply what will always seem most logical to do as there simply must be some sort of reason or reasoning for our here being and that around or for whatever it is that all of this is geared toward.

But the confusion comes in that said gearing is to be done differently in basically every life. For indeed, it’s simply an impossibility for someone else to have my faith or for me then to have theirs. And that simply because it’s also impossible for me to live someone else’s life nor they mine. Rather we are all in fact something of islands in what is this sea of faces in which we all see one another but sometimes not eye-to-eye. Instead what we’re bound to find is that all of us have slightly different understandings as are built upon what have been lives lived differently from one another.

And thus faith itself is something that comes unto us in differing measures as are needed to find for us our own unique need of everything from humility to the improvement which such allows. Everyone is different in regard to the amount of mistake and misunderstanding found present in past and pretense. And thus we all need what is said to in fact be a personal relationship with Christ.

Problem then is that we live amongst the many who are said to inhabit the wide and yet also alongside those who may very well claim an understanding of Christ but yet one that might seem quite different from ours. And so when we continue to assume that there’s this need for similarity, what I fear we’ll find is but our faith either broken by those around us who have none or jaded as we try to sort out the distinctness as is to be evidenced in what is a personal relationship that we, as a community-minded people, try to thus make more communal than it can be.

And that’s not to say that we shouldn’t gather together to hopefully glean something of spiritual growth or joyful hope from one another’s walk, as we should. But it is to say that there needs to always remain that realization that our walk is our walk and can thus only be walked by us as we’re the only ones to be responsible for where we end up.

No matter how much time within this life that we give to either looking to or even perhaps still living like those still living that way of life that all of us have lived in which a lack of faithfulness was found.

Not because it wasn’t there back then but simply because we didn’t care back then.

That’s either what has or simply has to change.

Why?

Because God won’t. No, nothing we do can impact Him as, well, we’re simply not of enough power to do so. Indeed, truth is that whether we choose to do right or continue doing only almost everything wrong, God is still God and Heaven is still then either waiting or ignored. I’m sometimes surprised by the simplicity of the things I write, or rather that I believe He might through me. And that simply because I’m also often shocked at these random thoughts as to just how easy it might be as confused by how hard we try to make it.

All so that we can seem impressive to whomever it is that we think we’re here to impress.

Question then is whether or not such seeking to impress is done unto God or rather still just those who are in Him faithless?

That’s the danger in any of us retaining any importance in our lives. It merely keeps us living to please us or pass us off as being important or impressive, and perhaps then even impressed by those around us so pleased with themselves that they think of themselves as the only ones important. Leaving God thus still but a distant afterthought.

Is that what you want Him to be? Is that what any of us need Him to be? That’s sure what our lives has said at times before. But does not that we know we’ve changed only offer us some evidence that He hasn’t? I mean, in everything there is an equation of movement as all we do is done from point A to whatever and wherever point B may be. We do nothing without something moving.

But again, He’s said that He won’t and so we’re thus either moving closer to Him or still in lockstep with those walking if not running away.

Truth is that we all know we’ve been those who’ve both walked and ran from so much of what true faith has called us to do, to be. But all such walking or running can only be done either toward or from. The presence of regret proves which. And thus, since we’ve all known regret, this only means then that there’s something better that we know to be there.

Question is whether we’re moving toward that better now or still only walking away.

Either way, God isn’t to be changed by the faithlessness of man. But if we don’t change from the same lack of faith, nor then can we find what so many clearly aren’t.

Just know that peace is there, and hope too. Only it doesn’t make much sense to keep following behind and thus living like those who seem to know nothing of either.

Not when we can simply turn back toward our Father and embrace the fact that we’re the ones who moved and have only moved so much that we’re now so lost that we need His help if we’re to ever get back to even that ability to hope in something better.

This world won’t help us get there. But neither will He fail to. And while the choice to agree to that change may be ours, perhaps all we can really ever do is start off by praying that He helps us see things His way rather than ours. As only can this stand as evidence of our understanding there to be indeed a difference between.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold