Day 3843 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Luke 18:8 NIV

The question

It’s not that as often asked of man in regard to either where or what God is nor why He does as He does if He is there to be found in that strange somewhere that thus matches the workings in which this gift wars. Nor is it that as pondered upon the persistence of problem as proven all but perfectly reliable in what has become a way of life in which war is what we do so often seem to see if not in fact feel inside. No, the question isn’t even one to be asked by us at all.

Rather the question in question is that to be asked of us.

And granted, it seems quite clear to see that amongst this sea there are indeed a very great and quickly growing many who do remain caught within all of these confused considerings such as where God might be as asked as if we might prove the ones to find Him. Others are asking what He is as if He’s meant to be something so small as to actually fit inside of our understanding. Some seek to understand a bit more of faith before ever agreeing to become faithful to the hope it’s supposed to offer as sought in such wonder as why He does what He does.

Again asked as if we’re supposed to comprehend what the past has already said we cannot.

And yet none of this matters all that much, at least apparently not to us who are always on that razor’s edge as honed in between the life we’ve known as built upon a constant roaming seeking more of the comfort of our knowing as much as we might in regard to what happens during the day and why it so often prevents our sleep at night and that other side in which we finally find the freedom which only faith affords. And while the former is typically done in hunt of the latter, the problem of this hour is that it usually becomes all we know to be.

For indeed, we are just roamers upon this earth, each us then seeking the very substance of a life’s meaning as is supposed to, or at supposedly, make sense so as to help our times and their trials do the same. And yes, this is a quite logical stance to have so stood so solid upon all these years as it’s quite reasonable to realize that we’re not here by accident but must rather have a purpose for our placement in both this time and amongst this particular basement of man’s debasement.

But again, we rather seem to quite fear the depths from which our true calling comes calling as we instead skip along through life mostly only ever skimming the surface of the same. All because we know this to be safe as such is what we watch millions upon millions doing all but every minute.

Yes, this world is all but enslaved to the surface upon which they can then seek the substance of their existence as, granted, lived upon the same. But the question will soon have become whether or not that is truly all we really thought of our purpose. Was our time here truly something to be best spent upon the content of the current and cantankerous? Were our lives given us to have given them to such things as what we can see or might fathom? Can all of these days and their many hours prove only the power to peruse the used and useable?

For what then does this mean that we’re useful?

See, I seem to find most days this worry that finds me rather worried that my undertakings are to only ever be as amazingly underwhelming as I know they’ve the tendency to try. And I know of this typicality because, well, I’ve lived every second of my life’s past in what’s most days only proven a portion of perpetuity that’s found every new today but a rehashing of the one just prior through what are both memories kept and mistakes the same.

Each of which were always made in what’s always remained my grappling between my grasping of the fact that every life must have a purpose and having placed my assumption of my own upon such things as what I’ve owned or argued may have owned me.

Indeed, I fear we’ve become so falsely freed that all we see are but the choices we make and the consequences they can’t.

As if something so potentially rewarding as our chance to make a choice between what could be right but might again be wrong and what will go wrong but could prove right is also so powerless as to prove something of so little risk that the reward must then be only ever the same.

For in life there are rarely such extremities as these outlying curiosities as considered possible by a man lost inside a life seeking only the provable.

And why do we always settle so short of such a faith that asks us to actually believe in such things as those we can’t see, don’t know, won’t ever even begin to possibly understand until we agree to both the above?

Because while we’re a people who pretend our path is one paved in rewards so rewarding that the world will even end up showering us with yet another as won within praise and applause, truth is our cause is always to protect ourselves from the unseen and unknown.

Simply because what we don’t know and can’t see are the same things as they which might find us so mistaken as to be found making mistakes again.

And we’re just tired of so betraying this pride in which, by which, for which we’ve so come to abide.

Thus we lie. We cheat. We steal. We storm into the streets seeking our daily dose of those whose hopes are held only in the held and heavy as heard around the world via cell phone livestreams and nighttime newsfeeds finding for us that feeling of our knowing what matters whilst also our very opinions on the matter also made without our undertaking the effort.

All to avoid the risk whilst still hoping to find the reward.

But you see, such is the first to be asked in this line of questioning. And in fact it’s a question being asked every single day as is being answered by whatever it is that we’re doing and why. For the reality is that we’re not a people who do without reason to but that rather we always have to have purpose for our purchase of the necessity of our doing something. What’s in it for us? What will it profit me? How might I be bettered, be in terms of financial gain or even personal growth?

Yes, what is the payout for this path asking for permission to upend my usual comfort as is always most easily won within complacency and thus both my life and me never changing?

What we probably haven’t seen is that such is an opening to faith as is always only placed in something that we trust to be there. In this example that trust placed in some sort of personal benefit. And indeed, this is what we do every single day into which we awake to once more charge the shore of what we have convinced ourselves to be sure is there for us to find or feel. Every single day we prove our capacity for walking faithfully either toward and/or for something.

First question is what.

To or toward what are we faithful? What inside this day will be given such things as our hope or courage? What of our plans are to be offered from us the willingness to fight for them unfolding as we’d like? How might our lives prove today as able to go our way as yesterday may or may have not? What can we do today to better uphold what seems to matter most?

Again then finding us right back to the question:

What matters most?

For most the answer is always different. And sure, that’s pretty obvious as we’re obviously all different. Problem is that’s not what I mean. No, rather what I mean is that the answer is always different even for us. Each and every day through which we’ve already lived has proven of such strange substance that so many of those things which once mattered now mean so little that we don’t even think of them anymore. So many of the past’s priorities have only proven so inconsequential to life’s purpose that we not only stopped worrying so much about them but in fact have all but completely forgotten them.

Proving then our longstanding tendency to place faith where it shouldn’t be.

Which only then proves further the issue to be found in what is this question both already asked and in fact being daily answered.

For yes, He will return to this earth and find faith.

Just then a matter revealed in terms of what that faith is placed in and where it’s then being placed. Because, again, all of us are in fact living faithfully unto something. For each of us are in fact doing things, thinking things, wanting things, winning things that we are thus given the effort and devotion needed to accomplish or achieve. And in this we find that, yes, we do know at least one approach to what faith is and even how to be faithful to whatever it is that has or is being offered our trust, our hope, our effort and reliance.

But will it prove worth as much as we so obviously believe?

You see, my point is that all of us are here on this earth seeking for something if not many somethings. All of us seem to all but perfectly grasp this undeniable and honestly not even debated fact that life must have a reason, a purpose, a path upon which then to find the both of them. But from there my point winds into this wonder as why we still think all these things to matter.

Not at all saying that they don’t. Just wondering if we’re even taking the time to consider why we think they might.

For indeed, as mentioned here, the seeking for such things as justice is a usually valid undertaking as there must be that balance maintained between the darkness and light. Seeking for such substance as something to do with our time that has some merit or meaning, it’s reasonable as we’ve both plenty of time but also want that plenty to mean something. Studying religion and searching there for life’s meaning, it makes sense as, again, to something literally all of humanity throughout history has proven religiously devoted.

But will what we’re devoting such time and intention to finding or figuring out find us or for us anything that matters if and when we do figure it?

Will it free us? Will it bring us peace? Might it proffer joy or at least a measure of the contentment which leads to the same? Will it help us to feel as if our lives mean something, as if they might finally have met their mattering more than they have before? Or are we just doing more of what we’ve done before and thus lost in the repeating of those cycles that we’ve already seen only to have found so little that still we seek?

What do we seek?

Why do we seek it?

What is to be this something’s payment as paid unto those who trust in it, hope in it, marvel in their ability to retain such a thing as hope and trust in a matter made in the moment or maybe only another moment met later?

When is later and what is it that our lives as we’re living them seem to assume is worth living them for?

Is it world peace? Cleaner streets? Something for everyone to eat? A roof over our heads or a bed for another upon which to sleep? Our own measure of that same sort of comfort as considered so hard find inside of such rarities as self-confidence or the sort of humility that knows shame but refuses to be known by it? Freedom for the captive, even if the captive is us? Sight to the blind, even they who think they already see and will hate us for our asking then what they’re looking for?

Hearing to the deaf who might not like what the Gospel asks us to say? Justice for the oppressed at the expense of the oppressors we’ve all proven to be? Truth taken to the streets and there finally able to fix some of what our tendency toward dishonesty has corrupted or elsewise caused to collapse?

Perhaps we’re even in that fight for life as is waged both for and yet still often against all of the above, an almost daily switching of sides thanks to lack of assurance in what we’re doing and why.

And that most often because still we skew that line between the life we knew and our never knowing the death it was, nor then the death it might remain.

But you see, that’s the thing about faith. It moves. It grows. It knows that life must do the both as life was never meant to be so stagnant as it’s so often become in what’s become a pattern of pride and pretense encouraging us always to pretend that we both know what we’re doing and that it will prove so perfectly thought out and accomplished that by the end of whatever we seem to believe might matter we’ll be found there fatter and happier and so wonderfully accomplished that we’ll be all but owed whatever it was that we fought so hard to know.

What are you fighting to know, or is such even a fight we know anymore?

And honestly, how can it be when all it seems that we continue fighting to find is but more ways to show the world that we already know everything and choose to remain then only faithful to ourselves and our strength and our wisdom and our understanding of everything from what life is to how best it lived?

Friends, we’ve all known faith, this much is undeniable. But the problem will soon be proven that said faith has so often been placed in only flesh, and mostly ours. We have spent so much time looking to man, either those around us or even more often he or she looking back from our reflection. But what has such a faithful fealty found for us? Where has it found us? Where has it left us?

Where will be found when it’s time for us to leave?

Odds are it might still be right where we’ve come to become whatever we are. Simply because we’re anymore so adverse to change that we basically don’t even care that as such we’ve also given up the race. But friends, again, both faith and life are matters meant to move us along them toward something. What is that something and will that something have something to give you that’s worth the work and wait through which the rest of this ride will war?

Or are we just sadly content with the content of the current being perpetually all we care to serve so faithfully as to give our time, our interest, our intention to it and it only?

Again, whatever that it may be is bound to be different for you and me as we are all still walking within a world that has so much to offer that we will likely find ourselves starting to wonder if it might matter or make our lives feel the same. For that’s what we know to do as what are a people again quite aware of the fact that all of this must mean something, have some reason.

Just know that whatever and/or whomever we’re looking to or walking with, such is where our faith is. All of us do in fact know faith. Question is where its being placed and why we’re so convinced that it’s worth it. And sure, maybe it’s nobody else’s business, for sure, what we do in and with our lives are in fact our own choices to make and rewards to find.

But friends, just because we’ve become convinced that these lives are ours alone does not mean that they’re no actually on loan nor then that said endowment isn’t coming due soon.

Just means that we might not be ready with the answers for the questions that we should have seen coming as instead all we saw was just a life that we thought was ours to make of and do with as we pleased.

And indeed, even pleasure is a faith of sorts as it is in fact the substance of things hoped for and often the evidence of things not yet seen in those many moments in which we seek that substance. Same goes for, well, everything as, well, everything in life that we do has some sort of hope or belief attached to it.

Guess then the question is where it is that said hope and belief has us attached.

Yes, He will return and when He does, yes, He will find faith on this earth.

Problem is that for most it will be only a faith placed in or to or elsewise of this earth. And that’s a problem simply because this place is never where He asked us to place our faith. Rather He asked that we store such treasures in Heaven and from then to live out the rest of our days in all of our ways with our eyes to skies seeking in a growing joy for Him to return and finally lead us to where our joy is completed.

Many will instead leave their joy behind in what is a life in which faith was only ever found in what cannot come when we must leave.

And while all of us have done the same, such is why His gift of that forever kind of faith begins with the doing of a new thing. And that’s not because some of the old doesn’t matter as in fact such things as justice and freedom and hope matter more than we’ve ever even realized.

No, it’s just that He who made them and thus defines them should always then matter more.

But the question then is if He does.

And it’s one only you can answer.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold