Day 3844 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Habakkuk 2:3 NIV

The vapidity

Such often seems to define the perceived reality of what is a walk of faith as walked, always, amongst an even greater many who’ve no such worry nor want as won within a wait that is a demand of each and every faith. And why is this? Why this ease of finding or feeling or even finding ourselves feeling this lack of liveliness if not life itself? Moreover, why the wait as is what we so often feel as if we have to have amongst a many who’ve not the same but instead seem to find far faster the fun and friendship we all have had in the past and would likely still like in the present and its next successor?

Because faith is for now only ever to be the substance of things hoped for and the assurance of those unseen.

And what then makes it so hard that many either have or will fall away from basically any form of faith in which they’ve found themselves having earlier believed is that what we here and now see and hear is but an entire world enveloped in so much enjoyment that it, for a while, becomes increasingly impossible for us to not wonder as to why we would want the wait that is asked in faith. Why must we forgo what so many are going for, living for, leaning toward and in fact winning in?

For we can all see the vast array of different things that those many around us are enjoying amidst their lives lived without nearly as much hesitancy or restraint as we’ve embraced in what is a kind of faith that finds us only increasingly alienated from the ways and words of this world which surrounds. And indeed, at times it almost might even seem as if we’re but a lone believer bound in a bunker under constant attack from what is a whole world bombarding us with interesting invitations to come out from our belief and finally, like them, see the fun we could have if only we’d not had the faith that seeks something deeper.

And indeed, what I find is that it’s to be the depth of faith that either offers us a foundation so sure and solid that we can better stand as we await the coming Day or rather just a lack of oxygen as found and felt in a life perceived as being choked of everything that everyone else seems to be enjoying in what are lives lived in lights that shine brightest at night and offer there the allure of pleasure with the constant hint of somewhere to hide whatever we may come to do that we may both like but yet in which find no pride.

Which is something all of us have done underneath this world underneath both this sun and the Son.

It’s a life then that we can always quite easily return to as, well, it’s a life we’ve only just barely turned from. For that is the difficulty of this faith as it’s placed within what are a people who have been a people of this world and found then living here as such. Each of us have known well that life in which this world was our treasure and our ever experience of personal if not selfish pleasure was found and felt as if evidence of our doing what we should be as we thought only about ourselves and wanted thus only what felt good or at least seemed the same.

And those days, being in fact so many, and in fact still so easy to see as being lived by those around us, they form for us the opposing anchoring of life itself. And, well, having all of us known so well that life lived tied to that time that we’ve all spent doing as a now shattered heart and sunken hope knows only as shame or regret, still it’s sometimes met with our understanding the ease of again our coming to be who we know we know how to be.

Combine that with both how difficult the narrowing of truth can often prove to feel and again the fun we see so many others seeming to enjoy and what we’ll find is that this wait in which we’re to walk will at times make so little sense that we just can’t help but wonder why.

Why continue to endure what indeed demands endurance? Why prefer more of what prefers perseverance so persistently that it’s not even a preference anymore but swells instead into a demand of sorts? Yes, why tolerate the testings of truth as are tempests of turmoil and trial as come so often tearing through tears torn in lives ripped apart seeking to see what may be left of either that heart or its hope so as to know what all needs to be done for the future He calls us toward, the forever that He died for us to have can and will in fact be had as we’re found upon the Day both broken but yet still breathing just deep enough that belief that He is enough that nothing else was allowed to pretend a matter anymore?

Why do we continue to agree that our faith in His freed indeed kind of forever is worth embracing the loss and missing of what so many others are finding in a fun so full that they’re in fact all but blinded to every better they’re sadly betraying?

Seems we actually happen to have answered the question.

Because it’s not the waiting or worry that prove the betrayers of life but rather those who betray them are too then they who betray the same. For the truth is that life, as is always lived in some sort of faith as is placed in some sort of place or preference or pride or pretense, it’s always thus spent waiting. Because that’s what hope must always do as hope can only be had in what we don’t have yet. And yes, we talk about that all the time.

Why?

Because if we don’t discuss the difficulties we’re either facing already or will here shortly then we’ll only by now or then prove all but unready for when those winds of want and woe come breathing again a flicker of life into that life we’ve known that was indeed so much easier it seems than this faith we’re so often failing to figure out.

Because there’s no comfort in that. Rather there’s only confusion. Consternation. Condemnation in fact. Indeed, I feel so often this need to all but beat myself back into the submission that I’ve seen pay off in dividends that none of those delving in dissidence can understand. For I have in fact found this faith find for me a life so amazingly beautiful that I don’t have still that same ability to see what I apparently saw in all those years in which there were indeed far fewer tears and much less fear.

And yes, I sometimes wonder why it is that I feel as if I’m simply supposed to continue ahead in this path narrowing in focus that’s found me having not a lack of fun or enjoyment but rather just slowly learning a different version of the both. Because again, there’s not much about such learning that we’ve ever learned to find as being enjoyable.

A fact proven even more flattening when met in terms of forsaking the ease of the life we’d already figured out.

But such is the fork.

It’s a place in which each and every faith, and thus each and every person who finds themselves feeling the courage to be faithful to such a personal belief, will indeed find itself facing down so many questions that likely can’t possibly be answered at the moment in which an answer is demanded if in no other way than what way it is that we decide to go.

Problem again proving itself within the often confused difference between decide and delight.

For we’re a people who have long known to only decide on that in which we delight. We want only what feels good and looks the same. It’s simply the natural comprehension of things that this world’s now natural confusion of things has to offer. This world can only teach what it knows. But just because the world is easier to see and indeed has formed the backdrop of the life we’ve known, such doesn’t mean that there isn’t another option, another opportunity, another opposition.

How about that for a fact?

Because the fact is that no matter what we do we will be found living both in opposition to someone or something and thus that same someone or something’s opposition. Yes, we will live this life letting someone down, missing out on something, denying someone or destroying something.

Question truly only boils down to what as is to be answered in whatever it is that forms the foundations upon which or within which we place our every such treasure as hope and joy and trust and, yes, even pleasure.

Where are we seeking such things? And is the place or face from which we seek to glean them able to prove then as able to offer as we are to imagine?

Or are we, as have before, only placing such a reliance for the substance of a life’s best rewards in the same hollows and horrors that we’ve looked to before?

Either way it’s both a choice made and a step then taken in faith.

Just comes down to where that road leads.

We just get lost looking at through what it goes.

Because that’s the way of life we know. We know to live in the moment, to seek out a constant rapidity of comfort, to all but demand a defiant defense of our every decision as have long been made only upon the delights and desires that we’ve long denied have stoked the fires that our once wayward hearts couldn’t help but design. Yes, for almost all our lives we’ve proven most often only a people who know to only prefer their rewards present in the present.

Leaving then hope itself but an afterthought to be then forever thought about only after we happen to find or feel that in which we’d hoped our hope would be both found and finished.

But friends, that’s just it, and indeed the very thing that seems to speak to me in a deeper clarity almost all the time.

It’s this agreement to finish lines that so many seem to continue to find in life. It’s as if the whole wide world is all but perpetually allured by this idea of our hurrying up and getting where we’re going so that we can then just sit there inside the knowing of that outcome in life that has proven so perfectly fulfilling that we’re then forever unwilling to delve back into the depths of all that hope is seeking the substance of that something more that we, having perfected life and its outcomes, no longer need to look for.

After all, if we could in fact perfect this path and find along it every ideal that we’ve all but come to idolize, then yes, we could indeed retire from life and spend out then the rest of ours days relishing in all our wins of all those wants that we don’t have to worry about wanting anymore having so clearly and so fully won the war that was the life that we had lived in what was a faith that was willing to fight for the more that we’d elsewise apparently all but tapped clean out of what are still the rest of the days that we somehow have left to live.

Guess God just gives all of these tomorrows so that we can bask further in the lives we’ve built of the beliefs we’ve had in the betters we’ve become in what’s apparently become a life best lived.

Yes, we see, and even more so hear all about how everyone else is either living their best life or just about finished planning their plodding along their personally paved path toward that perfect payout. And hey, maybe they have. Maybe those we see always partying and celebrating and enjoying all of this world’s many fineries and flatteries, perhaps they truly have found their reward.

Problem is that forever is still to come and that God has promised to let us both find and then forever keep that way of life that we come to love as much as life itself.

A problem seeming to prove even more problematic in that nobody really even seems to love life anymore but rather sees it most days as something of an undue burden as built of asking us to do better and try harder and hope always in the more that we were in fact made for.

Guess it’s just really hard to care about that better we could always be when in fact we already find that we feel just about as good as we can get both in life and thus at our living of it.

That is most certainly the message that we hear daily resounding from those around us in this founding of their finding of a life so fun and fancy that they even feel like making fun of we few who no longer find quite so much reason to do what most clearly find no reason to stop.

And sure, to their credit it makes sense as, well, who wouldn’t want to have the enjoyment they believe they’re having or feel the pleasure they assume they’re feeling or swim inside the successes that they seem to see inside their chosen way? Yes, who would walk away from what is basically the gaining of the entire world and all that it has to offer?

Who in their right mind would refuse to experience the liberties of a world living life so liberally that new things are considered reasonable to do if not even so right to do that we’ve only some new right to do them?

Well, only those few who find that they’ve been found by what is a faith that isn’t at all so bound to this place nor then what this place has to argue about being right or wrong or fun or frivolous or pleasing or passing or delightful or detestable. Yes, some of us have found a freedom that doesn’t have to spend any time worrying about such petty discussion or personal defining of what we’re finding in life to be right or wrong.

Rather we simply live by the truth that is in fact the very Truth who is the Way toward the Life that nothing most live for here will ever know anything of.

But that’s actually part of what makes this wait so hard.

It’s something that starts out as our struggling to embrace this feeling that we need to flee from youthful passions and social distractions, many of which are in fact all we’ve likely known of life itself having ourselves lived by them and for them for however long we have. And that is hard because it is something that most definitely does feel like the laying down of a life, a letting go of all we’ve come to know to both look for and fight against in our time as was spent doing mostly only that.

But somewhere along the way, as the road we’re on begins to narrow into a revelation of such a simplicity that we can then and there finally see the outermost reaches of the Hope that’s long been reaching out for us, the difficulty then flips into a struggle to watch the world continue to burn for all these betrayals of this Bread we’re finally finding that’s finally feeding what we start to realize are souls so starving that it only proves that nothing we’d ever wanted or won ever had any real substance upon which we could have survived.

No, rather we, like all of us, were just waiting to die and finding faith as only placed inside every distraction we could agree to see.

But then indeed He came along doing something so new that it made all we knew so unpalatable that we simply couldn’t fathom continuing to glut ourselves upon it anymore.

And that’s the struggle that is now in store for all the few who find themselves waiting for the coming revelation of life’s meaning as is to be met either in the sky or rather in the past.

The brutality is found in realizing just how severe the warning really was as was spoken of those who will have had their reward. Because none should so seek a reward that fades, a promise that ends, a meaning that must stay behind. Rather we should all know instinctively to seek for those things which reach to the other side of eternity. Yes, we should all crave only a hope so unending that forever is needed just to finally start finding it.

Yet so many seem to know only of hope that’s already finished, already complete, already known and thus has nowhere else to go.

And watching so many live it up in a life of sinful luxury is something that leaves you so heartbroken that sometimes the best you can do is shed a tear, shake your head and say a prayer that they might find that they’ve been found instead of trying so hard to keep finding only more of that same nothing that we know to be waiting at the end of every road paved of man’s intention.

Friends, I understand our difficulty with waiting as we’re walking in and watching as a world seems to find so much pleasure and enjoyment that we would too likely enjoy. But what I hope everyone will keep in mind as both the Day draws near but so too the preceding darkness grows thus only deeper is that everything that happens here will end.

All the fun, all the pleasure, all the treasure and our every worldly measure of why and how it all might matter, it will all fade away when both this place inevitably does the same, or as we eventually fade from it. It’s simply a matter of which might happen first.

Either way this world will either end or our time as spent upon it will do the same. And thus everything that happens inside this life inside this world will reach its cessation.

But yes, even the waiting.

So why not live for something more even if the more takes a lifetime to wait for? Because the truth is that this life was never to meant to by defined by only whatever we find within it. Rather this life is but our personal measure of time within which to find what matters most as is to be defined by us alone within the decisions we make and the directions they take.

For all of this leads somewhere and to something. And maybe your something really is here somewhere.

Just know it doesn’t have to be. Because again, no matter how much fun we seem to see others having, even the fun will end when this world is no longer allowed to spin.

So maybe such treasures are truly best to wait for.

Even if the world won’t.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold