Day 3845 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Malachi 3:15 NIV

Prosperity

What is it to live life prospering? What are the prospects of those deemed prosperous? Can those prospecting for such prosperous prosperings really prove prosperous? Or is not such worldly priorities as worldly prosperity but a problem to be proven perfectly preposterous? Indeed, can what we know of prosperity prove so perfectly able to protect the pride that prospects for such personal prospects? Or might our person’s prioritizing of such impermanent importance prove only perfectly problematic when we’re loaded upon the scales and there found wanting in ways we couldn’t afford to see?

Because we were here always too busy prospecting for our personal measure of what this world has long considered prosperity?

Indeed, what is wealth even and should this world even have a say in what it weighs? Should we live so waited upon the weighing of our worth as both wanted from those around us and thus won via the same? Should our lives be so perfectly preoccupied with what wins the arrogant and wayward are winning? Is not life’s greatest victory to be found only in the end when we finally feel the wind of forever begin to blow as we bow out from here and head for home?

Or will we rather weather the worries of most only to eventually, as we all have already, only begin to live only worried for what the wearied are worrying for and thus spend out our remaining days, months, years wrapped within only this fear of our failing to find what nobody else seems to have figured out either?

Will our final day find us looking for one more thing to find or feel? Or will that last breath be taken in a belief that we’re so ready to leave as we’ve lived looking for treasures this temporality could never tarnish and thus have nothing here to leave but only everything good still to come?

And no, please don’t get me wrong in that I’m in no way trying to say that there is an utter lack of anything to love and/or thus live for within this world. All that I am saying is that even such things must always be understood as things that have with them a firmly attached expiry that we will either experience before our own or at the very same time. And that is simply because we brought nothing with us and can only take with us whatever we’ve lived to store before us.

As in that place to which we live as if we’ve the gift to go.

But that’s the problem that we all seem to know as both entirely too big to think about right now and thus perhaps not really a problem at all. For after all, we look around at what certainly seems a world prospering upon the pretense of pride perpetually pretending that it knows so well all that it’s doing that nothing can go wrong and has what seems to most as a most air-tight case by which to wage what is, or at least used to be and thus will be again soon, an argument as to what matters and what more doesn’t.

Indeed, we’re a people of such profound priority as purchased alongside a pride always perfectly placed to so surmise that we live the widest swath of our lives scooping what will prove only fire into our laps and lungs not knowing then the danger we’re in for so doing. Rather we live as if nothing can harm us thanks to this now all but animated hubris that in many ways all but defines us and the lives already planned out before us.

Yes, we’re a people who are so prosperous that we seem to legitimately believe that we can buy our way out of whatever may come.

All done as if money or material can really matter so very much that our having come to in only them trust can overturn whatever that seems to turn against us in the coming days.

All of which should, if measured correctly and thus planned accordingly, prove nothing of the problems our pride ironically never has but rather only more of the prosperity that we see the prideful having had in what they too have long claimed is a long lane of life loved so well that, well, they all but deserve this definition of their being all but divinity.

After all, when everything in life is going always so perfectly right and thus finding us living with what is akin to the mythical touch of midas, well then we must be doing life at least right enough for us to continue to only measure up to what is clearly a life enveloped in so much prosperity that we’ll even have a fortune of favor and favorites to pass down to our progeny.

If we ever leave here that is, which we mostly have only absolutely no plans to do such a thing. For who in their right mind would want to leave their kingdom behind? Who would want to lose a life that’s being lived so large that we all but need bigger houses and faster cars? Who would choose to lay down an existence in which we’re existent upon this continuous expectation of what’s long been a life of blissful vacation spent in such the lap of luxury that others all but marvel at our memories as we post them upon some daily feed for the downtrodden to see?

Does it not strike anyone else as being the least odd that we call it a feed?

Anyway…moving on.

But yes, who would leave what we’ve learned to live so perfectly that we’ve got everything we want? So much so that want is all we know and thus need is nothing we even remember.

For the prosperous know nothing of need having been long removed from such struggle as strife and thus the striving for some way to overcome it in what is a persistence unwilling to allow it to become the moral of the story that we’re living. Yes, prosperity as measured via the world’s meaning of such an ideal is but an idol that is seen as something so giving that it can even give our lives their meaning.

Leaving then our lives to only ever mean something in the vicinity of money or mammon.

And indeed, all that it seems to take for this world to consider someone successful or prosperous is nothing more than material and a managerial position by which we’re able to always afford ever more of what we already live as if we’ve more than plenty.

For such is, to us, what it means to be prospering.

It’s to find that life spent living as if nothing is off limits thanks to the lines we’re willing to cross in order to do the things that we’ll have to do to continue to find this swelling of life as lived through bank accounts doing the same and the frame finally going up for the new addition we’re adding onto our houses to house all these hopes we’ve both held out for but now hold in hand. Indeed, why on earth would we ever agree to limit hope?

That insanity!

Because unto those prospering, well, hope is but a price tag away from being so perfectly fulfilled that perhaps we’ll not have to buy anything else after that. Yes, maybe this next trip we take will tick that box we’ve built of what’s been or will become but another worldly estimation of what might give our lives some meaning as made in memories and that pair of maracas we picked up whilst in Morocco.

It’s all we know. Just go. Just do. Just see and be whatever it is wherever it is that we’ll hopefully find our next hope found and thus crossed finally off the list of those in which we’ve hoped before, which then apparently only turned out to prove just hollow enough to leave us hoping again.

Never once coming to see the sickness of this cycle of wish and want and find and forsake that comes from a life lived poised upon the pretense of a life spent inside such prosperity that we again apparently need nothing but know rather only to always want more.

Thus seeming to say that worldly prosperity is actually nothing more than a long list of things we want that’s been written for so long, and is in fact still be added onto, that eventually our wants are what become to be seen as our needs and our needs are then just forgotten about so as to go along with this gimmick in which we’re living as if life’s but a game and we’re so good at winning that winning is all we do.

But friends, what is it that this world’s winning that has us so transfixed upon the trinkets that we see not the turmoil?

What has this place that’s of such worth that we’re too willing to only worry that we might have it for ourselves? What here has proven of such lasting value that it’s actually vital to have, so much so that our vitals themselves might suffer should we suffer through even one more hour not having or holding? Yes, what is this world holding that’s holding us so willing to stay here and continue fighting for whatever it is that these folks are finding in what seems then a life so well lived that we ourselves wish only to be them?

What then?

What do we do when we have everything someone else had? What does life become when we’ve become convinced that life is truly about nothing more than everything in store in the new store they’re building downtown? What can life be when all we can seem to see is just some new toy or triumph we need if we’re to be still considered tomorrow as prosperous as we’ve convinced everyone we are today?

What will it matter tomorrow what we were today if one of these tomorrows all we’ve left is but to leave all we’ve loved in a life long lived but thus still over?

Yes, what can our lives come to mean if all we ever believed to mean anything within them is only everything we’re promised to be one day leaving?

Is that prosperity? To lose everything? To amass a mass of money and meaning only to reach the end and be found crying and screaming about all we can’t keep? To spend this life doing as we please only because we see an entire world getting away with doing the same only to reach our share of the end on what’s then probably a bed inhabited by us alone but along with all the memories we’ve made of the mistakes we chose to make seeking to get what we thought we couldn’t live without?

Can we live without the prosperity we see this world enjoying every day?

Or do we need fancy bottles of wine and foreign sports cars to make our lives worth living?

And no, I’m not saying that those who have those things nor enjoy those things are wrong necessarily, that’s a discussion that could probably cover several of these posts. No, all I’m trying to get at is that we’ve put such things on these pedestals in life that seem to us so very high that we think they’re the very marks that best make life seem worth anything at all. As if we’re failures should we not find them or feel them or finally find that we can elsewise afford to forget what all it might take to get them.

Yes, we’re so easily and so quickly blinded by the glimmer of gold and glamor that we don’t even stop to wonder as to either why it matters nor the amount of time and effort it would take to get them. We don’t stop to ask what all someone had to do or convince themselves was okay to try in order to find in their lives this apparent ability to so live so liberally that they know not even anything of wrong anymore.

Friends, there are people so prosperous in the way the world views prosperity that even laws are considered inconsequential as they can easily afford things like bail and court costs.

But can all the money in the world buy God’s favor when upon that Day we’re found being finally weighed according to all we’ve done? Can we bribe He who’s said to detest such judicial dishonesty when our case comes before Him and He sees this long list of things we did to get all the things we had? Might there be accomplished some sort of barter in which we might even be able to beg our way into Heaven thanks to how much leaven we learned to love?

Indeed, can even love open those gates if all we lived in love with was only what we left behind?

My point is that anymore we’re so amazed by the wealthy that we even go so far as to consider them wise. I mean we even make movies, write books, sing songs about their lives! We’re so able to romanticize almost anything so long as it has some portion of worldly prosperity attached to it. Yes, we can overlook any number of wrongs so long as it looks like they know what they’re doing as is always measured anymore by how many bathrooms their house has.

All because we’ve become all but convinced that mansions and millions make the man, and those then that are broke must just not know what life is nor for what it’s supposed to be lived because surely we’re not here to be bored, tired or lonely in what are lives lived without any of this world’s flattery or finery. Surely we’re not then supposed to actually embrace the refinery that it is to lay down a life and seek from then on only to live it right as another has defined.

No, our wealth affords us the power to determine for ourselves what’s right.

Here.

Yes, it’s no secret that the wicked thrive in many ways throughout their days as spent in what is a wealth of this world’s wealth that some will never know. And it’s no secret either that those who know only struggle and strife are seen as losers and freaks who must not be willing to agree to do what it takes to get themselves to that place in which money and fame can make consequences just go away.

It is no secret that doing wrong in this world can lead to untold wealth and power and opportunity.

Basically all of the entertainment industry is built on just such a reality.

But friends, the thing is that it isn’t reality. It isn’t real at all! It’s but a façade, a perception, a presumption as presented by those deemed powerful in order to keep us distracted by what we wish we had until we eventually break down and go mad and find then ourselves slipping down that slippery slope of want being our hope and this world knowing right where we need to go in order to get it, and all we need to do along the way.

Yes, this world will help us find whatever we want, right down to a way to justify doing wrong if that’s what it takes.

Which that is usually what it takes.

But where can it take us? That’s my question for you today. Where can all the money in the world get us? Where can this version of power as is presently proven in pride and popularity help us to go? What can we actually benefit by our becoming convinced that this world houses all there is in which to hope and thus that those who have more of what’s here are the same as they who then know where to go and what to do in order for us be what they’ve become?

Is it really even that we want to become rich and famous or elsewise powerful? Or are we just tired of the common struggle of life and want only to know that other way in which we’ve so very much that perhaps we’re even free of such things as personal responsibility?

After all, when you have all the world, well then you can afford to take greater risks as you’ve plenty to fall back on. But when you’re cold, tired, alone, hurting, worried and worn then you just don’t have that same sort of wiggle room in which mistakes could be made to feel less severe.

Here.

That’s the grand take away for today.

It’s that, yes, it’s easy to see a sort of worldly prosperity that all but clearly shows that some are so rich and powerful that they’re all but above the law. But friends, it’s only this world’s law that they’re above. Yes, this world’s money and fame can only assuage this world’s law. God has another that isn’t so undermined by things like social media platforms and sold out concerts. He doesn’t care about those things. Rather He’s more concerned with what’s in our hearts as that is what will determine whether we spend forever in Heaven or hell.

But if all that’s in our heart is but a willingness to do whatever it takes to get whatever’s in this world, then this world is in our hearts and thus our greatest hope is here. But friends, all that’s here is just the reward of the wicked as is daily won within wealth and adoration. And while those things might feel nice and even make this life easier to endure, truth is that we can live without them.

And even more than that, we can’t live forever with them.

Why?

Because friendship with the world remains enmity against God and money remains the root of so many evils that I’m pretty sure we’d be both horrified and heartbroken at some of the things that the wealthy in this world have been doing.

We have to lose this sense of awe as found for those who seem to be living the life we’d love to have and instead learn to love the life we’ve been given.

Sure, it’s a life that’s not always easy, not always pretty, not always quite so financially secure as to afford us the opportunity to do as we please. But friends, being pleased by doing wrong probably isn’t the ideal to be looking for anyway.

Pretty sure that it’s said instead that godliness with contentment is great gain.

Maybe not here in this place in which you’re made fun of for not taking part in the fun and fame this place is feeding on. But one day their buffet will run out and those of us who learned to live on bread and water won’t look so dumb then.

Because many will be shocked to see that only the broken are admitted into Heaven and that there’s just no ticket booth by which to buy a way in.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold