Day 3848 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

James 3:16 NIV

The Gate

As opened unto a closing door that’s slammed upon the substance of the better life you’ll only later realize you used to have in what was then a time in which contentment knew nothing of jealousy and thus you nothing of want. Nothing then of disappointment, or at least not near as much. Nothing then of anger or frustration as are found inside a life that seemed so much better than that which you’d left behind. Nothing then of who you’d become on the other side of what’s become so many lines crossed looking for the greener while only managing to see the greed.

And that along with what grows into our coming to know that there would be a most solemn of struggle should we ever dare venture back as the only returning path is that paved of such a surrender that indeed nothing much of who we’ve become will be allowed to survive.

All because we’ll not have any of that humbler person left in which to hope having all but come to know all that still we’ll know only to want in what is a life so won inside of such that need is lost and gratitude for His having given it is given away as well. And well, this, I contend, is one of the slipperiest of all slippery slopes as not one of the slippers ever manages to fit and thus we’re just left slipping and sliding all over the place struggling along every path we can find or preference we can force in what are bare feet and cobbled streets.

Making for what devolves into the most gruesome of gangplank that we signed ourselves up to walk either not knowing where it was that we were going or simply not caring as to what might happen along the way to what since became a want so wanted that we just couldn’t see anything else anymore.

Leaving us lost not only looking to the rest of the crowd going the same direction alongside us to help us continue to remember why we’re doing this but in fact all but living their very lives as things become so skinny, so entwined as we all try to fit through this gate that is a common greed for the green on the other side that we all but become one in heart, one in mind losing all of us then the both as we come to hope in only this apparent more that we can have as defined on our behalf by those who took the lead and knew we’d follow.

Simply because it’s not hard to know of our herd mentality anymore. For such a sight is evident upon every city street, grocery checkout lane and fast food drive thru.

We all just know to line up behind whoever happens to be ahead of us as we suppose that they’ve already figured out both what to do and where to go having gotten to this exact same place, time, purpose and passion just a split second before we did and must have then a little more understanding as to the overall operation.

Yes, we’re anymore a people who, as always before, just blindly trust those of us who are the first to do something new, a choice always chosen simply for the sake of this new thing we want for our excitement knowing alongside a lack of worry as to why this other began this novel new and/or whether then we should really do whatever it is that they’ve so clearly decided to for what can only ever be preferences or priorities that we can know nothing about.

For we are never to be another and thus have no other recourse but to either trust or wait.

Alas, as patients of impatience personified, waiting in life is usually the last thing to cross our minds, let alone be allowed a moment’s consideration once found there.

No, we’ve got places to do and things to be, or things to do and places to be, or things to place and be to do or, well, we’ve just to be places doing things that need done simply because others are doing them and we can’t bear to see others having any sort of success or feeling any kind of free that we haven’t known before. And so waiting just isn’t considered a consideration acceptable as, well, the world’s just to be forever found in that fast-forward frantic finding of something else, something more, doesn’t even matter what.

Because something more is always known as more than we’d had before, and when you’ve so emptied yourself of everything from caution to contentment, more is better and always will be as it always seems to fill the holes and hold the gaps in what becomes a life coming apart in search of something else to always take our attention away from who we are and what that means in exchange for more of these things that everyone else wants and thus we grow to need.

Such is the path paved in greed.

It’s one in which we lose our very ability to care as to what we find as the finding of it becomes the passion that our lives revolve around. For such is the desire of every form of envy and jealousy as both find us perpetually focused on all we don’t have as is had always by someone else in what, as we discussed yesterday, seems always a life so much better than ours that we eventually agree to scrub our worry away so that nothing can keep us from having that better that we see them enjoying.

But what we never seem to notice falling away alongside our worry as it’s replaced by want is such things as our hesitation, our consideration, our contentment, our appreciation for what had been up until then a life in which we were happy, thankful, even able to sleep at night and hope all day for what always was this simple life in which we had enough and needed nothing, both combining into a life free from want and thus able to just enjoy the little things.

When’s the last time you watched a cloud drift along above you on its amble to wherever it’s going? When did you last notice the colors of a sunrise exploding over the horizon of what was a new day free from everything all the others before it had become? When was the last time that you just sat in the quiet and dared listen to your own thoughts rather than those upon some feed feeding you those of someone else?

Indeed, when is the last time that you didn’t notice anyone else?

That’s not to say that we should all just escape into some supremely solitary existence in which we never even care about anyone else as we are a people designed to grow upon mutual edification as sought inside the Word which was breathed for just such a benefit as our every single one of us continually bettered if not then communally so. But no, instead we’ve just gotten so lost on living communally that we’re only now continually worried about whatever everyone else is doing and why we should then probably be doing the same.

All because, again, they must know more than we do as they seem to have more than we do in what’s sadly become a way of life in which more is more making what we have out to be always only nothing.

And it’s sadly too quickly becoming a way of life in which we’ll do just about anything to get this ever more that we see so many others enjoying. After all, I suppose we can’t rightly agree to any limits when what we want is so seemingly limitless. Just feels too counterproductive to allow for lines we won’t cross when we see still a world so filled with all we want on always the other side of some choice we’d too have to choose if we’re to ever find whatever it is that they’ve so clearly found.

A choice always made as based upon that now fading worry as to whether or not something is worth it.

Worth what?

See, that’s the first thing to go it seems. We become so affixed, transfixed by all this stuff that someone else is doing or that somebody else has and we just forget all about what we were doing or what we had had. It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s all discounted. It’s accomplished already. It’s over. We have what we have and never think that we can lose it.

But friends, lose it we have!

We have lost so much in this constant search for something more. Problem is that we can have then no idea as to what as, well, we’ve also misplaced our ability to care. We don’t care what we lose, what we forget, what we forsake along what’s always the way to something else somewhere better than who we are. Yes, we know nothing of the peace that is contentment as there’s always another piece to add to our collection of what is merely but the life another is living.

All wanted simply because we think their existence here somehow better than ours because they have more, struggle less.

That’s why our best doesn’t mean anything anymore.

And it’s also why we’ve then stopped giving it.

Because as a people who always want something more, we can’t then afford to be giving anything away so free!

No, those who want cannot give as their entire existence becomes about this always more that they’re trying to get. And that, again, alongside then a willingness to do whatever it takes to get it.

And that’s the slope that slips both through the gate that is our greed unto an icy path of envy on the other side that simply knows nothing of slowing down as we just can’t afford to waste our time upon such hindrances as caution or worry or reconsidering why we’re not worried all that much anymore. It’s almost as if we’ve forgotten how to be worried as, well, nobody really seems to be.

Rather we all just seem to see only still that more we want and a corresponding inability to understand the risks we’re taking in the things we’re doing to get it.

Friends, don’t we realize that such coveting is what leads to such crimes as stealing, slander, murder even? Look, I know that seems extreme, but think about it. There have been plenty of people who have done some horrible things seeking to have what they either saw another already enjoying or thought they might before long in what would then be the very same stealing of that enjoyment that they could have had all to themselves.

How do I know this?

Because this post you’re reading is being written by one of them.

I freely confess that my past was a mess in which I did some terrible things trying to have what others had or what I learned to want because others wanted it too. I was once a breath or two away from what would have been a really bad day on account of a choice I’d made that someone else happened to catch me acting upon with hands stuffed into my pockets carrying things that weren’t mine inside.

But that very same day, that same exact breath, I did what was asked and never went back neither to that store nor to the stealing that I’d been doing seeking to have what wasn’t mine but still defined what I wanted to be so badly that I descended into an indifference for law and order, right and wrong in order to have it.

A descending chosen because I stepped through that gate that is envy.

A gate that opened me up to doing things I am so ashamed of that they now, thankfully, seem like a story lived by someone else. All because God helped me to let go of what I’d become and has been teaching me such things as humility and contentment and gratitude ever since.

Those are things that jealousy simply cannot know as jealousy rather only invites a person to all but dissolving in regard to their seeing this apparent affluence of others that is seeming to find for them this easier life, this better life than they’ve ever known on their own.

And well, we just hate such limitations in life and thus to our enjoyment thereof. And so we throw off such bounds and erase every boundary we find so that we can feel this more alive kind of life as is lived, apparently, on the other side of whatever line we have to cross to find the green on the other side. And yes, that grass will always be greener. Someone else will always have more. Someone else will always seem to struggle less.

And yes, we too could get to where they’ve gone and what their picture perfect life has apparently become. But friends, in a world so fake as this one’s become, we should know by now that even the pictures aren’t real. No, in a world of photoshop and filters, we can’t trust anything.

Most of all ourselves.

Why?

Because as a people so prone to envy and jealousy and greed, so too have we agreed to do these things trying to make our own lives look better than they are. We try to make ourselves look better than we are. And all of this never once seeming to care that someone out there somewhere might see it or hear it and think it’s real. Never then once worrying about our then maybe becoming the gate that someone else seeks to look to in order to live through to that impossible kind of life that we ourselves have thus had a part in painting.

Again, I say this from experience as I’ve been, recently at that, so affixed on getting healthier and looking better that I fell for the lie of an ideal body type and found myself willing to do some iffy things to achieve it. Cut to almost dying on a hospital bed and, well, learned quickly that it’s just not worth it to look like someone who’s on the roids and who knows what else.

Hopefully you see my point.

It’s that when we allow our eyes to envy whatever another has or what we perceive them to be, it just opens us up to a brand new sort of willingness to do whatever it takes to get there ourselves. Before you know it you’re stealing things, you’re starving yourself, you’re hurting those around you in ways that you assume they’ll never know but can never guarantee they never will. It’s just such a dangerous game to play when the heart decides that enough is no longer enough and that needs met mean nothing compared to the wants we wish to have.

And yes, it is a long way back, and too a path that we all need to travel if we’re to be honest. For all of us have wanted something someone else had. All of us have wanted to look like someone else we saw getting all the attention. All of us have done some shady stuff trying to accomplish those misplaced desires. And well, odds are then that all of us have started some fires that may have been burning for so long now that we’re just so used to them that we’re afraid of what we’d feel if we put them out.

Douse them my friends, forever’s coming!

And when it gets here it just won’t really matter how much we have or how amazing our lives may look to a world not really living for much of anything anymore. But what will matter is what we’ve done and just how much of it we chose to do for what God will know were improper motives and misplaces devotions. Indeed, we’re not fooling Him no matter how great we may have become at fooling ourselves.

So we can stop now as there’s just no benefit to be found in continuing to do so!

No, we all have things in our lives, in our eyes that we need to let go. We all have areas in which we can stop following the world and looking to the same to continue helping us get wherever it is that they’re going from here. Just judging from looking around, I don’t really know why we’d want to be where this world is going. And nor then do I understand why we’d continue to do as this world is doing or expecting us to.

Friends, this place is falling apart in more ways than we could have ever expected.

Our only choice then is whether we continue to fall with it or come apart from it and pray that God can use us to help snatch some others from the fire that’s coming.

Either way, it’s coming and that because of what we’ve become as a people so willing to do as none of us should in this always seeking to find or feel what we assume another has or is.

God didn’t create us to be like anybody else, and He definitely didn’t design us to be temples of the world and all the garbage it wants or has or offers to those who have what it wants. Rather He created us to house the Holy Spirit. And while that Spirit may lead to everlasting life, it can’t get us there if we spend all of this one asking it to bunk with all this junk that this world says we need.

Friends, we don’t need anything as God’s already taken care of that. Our problem is that we’ve learned to want more, and to sadly do some messed up stuff to get it.

That’s what needs to change before change isn’t an option anymore.

So I guess we do have one more need after all.

And it’s found only against the grain and back through that gate.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold