Day 3851 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Timothy 6:9 NIV

Destruction’s edge

Such is what comparison is. For the truth is that whenever we resort yet again once more into the looking unto those around us to all but themselves define for us what our lives too should be, as is sadly all too often defined by that with which they’re filled, as is then likely to describe the ways in which ours are not, then all we can ever find is just that estimation of an empty life as lain barren alongside a great many who are instead finding clearly their way to what seems everything that would then too make our lives feel more worth living.

And yet whenever that stone remains a part placed in any place within a person’s foundation, it doesn’t really matter what’s built upon it as if we’re always willing to wonder as to whether life’s worth living, chances are we’ll remain both open to considering that it isn’t and too to doing some iffy things trying to change that.

All because again we see only this endless sea of what’s so easily perceived as better than we have ever seen or felt or found for ourselves nor thus in our lives.

And indeed, so many times in life our lives are defined by what we have or how we feel. We’ve in fact become so very shallow at that that we’ve not only swallowed every pill of the public’s preferred potential that they so kindly offered, but too then have we only been swallowed by this existence in which the public around us becomes nothing but the purpose within us as defined by the things they find and the fun they have and the pain and misery and suffering and tragedy they don’t.

Yes, we walk in a world here that seems to know so little of harm or hardship that even those things are seemingly only ever mentioned when there’s some benefit such as pity or empathy to gain. We do nothing without at first ensuring that it will profit us in some way, preferably one in which we prefer profited. But friends, the problem with all this profiteering is that it runs a razor-thin line with pirating, leaving us all all but sailing the seven seas for 7,000 things that 7,000,000 people all already have.

With that classic pirate excitement to raid and pillage and perhaps even inflict pain or other means of persecution in order to exact what becomes a ransom of revenge for even our being born.

Indeed, it seems that all human greed is grown from this single seed of our lesser assumption that we’re all owed something just for being here. And yet when that seed sprouts and the truth of what it is starts to come out, what we find is that it only grows into our wanting more and more as what we find along the way never satisfies, never satiates, never once manages to help us escape this truly vicious cycle in which we compare and then crave and then lust and then lose our baser human ability to be content due to the content of this existence against which we’ve lived comparing our own.

It is in every possible way a trap, all of this temptation that we allow for.

Yes, allow for.

What do I mean by that? I mean that while temptation is all but common to man seeing as how the very first of us fell for its lies, which then opened their eyes and ours too unto the seeing to the more we neither had nor couldn’t then see that we really didn’t need in light of how much more responsibility it ended up adding unto life, it’s anymore something that we all but look for. We look for ways to be intrigued by things. We look for things to idolize. We look for things that seem to say we really are living empty lives.

We look for whatever it takes to justify this idea that we’re here but deserve something to show for it without our ever having to do anything.

Simply because this life of lust-colored laziness finds us wanting everything but willing to do nothing to get it. All we know is to want, to crave, to lust for what others have that we do not as such becomes unto us the better evidence of a better existence than we can see ours as having already been without all the stuff.

That’s what sucks the most on this side of all the shameful choices we come to make seeking for some way to find what another has that we feel we should too.

It’s that we never really realize what all we’re leaving behind in order to have and hold what we also just won’t know is not at all worth either what we thought it was nor in fact near enough to replace what we had to lose in order to carve the spot for it to fit.

I literally lose sleep thinking about all I’ve both missed and misplaced in what’s been a 20-25 year journey spent following jealousy to, well, just about anything that I could become easily enough convinced may in fact help make my life finally make sense.

That’s the ultimate treasure hunt in life.

Only it’s one in which we know exactly what the treasure is without anything in the way of a map to get there other than the forgeries handed us by those who themselves are faking it trying to pretend they’re making it to and toward what literally none of us can find.

For we know the treasure in life is the finding of both the purpose thereof and then, along with that, a measure of pure peace within.

Problem is that the world tells us to look in all the places that peace isn’t. Indeed, that’s truly the only places this place can point! And that’s because all this world knows to try is to wake up and get back in line behind those who are themselves quite clearly blind to the meaning of life. Nobody seems to know what this life means nor then how to make it feel like we mean anything for having been given the chance, choice, cost, consequence of living it.

And yes, over the course of our lives we will feel as if life itself is all of the above and about 3,000,000,000 different combinations of the lot.

And why is that? Why, or perhaps rather how is it that life can go from feeling like a beautiful chance we’ve been given to a precarious choice we’re tasked with making to a cost we end up having to keep paying if not some consequence that there’s just seemingly no way of avoiding?

It’s because our priorities shift more than the winds change.

For such is the pirate’s life.

One day we awake to find this desire to drive around looking for whatever it is that we’ve been wanting. Another we go to a sleepless sleep wrestling with why we’ve still not found it. Some we go around attacking others who have this thing that we want. Some we’re attacked because we have or maybe even are what others want. A part of our life is spent getting drunk on the delights of some seedy port town in which all the wares of the world are bought and sold. Another is spent alone at sea again trying to track down some mythical legend of some lost island on which there’s either a fountain that could make us younger and thus give us more time to look more places for life’s meaning or some buried treasure that was once someone else’s pleasure but that they couldn’t afford to be caught carrying should the authorities catch wind of the haul.

Indeed, this life as lived at the shore of something so apparently sure as the worth of someone else’s life just leaves us open morning, noon and night to this lust and allure for rust and velour.

Never then of the ability to see all the times before in which we’d already found other versions of the same things. Nor then that they didn’t satisfy. Nor then the odds being that something similar just won’t either. Nor the risk we’re taking in all this craving of the more we just don’t need. Nor the things we’ll likely become willing to do, trade, steal or assume in order to break on through to this other side of some self-made line as drawn between shades of green and how ours just always manages to look the more gray for whatever reason it may be that day.

Reasons we may well never know.

Why?

Because we’ve not the time to learn. We’re entirely too busy falling behind to dare stop and reconsider any of what we want for the why nor then why our lives are always so empty despite all we’ve found that was itself a want we wished to have. Just too much more to have as is already had by they who exist as but the evidence of both what life could be and too then what our lives just aren’t.

It’s the death by comparison that we talked about yesterday.

Always looking to what another has or whatever it is that they’re getting to do that we’d like to do too is without question one of the surest and purest ways to become dissatisfied with our own lives. Why? Because this other will always have another thing that we can learn to want. They’ll always go on some vacation we can’t afford to take. They’ll drive home in a new car that makes our beater look and feel even broker. They’ll do something new or find something the same that just seems to all but effortlessly prove our lives as lame as we’ve long believed them to be.

All because we look at what we have and just don’t know how to like what we see.

Indeed, just this morning I woke up into a wondering as to whether happiness is even a real thing.

But more on that later.

Because the issue at hand is that we come to find ourselves wondering such ridiculous things because our lives become stained by all the colors of the world as painted around us but never within us. We always manage to see ourselves as those lacking in some way, losing in some way, losers lacking then always something that would just certainly make our lives so much better than they always are right now.

That’s why we have all these plans we keep making for days that we may not have coming.

It’s because we know only to see our lives as precariously empty as they always seem lacking such things as peace and purpose and happiness and contentment. And we’re thus missing the greatest of all gain which is the godliness that comes both from and with all said things.

And again, as with the treasure idea, it’s not even that we don’t know where to find it because make no mistake, we do!

We just don’t want to go there because we know what will be asked of us along the way.

And well, losing a life in the laying down of the same just doesn’t really seem the way to end up gaining all the things that we’ve spent an entire lifetime trying to find!

And pride just can’t survive such failure.

And so we never try anything other than one more attempt to give it one more go toward this more we know as is so clearly seen in the lives of just enough somebody elses that we have no reason to doubt that it both exists and that it thus must be easy enough to find as they clearly did.

Issue then is that the craving blinds us to thinking about both what they may have had to do to get this thing that we have apparently come to the conclusion that we just can’t live without, nor then that we’ll have to do the very same things in order to get ourselves to those very same places with whatever it may take to afford the procurement of those very same prizes that have blinded our eyes and confined our contentment inside some cage waiting for its pending release upon that day that this ideal finally proves as fully fulfilling as our hearts just couldn’t help but hope it would.

No, we never see the trap laid out before us, nor that we’re oddly enough sometimes the only one digging it. All because we don’t seem to understand that desire is a shovel that keeps digging deeper trying to find more to desire but only doing so in deeds and ideas so descendingly dirty that shame itself it literally all we end up finding so very much of that it comes to define all but who we are.

Doesn’t even end up mattering what all we do happen to find of whatever we started out wanting to have.

All we wind up seeing is all the stuff we had to do or go through to get it.

And this leaves both every treasure tarnished and every heart so faithfully broken that we even break down eventually and forsake faith altogether because all it ever seems to do is stand there still on top that truth that tried to tell us the danger we were in even long before we invited so much of the destruction in in what were only such things as desire, delight.

Friends, when all that we know to live for in life are desire and delight, odds are we’ll do some odd things to find them or feel them. And why is that? It’s because our world’s understanding of them has become so incredibly denaturalized that they’re all but forgeries themselves.

They may well look right and feel so close to the same that most would never know the difference.

But that’s simply because this world knows nothing of the peace that comes from contentment and thus has no way of knowing the very piece that’s always missing.

All because the piece that’s missing is the peace that so many in this world are still living still not finding despite all they have found and still hope to before long.

That’s simply not the meaning of life. This gift we’ve been given was never meant for our to become so worried about all we hope to be getting within it. In fact, the meaning of life, or at least a decent part of it, is to only be ever proven in what all we give away and why. After all, what is life without love? And yet what then of all we’ve come to love can give us life?

See the confusion yet?

It’s found in that we’ve come to love (which is anymore just lust without the audacity to be so crude as to be honest enough with itself about what it really is and why) so very many things in and of this world that we know only to love both this world and thus how this world loves. Which is again nothing but lust. And thus our understanding of life’s very meaning has become so depraved that we live only to lust for the stuff that someone else has in what, as we talked about yesterday, is likely a life that they’re not satisfied with either.

And thus what we’ll find is that we’ve all been chasing down what’s not only a fake treasure that’s thus not buried where we either thought it was or learned it wasn’t but is in fact nothing of treasure at all as it has so little value that it even steals from us such things as virtue in our hunt to find that it’s not even there.

Indeed, all of us have lost so very much trying to find the little more we may or may not have ever found.

Was it worth it?

I ask myself that question all the time still trying to find some random way of being able to say for once the yes that I never can.

Was it worth doing what we’ve done to win what we’ve won? Was it worth missing what we have for what we had instead? Was it worth going to those places, becoming those people that we know we’ve been trying to find and feel what we believed would be as amazing as it never once has?

Or do you, like me, wish you could take so much of it back and do so much so differently in hopes that maybe life itself would have gone that far more hopeful kind of differently than whatever this is that we’ve come to see in only such shades as guilt as shame?

I don’t know but that maybe gray isn’t quite so bad after all. For after all, we can always try a little harder to do a little better seeking to make our gray a little lighter. And well, too much green just goes dark thanks to some of the things we have to do to get it or get there that are themselves the same.

Yeah, I’m wrecked from doing dark things trying to find that greener green that’s never once been there.

And so maybe for now I’ll just try staying where I am struggling every day to take these small steps to better. Because even though it seems like it’s taking me forever, getting better slowly is just far better than taking more of those large leaps to lesser.

Because the truth is that it’s not always where we go that tells the story of why we went.

Sometimes it’s what we did to get there that ends up telling the story of who we are.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold