Day 3853 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ecclesiastes 5:15 NIV

In their hands

That’s where I’ve long sought to see the substance of my life’s successes as always supposed upon the prose of this story I’ve tried to tell of life going well enough to afford enough to have always in my hands something for someone else to see. And indeed, I think that in many ways this seems entirely too logical for us not to try as, well, our hands are made to hold and so it would seem that we’re somehow leaving unfulfilled their purpose if or when we allow for them to be empty.

But as I find myself older today I realize that having and holding is only part of a hand’s purpose.

And not by any means the biggest part.

Rather in recent months finding us moving into a prayer for which our family had prayed for the better part of a decade I’ve instead seen this side of things that has nothing to do with all my hands can hold. I’ve seen this side of things that for once has me reconsidering all I’ve then tried so hard to reach for. I see this side of things, feel this side of life in which there exists both a life I’ve never known inside the many things my hands have known to hold alongside a fear that it may not be there for long as blended with a hope that it’s still there for just long enough for me to wise up enough to finally reach for it instead.

Indeed, it’s amazing just how quickly so much can mean so little when you find yourself faced with the fear not of losing what you have but rather never having what you’ve missed.

And it’s this that has me so gripped within a grappling with all that’s happening in between my heart and head in what I cannot dispel as being a life lived for dead through and to and for and in fact same ways from all that I was so dumb as to assume could hold a life as held in hand. Yes, again, this is something we all seem to so sadly learn along this line in life in which we walk and talk with those who balk at the better half of every hope as is always held both where and within that which doesn’t dare try and hold hope.

For a hope that fits in the hand is a hope that’s to be eventually left for dead.

Why?

Because who hopes for what they can find?

Who hopes for what they know without question is all but certain? I mean, is this not at least somewhat akin to our again hoping within that which we already have? Granted, we may not necessarily have it in our possession nor then amongst our possessions as of yet. But still, knowing that there’s no doubt about it being found as easily as our finally deciding to look, well doesn’t that just cheapen hope into a nothing all that much more than some other fact we know or ideal that’s already drawn its last?

Indeed, what of any of our many ideals has lasted at all? For are we not a people always looking for more, for better, for something more that is something better and still then something better than the more better and better more that we’ve already believed and bought?

Or is that not the problem?

That in this world everything up to and including such growths and potentials as more and better are always believed to be best bought by the very hands that both holds the cash and cards with which we use to afford our hopes and that thus wish to hold these hopes that we can buy in what’s then a life lived only inside this idea that hope has a price, a form, a firmament that we can find with little more than a degree of affluence and the world’s influence there always to help us determine where to look?

Yes, do we not know more days than not in which we’ve looked to the world and all that’s both held here and thus held by those whose hands are only able to hope here as held mostly only within what hands can hold? And indeed, even if these others to whom we’ve looked to help us hold our hope so close as our own hands are but our own selves, does this still not speak of the same leak of our looking elsewhere for that hope that isn’t here?

Indeed, are we not mostly only ourselves to blame for our mostly only continuing to play this life as if a game in which prizes are always presupposed?

Does hope pose?

Seems as if we at least suppose it might. For such characteristics and attributes are indeed attributed to the characters in which we house our hope. It starts off as toys we want to play with via hands that wish to hold them. It shifts into transmissions that do the same inside the cars we can’t wait to feel the wheel within. From then it morphs into making money at jobs that we hope morph into careers with salaries being seen as better than wages, and with better benefits and retirement plans as well.

And indeed, at some point we become well aware of our retirement drawing near and we find then this fear of whether or not we’ll fail to find ourselves having saved enough to live the life we hoped to have in all those years we worked away for all the things that we spent so much money on that have long since gone by the by. And then comes close the last goodbye in which we say goodnight to what’s been, what we hope at least, a life worth something.

But what is a life worth if the only worth we assume in life is that held in hands that can’t carry it with us when we’re either asked to leave or simply removed?

This is what I’ve been thinking about for nigh a week now. What is my life worth? What have I to show for the work I’ve known in a toil at times so trying and tormented that I stayed up late trying to find ways to stave the suffering seen in those around me? Is it just the stuff I bought in what I believed to be an interest worth pursuing? Is it the knickknacks held by nails to a wall that I walk past without looking at? It is the walls of our new house that, like those of every other residence in which I’ve resided, are seen as only blank spaces meant for covering with the substance of my assumptions?

Am I afraid of leaving walls empty because they might then make me sit in the silent understanding that my life’s been mostly the same thanks to my having tried so hard for so long to fill it with what doesn’t give it?

What can a life be worth if all we believe of worth in life is just what we hold in our hands?

And I don’t mean such things as the hand of the wife or that of the husband that we love. No, that means something. And I don’t mean the hope of helping someone else by reaching out what we don’t need that we can see they might. That means something too. And yet the both seem to combine into this realization that meaning’s always been so easy to find in that it’s not what our hands hold but rather what holds our hands.

That’s where real hope is.

It’s something considered inside the difference between reaching out with the intent to pull in as compared against the reaching out with the intent to give.

Indeed, I believe that such is the difference in a life that matters and one that only flatters.

And sadly I must say that I’ve always lived this life that way that sought to flatter by making my wallet look fatter and my walls free from the worries they might display were they left empty for even a day. Yes, I’ve known only that way of life in which I sought with my hands to hold all that stuff in which I’d come to hope, a hope I still seem to see more days than not. And thus I fear that all I’ve found is that my hope’s been held, as if hostage, to this ground from which it came.

In what’s then a misunderstanding in regard to whether or not I’ll ever do the same.

Yes, I’ve lived my life storing treasures inside all that I’ve stored inside a life that’s thus been lived inside what I have as was held, is held by the very hands that have rarely held the hand of another nor the hope of helping someone else nor the weight of worrying that I can’t help enough, not near as much as I’d really truly like to.

That’s something new for me.

Not that I’ve never wanted to help before, because I have. Not that I never wanted to hold another’s hand and find theirs willing to hold mine. I did. I do. No, it’s just that even those things that do mean something, they’ve sadly been only seen from this perspective perched atop this prerogative that has had me as always the only one who mattered most.

And I think that most of us could say the same.

That most of life and our many hopes as had within have long been about us and what we had, what we held, what all we didn’t and how best we could get it. And while this makes some kind of sense, at least superficially in regard to how our lives are our lives as we’re the only ones living them and must then play at least some part in their figuring out of what matters most, the issue is that if it only matters to us, and that only because it’s something we want, then what can that life accomplish?

What can it carry with it when all that it’s known to care about and hope in is but that which we’re surrounded by but for a moment?

And again, the same is fairly said of even relationships and helping our kids with their school projects as those things too have an expiration, because so too do our lives have one.

But do not those moments matter more than everything combined we can buy in some store?

I would readily trade all I’ve ever had to have had instead that joy of hearing a pretty girl say yes and maybe even seeing a white dress leading to a fence the same as my name became shared by someone else who dared believe in me more than I ever have.

But instead the best belief in most of my life has been placed in things I’ve tried to buy and those few I did before I finally agreed to just sell them off again so that I could afford a new distraction to hang in the same places that photos of family haven’t.

Was it worth it?

Not at all.

And oddly enough it’s that very same question that we’ll find ourselves asking when our time here draws short. But anymore it’s not that the question won’t change that scares me the most.

It’s that maybe too the answer won’t.

For the truth is that I’m 37 years old and just yesterday I finally got my hands on something my hands have wanted to hold. And yet all the time I put into to getting it right and hopefully making it look the same, it’s not something that I can say now was worth it now. Because there’s a really strange emptiness in the heaviness. It’s as if this thing that I’ve wanted finally arrived only to feel in the hand just heavy enough to make me realize just how heavy it isn’t.

Because what will it mean when that day comes and my hands can’t hold it?

What will it mean when that day comes and it can’t hold my hand? What will it mean when all the stuff I’ve bought and believed would make my life better can’t look at me and tell me that I did okay?

What will it mean when Jesus and me sit down to watch the movie of the life I tried so hard to make, only to switch it over and watch the one He had planned for me that I only missed because of all the stuff I chose to chase instead?

Friends, this life is long and it’s at times so hard that we almost instinctively seek out that something quick that we can find, something easy to get so that we can hold it in our hands and have it there to take our attention off of the struggle, the strife, the emptiness inside. But what if I told you that we needed that emptiness in both our hands and hearts? What if we knew that there was nothing we could do to fully distract us from the suffering in life?

What if we leaned into it? What if we embraced the perceived misery of mundanity and allowed the bareness to build in us a willingness to fight for a way of life that didn’t settle so often for all that’s always been so short on life?

Yes, what if we learned to fight for what made life matter?

And what if we could just understand that what makes life matter isn’t material or money or millions of followers and fans hanging on our every word as anymore held in their hands on cell phones that all but encompass our entire existence? Indeed, what if we learned to live beyond the boxes we’ve built of all we’ve bought and the little more we’ve ever tried to believe in and live for?

Granted, as I said I’m just now 37 and for the first time allowing these thoughts and questions in mind and so I’ve not the answers yet.

But I’ll find them.

Don’t know when, don’t even know how.

And in fact all I know of where is only where the answers aren’t.

And that’s in my hands.

No, this last weekend showed me that life’s been in my hands for too long, and well, I’ve sadly only dropped the ball with only myself to blame having always insisted it be only these hands of me holding on to all of everything that I thought I wanted my life to be.

And maybe it’s too late.

Maybe it’s too late.

But friends, it’s never too late to let go of what we’ve settled for and see if there really is something more along that narrow path that just doesn’t seem like it could offer that.

For make no mistake, there’s likely to be very little that makes sense along His path that He’s paved for us as it will ask that we let go of everything and place the same inside His hands.

But then again, was it not His hands that held the nails the paid our bail?

And was not our own that charged up the bill so high that He had to be lifted the same?

Yeah, seems safe to say that we shouldn’t have a hand in much of anything anymore.

Especially trying to figure out what life means and how to maybe make it matter. You know, having always looked to our hands to help by only then leaning on their ability to hold, but only that in which hope never was.

Indeed, we all know where hope isn’t, and considering how we’ve tried so long so hard to prove otherwise, maybe it’s time to stop asking our hands to bring hope to us and instead embrace the fact that a hope held is no hope at all. Because all we can hold in hand now is the same as all that we won’t someday.

But all that we hold in our hearts is what He’s promised to let us keep forever.

So maybe it’s time to focus on where our hearts are looking, and even more than that, what all hope they’re already holding.

Because it may not actually be all that much worth having.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold