Day 3854 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ecclesiastes 5:10 NIV

Empty walls

There seems to remain this universal if not indeed unanimous understanding that has in fact led to what’s always been an equally common undertaking as is undertaken by literally everyone literally everywhere. And that understanding is that there must be some reason, some meaning hidden inside or beside, or sadly these days most often only behind the truth that says we are standing here in what is a life we are living in what is a place that is too most certainly alive.

What seems strange then is why it so often seems entirely otherwise.

For there’s no denying that all of us are in fact living. We’re breathing. We’re thinking. We’re trying, even if said trying is only trying not to think too much about anything. We are all here doing something, chasing something, choosing something in which to place something that is called our hope, our trust, our faith even as is given on the then basis of our understanding that there again must be a reason for our being here. We’re all doing something as is being done in our collective searching for this life’s meaning.

Because all of this has to mean something as there’s simply entirely too much going on for it to all mean nothing.

No, there has to be meaning. Problem though, or so it would seem, is that we seem to seek it in the things that may well have themselves not much meaning at all. Not much life at all. And that all because that’s the very same place that everyone else is looking. Which this approach basically makes us what are second cousins to insanity. For they say that doing the same thing over and over again whilst expecting always different results is in fact insane.

But friends, is not our doing the same as whatever everyone else is doing sort of the same thing?

I mean, granted, we’re not the first to try it first and so we’ve that potential for plausible deniability as needed in a case in which we’ll all, at times at least, try to plead insanity so as to make our choices seem not quite so crazy or lazy or lustful. Indeed, someone else did it first and since it was them and then then it wasn’t us and so our doing what they’ve done is something new under our sun.

But still, we can see clearly enough what it is that they have found and thus determine for ourselves if we’re to plunge our shovel into that same ground seeking to thus find what will likely be only what they found themselves.

Guess then the problem has evolved into a matter of our seeking life’s meaning in what are holes that are indeed unique to us and in fact spread out a bit from the rest of those already dug or in said process as we speak. For indeed, none of us do exactly the same things that someone else has already done for though we know well how to idolize such identities as politician and celebrity, deep down we all know that we’re probably not moving to hellywood nor the white house any time soon.

And too we always want to be the ones who invent the content of our existence so as to retain such things as filming rights and book deals when it goes as well as it always did in our head in all those days in which we combed through all those ways in which we might walk toward whatever we either bought or bought not in regard to whatever this life may mean.

Indeed, we want to be the ones who pave our own path, find our own treasure and then enjoy all the public and personal pleasure that we can then afford with all the affluence and applause that we’ll all but surely be owed for having built such a lavish home with so many rooms filled with so many things that we live in what are basically museums of ourselves.

I’ve actually had that very idea here recently having moved into a new house in which I’ve a room all to myself with what are four walls so blank and begging to be filled with all my favorite frills and finery.

Yes, I’ll turn this thing into a museum of me!

And I sadly thought said thought in a most excited manner as I seem to have honestly believed that all the stuff I with which I planned to fill it really did matter.

If in fact so very much that it gave my life meaning.

What was I thinking?

You know, it’s truly funny, even if in a sometimes shameful sense, just how quickly life brings these unexpected events that flip things on their heads and leave you wondering what and why your head was thinking whatever it was not even a week ago.

Something changed in me last Friday that I’m doing everything I can to keep as deep as it felt in the moment. Even saying the name as much as I might as it seems to have brought something that means something back to life, and perhaps even me the same.

For you see, this idea of my own museum has long been something I’d always liked undertaking without ever actually referring to it as what it so clearly was. I just liked stuff. As a kid it was whales and dolphins, both of which are still exceedingly cool if you ask me. Then I grew into the cars and such thanks to hotwheels and hotrods. Next it was sports and all the collectible and quite valuable memorabilia that I then hung in every cranny and corner of my room at the time. And that one went on for years!

I have none of it now.

Not one picture, poster, sport card or sports car in miniature. It’s all gone. And yet what’s strangest of all isn’t that I had it as everyone here has such things that they enjoy, or think they do. No, that’s what’s strange to me. It’s that I once had all this stuff that I thought I just loved so much, was so pleased with that I could never part with, and yet now that it’s all been sold off or thrown out, I don’t miss it at all.

I don’t even remember most of it!

What then does that say of life’s meaning, or at least in regard to how we so often seek to make it mean something via the things we store that we think mean something to us?

Is life’s meaning really made in stuff? Can we find life’s meaning in a thing? Does meaning, be it that of life or even that of us, does it consist of the things that this world consists of? As we talked about a bit yesterday, can you hold hope? Can you weigh your worth on some scale? Can you really put a price tag on a life’s purpose? What about its potential?

Can you build something in this life with the materials of this life that is in fact so grand that you can expect people to stand in line and pay to buy a ticket to the show of all that you’ve gone to get with what is the time you yourself spent to get it?

I’m reminded of this story I heard on I think it was Mysteries at the Museum, a Don Wildman offering on Discovery, highly recommend it! But it was of this lady who I believe had lost her husband and in the aftermath determined to just start working on her house. She just wanted that something to fill the gap and maybe even perhaps help to distract from the heartbreak she’d found in such a loss. And well, she just kept going. Kept remodeling. Kept adding and building and doing to this house whatever she imagined worth being done.

And in fact that house has become a museum to which those interested in such eccentricities flock so as to see firsthand the undertakings of this lonely lady.

And so indeed, it did seem to give her life some meaning.

But friends, what did it make her life mean?

Got people to show up with what remains an interest as to the twists and turns and stairs that lead nowhere and doors that open only to walls. But did it help with the hurt? Did it lose the loss? Did it bring her the satisfaction that she apparently sought in doing all that work?

And while that’s not for me to say, does not the fact that she kept going only prove that she wasn’t satisfied?

And so what then of her life?

Indeed, what of mine?

See, that has, in just the matter of six days, become a question that I personally cannot stop considering. What does my life mean? What does anything I’m doing really matter? What can my life mean, how can it matter when I’m still, at least somewhat, of the mind that I might need to find a few more things to put in my little museum of me?

Who in their right mind would come to a museum of my life?

How can I think I’m in my right mind to keep living this life as if getting people to come and see all I’ve bought in the belief that it mattered, even if only to me, is indeed something worth being seen?

After all, what do I see?

Sadly, it’s at least somewhat still a fear of empty walls.

Indeed, for some it’s a bank account. For some it’s a bigger house. For some it’s a faster car or a better job that pays more money needed to keep gas in the thing. For others it’s something other on what is a list of boxes to check as are built by and believed in by what is an entire world contributing to the overall measuring of what we collectively seem to believe might possibly be the identity of life’s meaning.

But for me though, no, it’s been a wall.

See, truth is that we all feel this often unspoken urgency to fill our lives with something so that our lives don’t feel as if they’re missing something, let alone the so much that we daren’t imagine we’ve missed along the way to whatever, wherever, whoever and whyever we are today. No, we fill our lives with all these things all so that we don’t have to realize just how empty they are. Just how empty we are.

Yes, we all seek to fill our lives with things, or fill things in our lives all so our eyes can have something to look at and our hands have something to reach for and our minds have something to think about and our hearts have something to hope in that’s all there helping in our never having to see that our lives are empty.

Just like the empty wall that I see just across this room from me.

Now I’ve had plans for this wall. In fact I’ve a stack of frames and things leaned up against it just waiting for a couple more pieces to this personal puzzle to arrive so that I can get to work and give mine eyes something to see that seems to me the very meaning of at least part of my existence.

Is it? Does it? Will it?

Doubt it.

Why? Because again, I’ve been down this road before. I know where I’ve already been, what I’ve already done, what I’ve already had and just how unworried and unbroken I feel today over what I once thought I couldn’t live without having gone away anyway. So what makes this new venture in what’s basically the same direction any different? Because it’s about music this time rather than the cars I mostly don’t like and the sports I all but passionately despise?

Will all this new stuff bring meaning to my life?

Or is meaning made only outside the walls we build of such things as bank accounts and impressive titles at work that we can give to strangers who only ask what we do for a living because they don’t really care and that’s just what everyone knows to begin with when meeting someone for the first time?

See, that’s kind of the problem that I’ve found myself feeling here inside my own life, my own heart, my own head. It’s this realization that last Friday I met a version of myself that I didn’t know much about. Knew he was there but haven’t heard from him in years, indeed decades. In truth part of me thought that part of me was dead!

Ironically though his showing up has left me wondering if it wasn’t the part of me that I thought was alive that was actually he who has long been quite otherwise.

For all of the sudden something else matters in life. Something else means something more. A hope I’d had back when I was a kid has come screaming back to life in ways that I didn’t know I needed it to. Again, I thought it over. I thought it was finished. I thought that I was doing pretty okay in what’s long been a life spent as if dollars on eBay hunting down happiness as if happiness can be so held first in the hand and then by a nail as driven into a wall all so as to not have to see that I’ve all but driven my life into absolute misery by thinking that the stuff I like for now could hold the place of things that might matter more later on.

Friends, when is later on and is what we’re doing now going to matter when we get to whatever later is?

That’s something for each of us to determine for ourselves. Problem is we don’t. Don’t want to. Don’t think we need to. In fact we don’t really seem to think about it at all.

At least not until it’s likely too late to do all that much about it.

And indeed, while that is most certainly a fear I feel, what I find is that it’s not only one that I’m suddenly willing to face but in fact a fear that I would rather face than one more moment spent trying to find one more something to keep me distracted from my own broken heart and tragic life.

Not that my life has been tragic at all as I’ve an amazing life that is better in more ways than a scumbag like me deserves.

No, I’m just tired of holding my own hope to the fire of something else I want as is lit by a heart that knows what matters most that’s so often been held hostage by a weakness of spirit that’s thus unwilling to find it.

And yeah, I know that there may not be anything there left to find in regard to what I’m talking about. After all, some doors start closing as you get older and here at 37 I just don’t know but that I’ve slammed that door so many times that God finally agreed to seal it shut.

Don’t know that I have that power though.

And so I want to know what I haven’t because I know what I have. And friends, what I have known hasn’t been me happy. It hasn’t been me satisfied. I haven’t known me as something content with life no matter the content in life. In fact, the only me I’ve ever known is that kid who spent every waking moment trying to find something I thought would bring some worth to my life, and too nearly every dollar I made bidding on this theoretical version of a life’s meaning.

And I know that none of what I’ve had in my hands has made my life mean anything.

Some of it has helped. I mean we can hold the Bible in our hands and it exists for just such benefit as our lives bettered. But even then it can only help with such growth in the contentment that comes with godliness when we put it both into our hearts and there into action.

And there’s just no feasible way to hang that on a wall or account for it in some bank or buy it in a store.

No, truth is that life’s meaning has nothing to do with material, with money, with much of anything this world seems so intent upon chasing after.

Indeed, this world seems to think that happiness is a pursuit toward a destination as to be measured in millions and mansions, museums maybe. But in truth happiness is in fact a pursuit but one only taken away from all that happiness isn’t toward the simplicity that happiness is. And friends, happiness is as simple as being able to look in the mirror and smile because you’re trying.

Even if, no, especially at the expense of everything you have.

After all, what can happiness mean if we’ll not risk everything else to have it? What can joy bring to our lives if it has to share room in our lives with other priorities that are perhaps even detrimental to its existence? Yes, what can our existence mean when all that means anything is just the material with which it’s filled?

I’ve yet to meet someone consumed by the lust for worldly gold that was ever satisfied with what they had, no matter how much of it they had to hold. Never met somebody content with their current situation when their current situation was situated upon their saturating their lives with such prizes as fame and fortune. Never met anybody who knew contentment who thought contentment was measured in the content of a bank account or a storage locker.

No, rather from what I’ve seen some of the happiest people on earth are those who have the least. Why? Because it apparently doesn’t matter if you have to sleep on the streets as it’s always been the sleep that mattered most, not where you got it.

Get it?

Point is that it’s not what we have in this life that makes this life mean something. And so it’s not then our seeking for meaning inside the things of this world that will help our lives matter. No, all that can help make our lives matter, make sure they mean something is when we empty them of all that distracts, detracts, divides and destroys so that we can then give ourselves more fully to the finding of the audacity to face our fears of staring at empty walls and seeing there only a reflection of the lives we’ve truly lived.

Friends, don’t keep spending your life trying to fill your life because that will simply never work. Because we can always find reason to want a little more than we’ve had before. But it’s only when we find those few things that we’re willing to risk everything to feel that we’ll find what life is truly all about.

Yes, guess MercyMe said it best in that “you never know why you're alive until you know what you would die for.”

And this makes sense as I wouldn’t die for the stuff leaned up against that empty wall I see.

But I would die for those who still choose to love me even after all this time of my spending my life loving so many things that were never alive themselves.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold