Day 3855 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Job 15:31 NIV

What is worth?

What is worth worth? What gives worth its worth? Is worth what we think it’s worth? Is it worth the work we wage to win what we hope it’s worth? Does worth need to work, to win, to wage the war within what is a life in which we know of worth but so often only so little that has any? Does any of what we’ve come to believe has worth truly have worth? And if so, well, how do we know?

Can worth be proven outside of public opinion?

And if not, as I mostly assume no, well then what can we know what worth is nor then what worth might be worth? For have not all of us at times before, times still seen still worth inside of what’s, well, still? Does that which has worth never walk? Does worth have nothing to say, no room to talk? Is worth so able to from some be balked, disbelieved, doubted and denied? Indeed, is worth something of a person’s personal opinion as is placed in those places in which they want worth to be?

Is it on you or me or me and you to make whatever worth is worth whatever it’s supposed to be?

Or are we but the recipients of what should have remained a humility that was always elsewise able to see the simplicity of all such measuring?

You see, as we discussed yesterday one of my life’s greatest worries has long been this one won within what are empty walls. And that’s because I, like you, found myself always of the widespread worldly estimation of a life’s worth as wrapped within walls the same. Yes, I seem to have latched on to this idea that the less emptiness I could see around me somehow equated to a lack of the same within. That so long as my walls were filled with the thrills and frills of a life I’d loved as evidenced in a fair plenty of things that I too so cherished, well then my life had been well plenished.

It was successful, special even. Indeed, so long as I could look always around me and see a good plenty of enough things that took up enough space in whatever place I happened to have been placed then said place would be able to then prove that my life was worth something.

That I was worth something.

But what then does this say of my calculation of my life’s valuation?

Does it truly prove, as I’ve long sought to, that my life was valuable simply because I had valuables? Do collectibles truly make life enjoyable? And while they can, to a degree, does not our instead all but having a doctorate of the same inside this love and lust for things only come about to show without a doubt that our worth is only worth whatever we’ve wanted and won within the work we’ve done to get it in our hands?

Indeed, does worth fit in the human’s clutch?

Are we more important if we’ve always a bunch to which we can point in order to offer our hunch of what our life is worth? And if that is the case, then how much of enough is enough to so assure our hunch of a life’s worth proven in a bunch of whatever we’ve thus enough of?

Is enough ever enough?

Can we ever truly fill our lives, our minds? Should we be so united, unanimous in our now cultural understanding of a life’s valuing as based upon whatever enough isn’t? For it would seem that we know nothing of enough as we’re always quite clearly on the hunt for what then can only be only more. After all, why else would we go toward whatever it is that we’re going for?

To put it bluntly, we’re lazy to the farthest exponential degree.

And so then have must we something that is apparently worth our work, worry or wait that we think is worth the work that is worry that is our waiting for that day in which we find we’re finally finding and/or feeling this most hopefully fulfilling filling of a life’s finally meaning something that we can then equate as worth.

But what can a life be worth if all that life ever knows of worth is the not enough image of it?

You see, what’s quite odd to me is that it seems that we see this for what it is in every bit of the clarity it’s always been. I think that we all understand the trouble we’re in from having placed so much faith, assumed so much hope, estimated so much worth inside of whatever it may be that we’ve all already seen, been, wanted, won, known then of a life we have already lived.

We know it isn’t enough, and in fact we’re so sure of that that we’ve come up with ways and wants in which to work for what are things that are undeniably worthless.

That’s why we have so many images still.

Granted, they’re not all calves, and they’re most certainly not all gold. But the truth will one day hold that of all we’ve held so much either in our hearts or in our hands is instead only so much of this land that we’ll be quite shattered to see just how much we have to leave when His asking us to give all we’ve got to the poor and follow Him is no longer a request.

For He’s only given us this one extra day in which to find that most fleeting of way to find that feeling that will find us anything but reeling when we’ve really got to let go of whatever it is that we’ve come to know of a life’s worth in exchange for what we can hopefully learn before we leave as having always been what life’s worth really was.

And He asks us to trust Him now in our laying down all we’ve assumed we couldn’t live without both so that we can see for ourselves that we can but also so that we can then spend maybe a couple of the few days we’ve left trying to help others break free from this priceless slavery that we see the entire world enjoying thanks to the pricelessness we see inside being enslaved to things that have neither life to give nor then hope with which to help us find some when ours are done.

Yes, He came to set us free from our lust for things that haven’t life to give, the freedom needing His forgiveness because we’d given our lives to the things that we learned to love more than life itself.

Thus us just discounting His grandest of design into what’s been instead at least a half lifetime, if not more, spent seeking for something that could make our lives feel as if they too were worth something.

Do we not see the idiotic irony in this?

That whilst trying to prove our lives have what they’ve always had, which is worth, which is what defines the stupidity, we’ve fought so hard to convince ourselves, and everyone else so that they could at times help by returning the favor should our foolery begin to waver, that all of this stuff around us had the worth that we needed to make our lives seem as if they were worth something?

We’ve given away our worth to all that is worthless so that all that is worthless can then bring our worth back to us in the external form in which we’ve apparently come to find this belief that our worth is best proven.

By only the things around us.

That’s where our worth is. It’s where our hope is then too. For what fills the heart defines the hope as hope is housed inside the heart. And so this actually makes it a really good, and in fact quite easy place to start in regard to figuring out both what we’re worth and what gives us that opinion. For again, hope is worth more than we know, especially when seen from the humbled life that knows we need hope more than just about anything other than life itself.

A truth combined inside the Christ and what He achieved there on Calvary.

And yet, again, it seems that, instead, all we know of what a life can be worth is only what we’ve given our worth to as has been now long done in our wanting both what we’ve won and still worrying over what we’ve not.

And again, I say this with every ounce of personal conviction as I can understand to offer.

Because as we talked yesterday, I still sit right here in this same place across a room from an empty wall that screams to me that my life means nothing because that’s all I can see. It’s just an off-white shade of blankness where so much other stuff could have been by now. I mean, my family and I moved in about four months ago. What am I waiting for? I’ve all the stuff. I’ve even plans and such that I’ve spent my time making so as to get the layouts and ideas and such just right.

Indeed, my mom’s often made fun of me for having taken so long to get my stuff all finished up and put away and moved on from.

But maybe that’s the problem.

Perhaps I’m not only afraid of seeing walls empty as I still seem to assume it means only my life the same, but now I’m perhaps even afraid of filling the wall with all I’ve planned to put on it as I worry as to what I’ll do once I see just how much none of it means alongside a then opened time in which I’m not planning on what to do with what’s no longer an empty wall.

Isn’t it amazing the worries we can win within what’s been a life in which worry is our worth?

See, I’ve always worried a lot about what I had, what more I wanted, what all of it was worth and thus what that proved of my life’s importance. And yet now I find this new worry at work in the way of my worrying about not having something to work on that will keep distracted from all the thoughts that an empty wall asks us to think. I worry about the me I’ll see should I not see something shiny looking back at me. I worry about what my life will feel like when my life isn’t busy working on something that has something to do with what I think is worth something in life.

Thus I’m still afraid of empty walls proving my life the same all while also now afraid of a wall filled forcing me to see that it’s just as empty as the wall used to be despite the things that I filled it with now filling it.

Because what’s filling me?

Indeed, what is my life worth?

Thankfully through this daily writing thing I’ve come to believe, at least a little more than I did before, that I am here for something more than just buying from a store what I then store in what’s long been a waiting for someone to ask what life means to me. I’m finally starting to see that what we do is in truth worth more than what we have. Though I also learn to worry about that as, well, I’m of the opinion that much of what I do do is so far from perfect that I fear it still worthless.

Probably because of that collector’s mind in which scratches or tears or stains or other blemishes only detract from an items valuing.

Got myself quite stuck in between who I know I’ve been as has been at least somewhat able to amble at least a degree of my estimation of a life’s worth and the me I know I’m not who then has no idea what life might be worth having never lived like him before.

Where do we go when so torn between worths?

Well, seems to be that we should want to see the worth we haven’t known in what’s a life the same. Because, well, we already know what is and while it might make sense to stay where we then are as it’s both easier and thus safer to settle for whatever already is, I guess the question then becomes what is already and if it’s truly already enough.

But then again, what is enough?

See, that’s the danger we never see inside this life spent trying to see value and worth and meaning inside all but all of everything. And sure, everything around us does mean something, it has some value. Doesn’t mean it’s always good or helpful or hopeful or life-giving. In fact a lot of what’s here is only life-taking as it, again, asks that we give it our lives in terms of our times and our minds spending them thinking about this thing that we think is worth our wanting it so badly.

Yet we still don’t seem to see it.

For instead still we mostly seem as if we only know to lean on it, this understanding that worth is to be best won within what we have as if what we have can mean so much as to truly measure up to what will be agreed upon as a life well lost.

That is all we’re doing here, you do at least know that, right?

We’re all just here losing a life.

Question is to what and whether then that what is whatever already is seen as enough to account for our life’s worth or if we’re still open to looking as is clearly being done by all of us in one way or another toward then what is only the obvious.

Which is that we have no idea what our lives are worth, nor even most days where to start trying to find that answer having already searched pretty much everywhere.

Only to find nothing.

Ain’t it amazing how the entirety of our lifetime and be so summed up in what is but one small verse from the sea of Scripture?

For all of us have trusted in what is worthless. All of us have hoped in what has no worth. All of us have looked for life in all that has so clearly no life as it neither breathes nor speaks nor blinks nor begs nor bakes nor brings then anything by which to sustain us who are starving for meaning and purpose and peace amidst our ongoing inability to find either.

Yes, all of us have placed our trust, our hope, our faith inside of things that were never worth such a worth.

And all of us have indeed gotten nothing in return.

Why then do we continue to return to what we’ve always done in what’s always been this almost frantic searching for something that can give our lives the meaning we ironically give away every day that we spend trying to prove that worth is only worth whatever we spend on it or that another will give us for it when what once had worth is again replaced by something else that’s worth more than the thing we then agree to finally give away.

And thus we too prove that Christ’s asking us to give all we have to those who’ve less is not at all even something we’re against.

That’s literally why eBay exists!

It’s why we have garage sales and garbage bins. It’s because while we, for a moment at least, seem to love what all we’ve won in life thanks to the worth we estimated it to both have and thus bring to our life, at some point in time we finally find only that it wasn’t worth as much to us as we had imagined it was and we then agree to the getting rid of this thing so that we’ve then both money and space which to spend and then fill with what is something else that means more than whatever we give away came to.

Yes, so much of life comes to mean so little.

It’s just that it takes us an embarrassing amount of time to realize it.

Let alone to agree to it.

But friends, such is the danger we’re in. For all of us are surrounded if not consumed ourselves with this estimation of so many things that still mean enough of something to us that we think they’re for us something of meaning, of purpose, of our worth. And each of these said idols will take their own unique amount of time for us to see just how little they really mean.

Problem is we’re running out of time.

And when it does finally run out completely, we’ll be then left with nothing left in which to rid our lives of whatever they’ll have ended believing to be worth something.

So what is worth to you? What is worth to life? What is life worth?

And how dare we continue to so undermine His most precious of design by continuing to define it via a price tag as placed upon such impermanent objects as those that can be stolen, torn, tarnished, tainted, stained, sold, bought, ripped, won, lost, burned, melted, ruined?

Are our lives so able to be any of the same?

And if not, as they are not, then why should we continue to agree to give them away only to get these things that are subject to at least some of all the above?

Why trade life for what has no life to give?

And why risk doing so for so long that we’ve no time left by which to realize that we’ve only amassed a mass of nothing that we can take with us not if we go but when we do.

Where will we go? And is that hope worth enough to let go of all that cannot come?

Or are we still planning on staying here a while more?

Yeah, empty walls may speak of empty lives, but an empty life in the world’s estimation is worth more than one so shallow as to live as if all that’s worth anything only stays behind.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold