Day 3856 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 44:20 NIV

What is life?

Seem to me that life used to be this ideal in which we thought of life as something of a blank canvas to be filled in and colored by the uniqueness of our own personal experience as was to be experienced through such things as dreams and goals and hopes and such as each experienced in proper progress and thus progression. Yes, life used to be an open road filled with so much room for newness and renewal that nothing would dare convince us to become stagnant inside a settlement as settled upon what we see already.

No, we used to have this idea in heart and head that refused our hand the audacity of this imagining of a life lived in images rather than imaging as imagined in the imagining of something always better, bigger, more beautiful even.

Yeah, we used to see life as a blank slate and now it's become nothing more than a page torn out of a magazine or clipped from a comic book, a fake photo photoshopped to fit what people want as wanted on a plastic screen, an image flashing on a tv or an ideal drawn upon a billboard in a big city.

Life has indeed become ashes upon which we feed on what we ironically call a feed that feeds us a daily helping of however much scrolling through another’s ideals and idols as we might imagine we enjoy, a feed we feed upon it’s feeding us simply because we know nothing left of that life we used to live in which our lives could be the better that we now only see through those windows in our pockets that we reach for as soon as we feel bored and find ourselves there terrified of having to look at our life as has been lived for so long now not thinking our own thoughts that we’ve no idea how.

We’ve simply made too many idols into far too many ideals and thus haven’t in us anything much of that life we once lived in which everything ahead was as empty and open as can be and then to be filled with any version of audacious impossibility that we might imagine or hope to find.

Now we worry ourselves only over what we hope to have.

Been talking about that for a couple now, this personal fear of mine of finding in life too many empty walls making me wander the halls of a mind emptied itself. And indeed, I think I knew it was happening. I think I felt my better hopes going. I’m pretty sure that I even heard happiness say goodbye and watched as joy drove crying into the night as I sat inside a little one-room apartment in the corner of my mind trying to find something more on eBay to buy that I could hang on my wall so as to not have there any better thought or theory left any room at all.

Pretty sure we all knew it was coming, this going of life to the birds that we seldom see anymore. Not that they’re not there in the air flying in the freedom we once reached for in our aching toward the stars that waited even above them. No, it’s just that we haven’t the time nor intention to look at them anymore. We’re too busy. We’re too burdened. Indeed, we are anymore but beasts of the same, much the same as those oxen yoked unto the task of walking in a circle spinning then a giant mill that ground all that was found in or from the ground that we, or rather they, sought to feed upon.

Indeed, we don’t even make our own food anymore we’re so busy.

Rather we insist everything brought to us through apps and delivery services replacing even our willingness to nourish the bodies that we too rarely seem to see any real point in noticing aren’t doing too awful well anymore.

Yeah, it’s amazing what all we can miss when life consists of only whatever we have and hold then the happiness of holding in hand.

Problem is that life was never meant to fit in our hand, our head, our heart even. Definitely wasn’t meant then to fit inside our pocket as placed upon a cellphone filled with podcasts and preferences catered to by algorithms knowing more about us than we do. Wasn’t meant to fit inside studio apartments or houses so big they’ve both an upstairs and a basement. Life wasn’t so destined for storage lockers and social media as it’s sadly become anyway.

It wasn’t created to be curated on a TV or streamed via something that has really nothing to do with water whatever.

People don’t even drink plain ol’ water anymore as they believe it too boring when compared to such things as soda and alcohol. Both of which offer ads seen at first on a screen and then found in some form of fandom that fits nicely on the wall of man caves and she sheds defining for us our own little space in which all that matters is only us and what we like and the fight to keep out all we don’t.

Such as each other.

Such as ourselves even, at least if truth were to bother.

But it doesn’t. Nope, we’re not seemingly too bothered by the reality we’ve borne inside of what’s but a stillborn assumption of this life spent with a lack of gumption giving us so little reason to reach for much of anything anymore. Again, why waste the effort of something so grueling as cooking our own meals when Mcd’s delivers? Why waste our eye’s times staring at those birds that mock us from the skies as they soar to remind that we once tried for the same? Why give our frame, our brain to the belief in something better that would require a bit of work if not in fact an all but complete rewire?

Why walk such the wire that is the Way, so narrow and straight and there pointed right into the unknowns of every tomorrow we all know we cannot truly assume?

Just feels better to believe that we’ve plenty more tomorrows to see in which we can maybe then be a bit more worried over the better that’s just not that big of a deal anymore.

Friends, why is better so betrayed these days?

Why is beauty under such attack from endless ink and piercing everything? Why is common sense being replaced by common agreement? Why is morality still suffering a mortal wound? Why is modesty mocked via trash on TV telling young men and women that to be attractive means being all but naked? Why is porn so popular while marriage considered the social construct instead? Why are phones fun? Why is streaming all we care to keep seeing? Why is the truth lying bleeding in the streets having been trampled once more by an all but terroristic society?

Why don’t we care about what we’ve become?

Why don’t we see that life’s become numb?

You know, I said yesterday that the reality is that we’re all here just losing a life. And I followed that up with asking for what. What are we losing our lives for? What are we losing our lives toward? What are we living our lives for, toward? And is that answer, or those answers should they truly be as different and ever-changing as I so sadly surmise they might, are those answers really what we once hoped they would be?

Is this what we wanted to be, where we hoped to go, the epitome of that thing now widely considered a lie in which we were told that we could be anything we wanted to be?

Is this what we wanted to see?

Don’t know about you but as for me, no. No, this world and our common way of life lived within isn’t at all what I hoped to have or was once excited to experience. You remember that? Excitement? Hope? The sheer excited expectation of our planned vocations spent as astronauts and farmers and such? Remember when normal wasn’t so bored and boring? Remember when ordinary things such as sunsets had a beauty we could always count on being there, and we checked far more often just to make sure?

Remember when you could be excited to go to the movies? Remember when you got nervous asking a pretty girl to go see one? Remember arcades asking us to do whatever we could to earn some pocket change so we could play a game of pacman or twenty? Remember when twenty was old and our parents never seemed so far past it? Remember when life had so many goals and so much good that we never imagine we’d be past it?

Friends, I think we’ve passed it.

Why?

Because we passed on it.

We passed on the pursuit of a better life. We gave up trying to find what the world started telling us we couldn’t. We stopped fighting our fears and just accepted that they would both always be there and that as such we should just make friends with them. We let go of every farthest hope in exchange for something we could hold both closer and thus quicker. We walked away from walking toward the excitement of that blank canvas that was once stretched before us, as far as the eye could see and then a little farther still.

There is no farther now.

No, now the furthest we’re willing to go is to the other room to grab our phone to order our dinner or fire up that salacious site to act as our romantic rendezvous for the night.

And to be honest, which even that we’re anymore told we shouldn’t, truth is I absolutely hate it. I despise this now normal way of life. Hate it more with each passing day.

Why?

Because it’s a lie.

Friends, nearly everything around us anymore is either a distraction or a deception, always the latter which allows for so much of the former. Yes, everything in life is a lie anymore. It’s all fake. It’s all forced. It’s all formulated and figured in to our continued plan to do nothing differently than we did yesterday in which we did only as little as simply necessary to in order to not die. Indeed, I honestly don’t believe but that there aren’t some who would be perfectly okay with that considering how much this life still asks.

But what does life ask? That we care? That we try? Oh the horror that is this life!

How dare it ask that we give it something considering all it’s given to us? How dare God ask anything of us considering the same?

No, we don’t want to give so much as actually caring or trying or fighting for something better because both we’ve been told that better is where and what we already are and that as such we’ve nothing more to offer. We’ve become convinced that this is as good as it can get. All we’ve left is to wait once a year for the newest iphone model’s release to draw near so that we can go right back to doing the same nothing that we spent every waking hour doing on the old one.

And yet somehow it still doesn’t seem to dawn on us that we’re each living out in real time this very line!

We are indeed the very people about whom this verse speaks. We’re those who seem to know only how to make an idol out of everything in life that is itself only lifeless. Been at it for decades! I was literally just praying about this last night in which I poured out at His feet and in my hope that something could be done in regard to just how far we’ve come in what’s become so clearly the worst of all directions possible.

This isn’t what I expected life to be. It’s not anywhere close in any way whatsoever! Because the dreamer I used to be grew up in a world without all the technology. We didn’t have this constant access to whatever everyone else was doing that gave us something to do so we’d not have to do much of anything else. We didn’t worry so much about politics. We didn’t tell our time on smartwatches that told us we had a new email to read.

We didn’t think water was boring but rather it so daring that we enjoyed drinking it from garden hoses!

You have any idea how many germs and stuff are on those things?

See, that’s what we worry about these days. The real question is who cares? We didn’t die!

Yet now we live as if we might should we be without our access to our favorite feed feeding us our daily helping of the most unhelpful drivel in all of human history.

Again, is this what we wanted to be? Did we truly hope to become so distracted and indifferent? Did we set excited to arrive at what is a life in which our greatest excitement is some celebrity couple getting engaged? Heard that some “professor” even canceled a college class because he was too excited to teach because of the breaking news.

This is what we’ve become.

And sadly I fear it’s what we’ll mostly remain.

Because we’re good with it. We’re okay with it. We’re able to squeeze from it just enough enjoyment enjoyed in the easiest form of dopamine we can find. All because when you make an idol of everything, well then anything will seem cool or impressive or special.

Friends, there is nothing cool, impressive or least of all special about pretty much all of what we’re interested in. Rather most of all we’re interested in is just as this word reads. It’s ashes, or at least prone to, and in fact destined to become exactly that. For everything here will burn. Everything here will be torn. Everything here will be tried, tested, us ourselves questioned as to just how much of all that’s here was allowed to matter and why.

Why does all this stuff seem to matter so much?

Or do we just agree it does so that we don’t have to be the ones who see just how much it doesn’t? Just because that would be considered offensive? And that would leave us unwelcomed, maybe even cancelled?

My question is why we don’t go ahead and cancel our own subscription to what’s become a life of such little intention that nothing ever changes?

Friends, I’m tired of feeding on ashes. I’m tired of trying to make it make sense to just keep going along with what isn’t going okay at all. I’m tired of allowing myself to be convinced that we’re supposed to like it like this. What is this? What are we doing? Where are we going?

What is life?

Again, as we’ve been talking, it’s mostly only whatever we hold in our hands. But friends, since when did life fit in such a small place? Since when did our best hopes and their better intentions become matters of inventions as invented to keep us so distracted that we only know what day it is when we again pull out our phones and check? Since when was the most important feed in life that of a social media app rather than that of the kids we don’t have in the marriage we also missed thanks to pornography offering us companionship without the risk of being rejected?

I shudder to think about all we’ve missed and just how late it may well be to retrace our steps and see if we can find some of it. And I’m scared because I know that we’re anymore so used to all these distractions and idols that we already have and allow for that we’d just give up all over again if we ever even tried to go back and find even some of everything we’ve missed.

But I know that I can’t seem to shake this feeling that nearly all of life is in fact a lie anymore. I can’t get rid of this realization that so much is so off that we should set off in search of literally anything as pretty much everything would be so much better than whatever it is that life’s become.

Indeed, I would anymore rather have absolutely nothing in my hands than to hold within them something that I know is only keeping me from hope, from truth, from happiness, from life itself.

I’m tired of not living life as we live it instead only through lifeless garbage made of plastic and wood and metal and glass.

I never wanted a life like that. Dare say none of us did.

But what are we going to do about the fact that it’s the life we chose anyway?

The smart move would be to go ahead and throw everything we have into the proverbial fire that is truth and see what of it survives, alongside a courage to just not care about whatever doesn’t as, well, it wasn’t going to anyway. But sadly I just don’t know that we have it in us anymore to do such a thing.

I’m gonna find out!

At least for me.

Indeed, I’m done living a lie through something I can hold in my hand that is then basically the same. Because no, life does not consist in nor of an abundance of possessions. And well, I’m simply over being so possessed by what I possess. Because wood can’t give me life. Plastic can’t help us find true happiness. Metal means nothing in the grand scheme of things. For all the above are promised to perish.

And friends, fact is that so too are we.

What is it that we want to see, want to be before we do?

In truth we all used to hope to see and be a great many things. And while, yes, it may be too late for many of those many things, it might not be too late for some of them. The thing is that we never used to know so well to look for them in stores or social media scrolls. We used to look everywhere for that everything we wanted to make of this life.

And no, it’s not on us to determine the ways in which this walk will go as that’s God’s part of this program. Our part is to just enjoy the ride, appreciate the journey, and for the love of everything that is good and decent, stop feasting upon all this manure that society has shoveled here in the middle!

Friends, everything we’ve become and come to believe about basically all of life is destined to perish. And rightfully so. Perhaps then we can spend the few days we’ve left coming indeed apart from the world and being there separate from what is a ship sinking into new depths of despair and indifference every single day.

I’m tired of not caring about life. And I’m sick to death of sharing in this common belief that life can and should fit or consist of whatever we can hold in our hands. I want something bigger. I want something better.

Even if it really does cost me everything I have to find it.

For the truth is that so long as all we have is all we can hold, we have nothing. Why then worry so much about keeping it?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold