Day 3865 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ephesians 4:18 NIV

Found it

It’s now just that I don’t really know what it is nor then what to make of it in light of what we’ve made of it in light of our communal confusion as to the question I asked yesterday, as is found only in our having never asked it before. For yesterday I asked this: If this world is our home and home indeed where the heart is then where is the heart? And I asked this because it seems daily that we see no such mercy as that met in what the heart ought to be, ought to do, ought to give, what we ought then to see.

No, rather we see only endlessly the mercilessness of a fallen humanity that somehow continues to fall daily for this deception that tells us both that this world is our home but also that as such it’s supposed to be where we feel we belong.

And while this may in fact be the case for many, as it daily so seems to be, what I fear we’re all either finally finding or have been feeling for quite some time or will all indeed feel one day is that the idea just doesn’t add up. Sure, it’s easy. It’s common. It’s clearly considered quite normal in fact. But still the fact remains as found within a thought I had a little while back that’s stuck with me like the shadow I can’t seem to shake.

And that idea, that reality is that it’s amazing how out of place you can come to feel in the only place you’ve ever been.

In fact, there’ve even come times, and many of them, in which I wasn’t even comfortable in my own skin. I’ve endured many a day in which nearly my every way was only walked within a general walking away from everything from responsibility to thus reality. For in truth the two are unanimous when it comes to the meaning of life as life cannot mean anything without the either.

Yet we anymore seem to prefer if not thrive upon this consensus that tells us that we’ve every right, even a great many outside expectations, to both forge our own reality by which and in which we “live our truth”, a lie that leaves reality lying bloody on the floor of a foolishness entirely too real to fend off on our own and that because so too has responsibility suffered the same fate.

All because the both simply ask that we humble ourselves and in so doing find our eyes finally seeing that what we have been doing is only contributing to the overall decay of life and the very destruction of this one place in which we’ve lived it.

And indeed, again anymore it seems as if most are quite agreed upon this idea as sown of the seed that says that this place is the only place in which we will live a life. And that because it’s the only one that any who are here ever have. And the problem then is that as defined in how blind we are to the very premise of a better promise the likes of that held in the hope of another home, a truer home, a lasting residence as promised in the presence of He who is the Life.

Problem is He’s too the truth and we’ve just all got a lot of problems with that.

Simply because His truth often dares to counteract this one in which we’re living thanks to our having been given and too giving this idea that says life is to be lived best only when done via our truth. But what I don’t seem to be able to understand is how such is supposed to work. I mean, with so many having already so bought into this belief in which they see that it’s best to be them alone on the throne in their life from which every choice is made and consequence denied, sure seems we’re still having to see entirely too many consequences as borne in the actions of those who think them okay to do.

In truth, there are some people whose “truth” had found it reasonable to steal, to kill, to thus destroy the very fabric in which all of life must be weaved if any of life is to be lived. For the most foundational principle in regard to life is that without some baser acceptance of some simple moral compass there can then be no agreement upon direction. And where there’s no agreement as to the direction we’re supposed to go, well then everything just all but instantly unravels as everyone determines to go their own way and that mostly alone.

And down that path all we’ll inevitably find is that we feel as if everyone else is an enemy that needs to be vanquished for threatening the very sanctity of our chosen insanity.

The insanity chosen because it best aligns with the “truth” we’ve chosen to live by which is always, and without fail, found feeling as if such foolishness as feelings are at least theoretically equitable to even human life.

And indeed, upon such an outcome we have arrived as not two weeks ago we watched a man die because the words he said made someone feel bad.

A horror which too proves that the past repeats as the very same scene was seen painted upon a hill called Calvary some 2,000+ years ago.

And no, I’m by no means saying that the man who lost his life a week prior to last was some sort of savior as we’ve but One of those and He did the job so fully that none other shall ever be needed. I’m merely saying that society hasn’t been changing so much for the better as all our ego and advancement in such worthlessness as technology has been allowed to help us assume.

No, still we remain apparently a people willing to subject the world to death in order to live a life according to some version of truth in which we feel it in our hearts acceptable to hurt another for nothing more than words, opinions, perspectives and pride.

Yes, pride is the ride by which we will all die as it’s what caused the train to leave the station that was Eden in which we could have so easily stayed inside of God’s endlessly loving provision for all of forever. But no, instead we caught wind of this idea that there was more to have and thus that God was holding back and keeping us from being more like Him, seeing more like Him, living more like Him as is done in our knowing more than Him.

And just look at the more we have now!

Yeah, our more has been found in such things as murder, rape, incest, immodesty, immortality, mortality, greed, gluttony, gore, violence, hatred, political division, social unrest, public shaming, name calling, stone throwing, gun toting, knife wielding, plan having, pain giving, lust loving, hope robbing, bank robbing, law breaking, heart breaking, life losing.

Indeed, it was never God’s plan for man to fall so far that we’d all but dig that 6 foot hole ourselves. But as any Good Father would do, He chose to create the shovel and ask us to simply stay away from the tree.

But no thanks. No, for the fruit of that tree was told to you and me as the very same something that we would need to make this place our home. And so we chose to grab that shovel and set to simultaneously trying to chop down that tree and pretend we don’t see the hole we keep on digging.

And that’s indeed a lie we buy every day on every phone, every TV, every billboard and in every hellywood movie. It’s all about more. Pushing the boundaries. Crossing the lines. Choosing our own destiny and devolving into a sort of darkness that’s entirely too willing to alter that of another for whatever may come to us as reason enough to do so.

Friends, we are very much “separated from the life of God.” In fact we walk amongst a quite great many who live as if there is no God, and they’ve some of them at times past and still to come become of the opinion that those few freaks who do believe in such a hopeful belief need to go so that their show can go on getting nowhere and doing nothing and meaning then forever the same.

Though I guess I can make sense of that senselessness. For after all, if you are doing nothing with your life and thus chasing nothing in your life and thus finding nothing better in your life then you must have no life and thus likely don’t care if anyone else does either.

Especially those who do have a life as lived in hope and growth and love and mercy and the miracle that is believing so perpetually in better that they’re even willing to suffer in order to know for sure.

And indeed, anymore this world is home to a degree of suffering that seems only deeper by the day.

And yet still so many consider it home and call it the same.

But again my friends, if this is home and home is where the heart is then where’s the heart?

Because there’s none in hate. There’s none in hostility. There’s no heart in tearing one another apart. There’s no heart to be found in burning cities to the ground. There’s no heart in robbing banks, grocery stores, or women of their husbands, kids of their father, men of their mother, dads of their sons and sons of their daughters.

No, there’s very little love in this world anymore, and so I estimate that there’s little heart to be found either.

And yet this is home to some apparently, perhaps even most maybe.

Yes, seems that most are plenty okay with what things have become. No matter the separation. No matter the silence. No matter the sorrow or sadness. No, those things are apparently to be perfectly welcome within “our truth”. Or at least they’re apparently welcomed within that of those around us who’ve long since given up on trying to be decent members of a stumbling society struggling to remain numb to the reality that we’ve become so dumb to every manner of any better that we just sort of seem to have chosen to resort to fighting it out to see who of us will last the longest.

Doing then daily all we can to break the will of those around us so that we can prove our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual superiority over these puny losers we’re forced to call neighbors.

Not that we do and certainly not that we treat one another as such anymore as for the most part we don’t.

But we are technically sharing the same dirt and air and so we are by definition neighbors.

In fact we are, by definition, brothers and sisters seeing as how we all came from a single starting point as painted so perfectly in that Garden we mentioned above.

Never mind that though. No, because for this world to feel the home we’ve heard it should it must be only us who determine what’s good and who all isn’t contributing to our getting thereof. And make no mistake, when life so comes to center on our both defining whatever better is supposed to be and our then growing in greed seeking to have as much of it as we can possibly hold, there is no extreme to which we’ll not go in order to get the more of what we want.

Which eventually just becomes left alone so that we don’t have to answer for who we become and what all we come to do because of it.

That’s why so many have long been so happy to live as if God’s not there. For that theory all but instantly resolves the whole reality and responsibility issue we all face and feel. After all, if there is no God then there are only people. And well, since we are all a people too then we’ve just as much right to say what is right and what is not as any of the rest of us do. And if we do have that right to determine for ourselves what is right and what is not then we’re not in any risk whatever of our ever being wrong.

And thus there can be no consequence because we’ve come to see ourselves as judge, jury and executioner.

Some of us literally!

But you see my friends, much like how the Bible talks about a building needing a firm foundation that’s able to withstand all the ways in which this world will blow and beat against whatever is built thereon, so too does a building need walls. And while we’ve all so undeniably built up a great many walls seeking to provide for ourselves a selfish sense of safety here inside our selfish sense of superiority, what we’re going to find out fairly soon is that the paper that is our personal opinion doesn’t really have quite the rigidity needed to make a house a home.

And yet that’s exactly what we continue to all but build our lives around, upon, within. It’s anymore nothing more than what we think to be best as is always seen but from a single angle that’s always held just right to make it seem like the right we want to have is the same as the right thing to do.

Leaving us once more alienated from God due to the widespread ignorance of our thinking that we can know better what to do with, in and for this life than He who created this life.

And indeed, that’s sadly where our hearts have gone.

Each of them.

Every single one.

They’ve all left the house of hope to which He still calls us to return as is held in that home that is Heaven in which all treasure is so safe because He sealed the gates with His very own blood. Left it behind in exchange for this common way of life in which we all live as if life is nothing more than a path for us to decide. And on this path we daily descend to what are demonstrably demonic depths seeking a new degree in depravity to hang next to our doctorate in destruction.

And we are all incredibly skilled in that!

Don’t believe me? Just look around.

Again, is this home? Is there where you want to be, who you want to be? Is there anything to be found within everything you see that seems to show anything of heart, of hope, of peace, of meaning, of a place worth staying?

And no, I’m not saying that we should dive any deeper into our already general lack of appreciation for life and where we were given the undue chance to live it. I’m rather just saying that who we’ve become and what we’ve then done to this gift as a result isn’t anything that we should in any way be so proud of enough to put our name on.

Yet our name’s all over it.

Speaking personally, my name is on every person I hurt. It’s on every improvement I refused. It’s on all the humility I signed off on never seeking nor then agreeing to welcome. It’s on every lie I’ve told. It’s on the hands that held a phone or typed on a computer some website or search seeking to see something I now wish I never had. It’s on every prayer I never prayed. It’s on every day in which the Bible stayed dusty. It’s on every moment that I chose to remain lazy, fat, unhealthy.

Yes, my name is all over my life and how I’ve lived it thinking I knew best how to live it.

I didn’t.

Because I can see now there was no heart in it. And where there’s no heart there’s no life as life is lived only when the engine pumps the blood that gives it through the body that gets to live it as a temple of the spirit that we’ve all but left for dead behind it.

That hit me the other night as I enjoyed my nightly stare into the darkened field behind our house. I realized the lack of life I’ve lived in the life I’ve lived. So many years spent doing so little, and yet so much of that that was so far from good. Yes, I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, with my life, mostly to my life I fear. All because I never had the heart to hope for more.

Just settled always for what was easy, and again, what’s easier than thinking we know best?

But friends, that’s right where we’ve all left behind the life of God in search of this depraved idea of our life being better without Him there, simply because we don’t like rules or expectations, mostly just the consequences for failing them, breaking them.

But can any of us say with any honesty that we honestly like who we’ve become and what the world’s become because of it?

Do we like it like this?

Enough to still call this our home and seek here then our every hope?

Maybe you do. Seems many would agree. But me, I just can’t help but find I’m unable to let go of that realization that life doesn’t exist without a heart.

And too that I see very little of such a hope in this world, and therefore for this world.

No, rather I believe the Bible as it just seems to make entirely too much sense as it just seems to entirely match what I know I’ve made in and of this life.

But I guess that means that I must too agree that this world is then passing away because it deserves too thanks to all the sin we’ve seen to applaud being done within.

Yes, “our truth” has caused the coming decimation of all we see and most of those around us. Probably not something we should continue patting ourselves on the back for having so fully accomplished.

No, it’s time for us to stop playing the accomplice to a world still enjoying its every chosen enmity. For God is there, and as such He must be pretty ticked with what He continues to see taking place down here. If for nothing else than He created every heart to beat to the tune of life, not to become of the song willing to steal it.

Maybe we can convince Him we didn’t mean it, this utter hardening of everything from our every heart to any semblance of any hope anyone may have left.

Don’t see how we can make that case seeing as how we’ve made a world in which life is lived in what feels an endless tunnel in which we don’t know where to go, don’t care what we do, don’t have much desire to change either either.

No, don’t imagine that He who is the Light who is the Life will be in any way pleased or impressed with our having chosen the darkness and let so much of it in that we’ve become darkness ourselves.

Not when He’d apparently rather die than to leave us where He found us.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold