Day 3867 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Matthew 12:34 NIV

Fix it

And yes, that as is to be done through only the emptying thereof as the fact has become that of which we have filled is the same as that of which we are seen. And for what we are seen is the same as what we can likely see, and that simply because we are all quite amazingly the same even down to our being for now still found upon a ground from which we’ve all gleaned and thus gained all we’ve given way to letting in into that place from which every word spoken starts along its journey unto the hearing of those who hear then all about all we are.

But I suppose that such is quite possibly the perfect question that must be asked before everything better becomes anything we can become:

Who are we?

And granted, that is quite the loaded question as it seems always asked within what’s always been the very judgmental tone in which it’s asked. After all, it all but demands at least some degree of judgement for anyone to even consider asking it. And yet this becomes the problem it now remains in that we’ve so bought into this lane in which we’re lied to about how in this life we’re not supposed to judge that we’ve even in turn applied the lie to our own lives.

We all live as if we’re to judge so little that we’re not even to judge ourselves. But friends, if we don’t do that then how are we to know what statement to give unto the jury and/or executioner when inevitably brought before the court of either public opinion or eternal outcome?

Sure, we can all seemingly manage to skate through this place mostly unscathed so long as we try hard enough to never try hard enough. We can all weave our way through almost every day as lived here in this land of the lost never then ourselves fearing the finding of anything we’re failing. We can even sit in the silence and string together words in compliance with both one another and our every lie about our being ever better than the perfection we’ve always been.

Indeed, each of us have it so clearly within us to lie as much as we need to in order to break on through to the other side of whatever line in life we’re living both to find and then leave behind.

Problem is not many of us are looking for the line beyond which life begins.

All because we think it already has.

And this makes sense because, well, life has begun. But again though, that perfect question isn’t too far down that road either. For if life has already begun then it’s perfectly reasonable to ask what life has become. Simply because the ordinary logic of reality is that once something begins it also, forever thereafter, becomes something. Because priorities shift. Passions change. Decisions and/or dilemmas are faced and choices are there to be made.

And every single choice we make defines then at least one step we take, if not more, along what is a journey that is as every journey must always be which is a trip taken from whatever point A was to whatever and wherever point B is.

Problem then is that we’re well past point B and are all but on plan Z still trying to find that life spent not failing to have become the better for which we’re likely all but basically tired of realizing we can probably never be.

That reality hit me like a bad burrito just last night, and indeed, I even awoke today with something of a stomach ache.

The reality that I realized is that, despite my having long tried to become a better person, there’s still this anger, this arrogance, this sense of self-entitlement that comes screaming from inside at those around me who are found doing what I don’t want them to do, asking what I’d rather they not ask, inviting me to take part in something in which that they simply want to include me.

Indeed, I even look up every now and then and find I’ve snapped again at the very hands that are merely holding out an invitation to sit and watch a TV show together as a family.

Why do I do that?

Why do I do any of the foolish, hurtful, harmful, horrid and hateful things that I still catch myself doing?

Truth is the only answer I can seem to come up with is that there exists inside of me the existence of something, even if just the remnants thereof, that is so full of everything wrong, everything bad, everything darkened and dangerous and destructive that it seeks simply all the above.

For nature’s natural instinct is to seek more of that which already is in what has long been a general understanding as to the overall limitation of everything.

Because we all know deep down inside that everything in this life is far more fleeting that our foolish feelings care to find. And so we set daily to find a renewed plenty of whatever we have so as to ensure that we always have more than enough to simply sustain whatever it is that we already are, already have, have always had or in fact always been. Yes, we seek to daily top off our cups of whatever delight we’ve been drinking of.

But the problem comes in that we never really seem to ever really stop and ask what’s in the cup.

We just like that it’s full as full means there’s surely enough. And indeed, life in this world is by no means being rationed as it so honestly should be. Rather we all spend our everyday enjoying as much of everything that we can possibly be invited to become partakers of. And indeed, there is by no means all that much arm-twisting to be seen as we’re all quite rather always willing to taste and see whatever we see as something that could be as good a thing as so many others seem to have so clearly surmised.

After all, the more folks doing a thing only offers us a greater assurance that the thing they’re doing is safe for our to join, right?

They can’t all be wrong!

And yet here we sit, each of us living quite impressively alone inside what are hearts that have become homes of so many vile ways that it would take the rest of our days to even find the audacity to admit even one.

How then are we to ever become anything better when we’re so far gone into this fight for more of the life we’ve come to love, simply because we love the stuff of which we’ve filled our lives not the lives themselves as we can clearly tell that we’re all but to the point of rapidly draining of our appreciation for the sanctity of life itself, that we can’t possibly come to see that what we love in this life is likely the same as what invites inside all the hate we still happen to catch ourselves sharing?

We do understand the incredibly elementary message being shared with us in this verse, do we not?

That whatever we let in is to be then the very same as what we have to give out? That anything we consume will become what we serve unto others? That we are basically what are spiritual conveyers that at first bring close what, once close, becomes what we then becomes the purveyors of?

I really hope you get the conveyor belt idea as it’s probably one of the best ways that I can imagine to explain the point.

Because conveyor belts act in this endless loop sort of way in which on the surface we can see the things that are coming our way, bringing then toward us whatever it is that we likely want as, well, we never really welcome all that much of all we don’t. But what we so often seem to fail to realize is the flip side. For once a conveyor belt has reached the final roller, it then still keeps rolling, just only downward and back toward wherever it began.

And indeed, each of us exist as those last rollers that keep the belt spinning in its elsewise, for now at least, endless circle.

And while you would think that this would cause us to pause the program, at least every now and then, to check and ensure that we’re taking in what will then allot us something to share, we don’t. Rather we’re a people of such a consumptive nature that we exist as if life begins and ends with us. Indeed, we’re all so selfish anymore that we literally live this life only thinking about what we want in or from this life. And truth be told we don’t even stop to consider what these wants may really be.

We just always want something in what are then to be easily surmised as quite empty lives as, well, all this stuff we consume has to be going somewhere.

For we’re not so endless nor limitless as our arrogance so loves to believe!

No, rather we need valves, overflows, runoffs and drainage systems through which we can let out the excess of what are indeed cups overflowing, just sadly not with what the Bible speaks of. For when the Psalmist says “my cup runneth over”, it’s pretty easy to understand that he’s referring to God’s goodness overflowing in his life.

Not then the garbage we live letting into our own.

Garbage like hatred, foul language, petty judgement, social expectations, public pressurings to fit in and feel at home. Yes, we’ve been talking about that idea for days now. That concept that we’re supposed to feel at home down here in this place in which home is considered to be wherever the heart is and yet we don’t see all that much heart anymore.

Again, we see, and hear, mostly only hatred and foul language and the pettiest of judgements levied on only always the basis of a fallen society’s expectations and how we’ve apparently failed once again to please the public’s pressing us into agreeing to live as if this is our home and that we like it like this.

And maybe you do. But as for me, no, I really don’t! I in fact hate both what this world has become, is further becoming, and mostly what I’ve been because of it all.

All because I seem to have allowed in so much of what the world is that so too am I mostly only what the world is.

For I am entirely too often hateful, course or rash in my speaking, prone to still seeking some way to keep living up to social expectations, and thus still leaning toward caving under the pressures placed on us by the public around us in this place. Again, like I said, just last night I found myself once again having done and said something I didn’t even realize I had until after the fact.

And while that’s so typical around here that it’s typically all we do, realizing an issue only after its been conceived and in fact convened, the scary truth is that one day we’ll not have even another breath with which to seek the forgiveness of our having said or done something we didn’t realize we’d done without realizing.

No, it will then be too late to set things straight.

And that’s why I’m daily taking up what is the fight of my life to find for my life that kind of life in which I don’t catch myself failing and falling short so often.

But all I’m continuing to find is that I’ve apparently let so much darkness and evil and hatred inside that I’ve always got plenty left to share.

And that fact scares me to death!

So much so that I keep on pestering God all but begging Him to help me see more of the ways in which I’m failing to be who and what He created me to be and calls me daily to return to becoming.

Because I still keep seeing and/or hearing myself say and do all these things that not only so utterly fail to accomplish the good I genuinely want to do in life but also fail at that because I’ve still apparently little good in me to put out into this life.

Rather I, like Paul, feel as if I just keep doing the things I don’t want to do while not then doing the good I would rather do instead.

And friends, this can only be from sin because sin wins death and indeed, I’ve apparently got so much that’s still dead in me that I keep on giving it off in these little outbursts of anger and arrogance that by no means define in any way who I want to be. But still instead only seem to show both who I’ve been and what I’ve let in in order to have become it.

I’m over it.

I am literally all but physically sick to my stomach over so many of these things that I say and do. I mean, I thought I was done with the person I’d become but no, that cretin still manages to pop his ugly head up every now and then as if only to remind me of all the selfishness, arrogance, greed and jealousy that I once existed in and wasted for.

Yes, I have wasted so much of my life welcoming in so much to my life that was not alive that I still have reserves of death that I find myself sharing with those around me.

Even when they simply ask me to stay up a little bit to spend a bit more time with them!

I hate this man that I am!!

Because it’s neither who I want to be thanks to my still doing what I don’t want to do, but nor is it then who I imagine God wants me to be as evidenced in this continual gnawing inside as if a fight being fought between the two sides of life that I’ve tried to find myself living. Indeed, one side is all darkness and yet plays the victim whereas the other is at least a little lighter and yet still succumbs to all the fires that the liar, thief and coward I’ve been still enjoys starting.

Fires like that said of the tongue in James 3:6.

“The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.”

All because the tongue can only speak what all we’ve let into the hearts that have, as we discussed yesterday, become homes of things that should have never even existed. For He did not create us to hate, to hurt, to speak rashly, to speak so foully, to chase after so much jealousy or exist so selfishly that we even snap at our families just for wanting to spend a little more time with us while we’d rather leave them and go to bed early.

You know, I had this thought hit me a long time ago, one of those life-rule sort of things that I have indeed tried so hard to put into practice. And that idea is this: Don’t blame others for the choices I have made. Because who I am as a result of what I’ve done as a result of choices I’ve made has nothing to do with their being left to face the consequences thereof.

I’m the one who chooses to get up so early to write these posts. Those around me shouldn’t catch my anger when they want me to stay up late with them. I’m the one who chooses to exercise so much as I do. Those around me shouldn’t be left carrying my frustration when my schedule is altered forcing me to work out later than I’d like. I’m the one who chooses to eat so differently from the world around me. Those around me do not deserve to taste my arrogance found and felt in my trying so hard to do better that I at times think I am better.

I most certainly am not!

Thankfully God continues to help me realize that. I just wish I knew better how to help Him help me become the better that I know I can be, but only at the expense of what I have been.

Friends, my point is that we are each truly walking evidence of that of which we’re filling our hearts and minds and lives. And we can see the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, helpful and harmful in the very words we say and the things we do. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of as much as the body does what the minds knows to tell it to do.

What then are we doing? What all are we saying? And if any of either are in any way hurting those around us, then something awful has gotten inside us as it is in fact coming out of us.

And no, the sad reality is that we’ll never be perfect in life. We’ll never figure out how to get everything we do or say just right. We’ve all simply accepted into our hearts too many imperfections for that to be possible.

But we can learn from our mistakes. We can grow from our failures. We can improve and perhaps even become the better people I think we all know deep down we can be, should be. But we can only find such growth and improvement when we allow God to help us see what all we’ve let in via His forcing us to notice all that we’re putting out.

And yeah, if you listen just close enough, you’ll still hear the echoes of who you’ve been. And yeah, that’s miserable to have to listen to. But friends, we’ll never improve if we don’t.

So don’t ignore or deny the things you get wrong every day. For while they’re in fact proof of something wrong in you, wrong with you, noticing that something’s wrong is the entirely necessary first step to fixing it.

So fix it.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold