Day 3889 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Deuteronomy 32:32 NIV

We lost

And that sight of who we were and thus could have stayed as they to whom were gave what remains the gift that is the grace that it still is to exist within what’s always been the goodness of God’s own image. Indeed, we’ve lost sight of the light that it is to seek His delight as opposed to our decline. In fact, judging by the fruit found upon this ground as grown by those themselves ground into these lives anymore ungrown and thus every better unknown, well, it could be argued that we delight in decline.

Why else would we so clearly continue it so?

But no, this is the way we’ve determined to go, this daily afterglow in which we know seemingly less than the day before in regard to everything from our own personal growth to thus the beauty that is our every hope. For in truth my friends, what can hope ever become if we’re to remain as numb as we’ve become in lives lived all but dumb to the line of plumb from which we’ve come to run as fast as we can, insisting always that our feet keep up with our minds racing to find some way to entertain the desires of hearts deceptive?

What can we truly hope in if we’ll never bend toward where hope goes as it grows in that knowledge that it knows of the necessity of snows and stones and sores and how He is the same as He who pours them all in their due season and thus for good reason?

How can we know what hope is until we not only accept what hope gives but in fact humble ourselves before He who is the only Hope we have?

And, well, looking around at the fruit we bear inside the scenes we show, does much of anything you see have all that much to say in regard to either He who is our Hope or even that in which we used to? I mean, growing up we all hoped for brighter days spent walking better ways in light of the lesser weather we’d warmly weathered along the way. We used to learn from our mistakes, not simply ignore them. We used to own our falls, not just forget them. We at once had the audacity to admit our errors because we knew then what we seemingly don’t now.

And that is that it’s better to confess a collapse as that’s the only way to ever begin to rebuild what once was and, should humility have a say, find within the rebuild some kind of way to sturdy the outcome against whatever issue came along the way and ruined the day in which our way finally fell apart.

Yes, we used to look for ways to do better, to build better lives in the light shown inside of the failures and flaws we were far more willing to face.

Or at least it seemed like more of us tried.

But these days, no, anymore it seems as if all most are willing to try for is only to fight toward those who claim they’re willing to either die for something different or speak a lie that’s sounds basically the same. For that’s all that life down here has come to become. It’s either wars waged in, well, mostly words (though we are going further these day) or it’s lies told in the same words seeking to avoid the same wars. And it’s inside of these two realities becoming of commonality within our varied communities that we’re all at the cusp of our too coming to become either liars or fighters.

And both for nothing having to do with hope, other than our hope that we’re proven always right and those around us either then falling in line behind our lead or simply getting out of our way and leaving us alone.

Indeed, we’ll love those who love us and we’ll all but kill those who even dare disagree.

In fact, no, we’ll even do that!

And we see that fact upon nearly every nightly news broadcast in which the anchors themselves seem to feel anymore so little that they too look as if mostly zombies unable to care. It’s not to say that they don’t as I hope we all do as, well, we all should. Every single one of us should be daily destroyed by these scenes of our own personal destruction we see. But alas, so long as said demise doesn’t hit close enough to our own lives, we’re fine.

We’re good.

It’s all gravy and this train’s got biscuit wheels baby!

We worry of nothing. We weary for nothing. We work for nothing. We want for everything, but when mixed with how little we’re so clearly willing to do, well, when push has finally met shove we just sort of settle in the middle in which we whine and complain about how unfair life is simply because we can’t have all we want of what is a world basically on fire.

And most are so far gone that, though they too admit all the time the many flaws they themselves seem to find, most will call you a liar should you dare to speak as to how bad things have gotten.

After all, how dare anyone say rotten the things we see so many still craving?

How dare anyone call attention to the tension we’re basically only tightening all the time? How dare anyone point out that we’re pretty much only collectively losing our minds? How dare anyone say anything about how we’re wasting our time and thus forsaking our lives as we live them mostly only inside the petty little fights we fight over what words were said and how they made us feel? Indeed, how dare anyone dare us all to step beyond this existence spent protecting our opinions and fight for something with more meaning than our feelings?

No, that’s preposterous! It’s outlandish! It’s balderdash and poppycock and pure, unfiltered and utterly unrefined tomfoolery!

Simply because nobody wants to admit how bad we’re doing nor then how bad things are getting. No one wants to admit how far we’ve fallen. None want to confess how much further we’ve fallen in recent years wasted upon such fervor as football and french fries. For that’s all that so many care about in life. That has literally come to become our best, our treasure, our worth, our very fire. We care so much about what’s so little that we’ve no idea what it might be like to actually work toward something worth so much more.

Nope, just keep track of the score so you’ve something to talk with your neighbor or coworker about tomorrow. Because we’ve fallen in such love with a world fallen itself that we don’t even have anything to say to one another anymore. And that simply because we know the risk of opening our mouths. Indeed, if we dare to speak about anything other than sports or the weather or what we’re having for dinner, odds are we’re opening ourselves up to being labeled as being everything from a racist to a bigot.

And that because we mostly only use our words as our weapons as we wage daily this war to prove ourselves always right, even if it means we fight over matters that just don’t matter.

No, we’ll happily argue about anything just to win the battle.

But friends, look around.

What are we winning?

How are we growing? Where are we going? How much longer can we genuinely live as if we couldn’t care less to even try unto the knowing of where this winning of wordly wars has us aimed and aiming? Where can we reach when our every inch is only taken by blaming someone else for the fact that we’re not where we want to be just yet? What hope does hope have to teach us anything that might free us when we so clearly don’t want to welcome the changes that must proceed such freedom?

Or do we even remember that hope is a freedom to rise above all these petty debates and indifferences?

Again, looking around, no, no seems as though we’ve all but lost sight of that. For again, looking around, everyone’s just always mad. Indeed, friends what’s has happened to our world, to our lives, to our hearts, our minds? Seems anymore there's every day an almost palpable anger ready to explode at the mention of a word merely heard wrong.

Is this how it should be? Is it who we should be? Just nothing but a walking animosity?

Can we not see the coming tragedy we’re all but chasing in what is this wasting of so many opportunities to choose love rather than indifference or indignity?

For what good can come of our treating one another so horribly? Are we to beat one another until we’re all so bruised and bloody that we can again look and see that we’re all more the same than we are as different as we’ve desired to design along lines we’ve drawn to cordon ourselves off from the many in our community we’ve come to hate? Why do we so divide our devotions between both community and commotion? Is it that we want to be lonely or left alone so badly that we find it somehow humane to hate so much of humanity?

On that note, where is our humanity? Where is our sense of common decency? Where is our disgust in regard to all this immodesty and immorality we see every single day in what are more decrepit ways than the days in which we thought things were already pretty bad?

Maybe they too have been left somewhere beaten and bloody.

Because it only seems anymore that we’ve not a care left as to where such things were left as we live as if we couldn’t care less to even pretend we could go and try to find them again. No, rather we just call names and pass blames as if these flames of fear and torment aren’t to prove a torrent of nothing anywhere close to triumph. For again, what good can come of treating one another so wrong?

What healing has hatred ever brought? What betterment is bought by believing we’re better than everyone else? How can we grow when all we show is that we despise the lives of those not willing to live theirs like we’ve chosen to lose ours?

And are we not losing them thanks to all the chances and changes we’re refusing within them? And that not even only to time’s inevitably running out? No, we’re also losing them to such things as struggle and strife as we awake only to wield our way as if a knife used to slash and slice at those who we don’t know nor even care to try. After all, how could we when again we just yell at them, call them names, assume them fools and forsake then yet another chance to find out who the fool really is.

Because it’s never us, is it?

No, it’s never the one flipping the bird or shouting the curse or swinging the purse pursuing the hurt of this one we hate for no reason other than we live expecting us in them while they do the same in reverse. Yes, we’ve sadly come to live this life as if everyone else sees everything the same way we do, but they don’t. Because we’re not them nor they us. And while this could be used to benefit both as we’ve all both things to teach and more to learn, no, we rather live as if we ourselves are always nothing but right and everyone else nothing but at best in our way.

And at worst just another enemy fit for a grave simply because they dared to say something that our fragile minds and failing hearts couldn’t bear to hear.

And to that I ask, what is our way and how do we know so surely that it’s so right as we live it might and that so much that we’re resorting unto the stealing of life from those who dare speak in words that we ourselves allow to hurt? And indeed, is it not on you and me to allow words to wound? Are we not the ones who’ve so vastly chosen to live so frozen inside our islands of feelings and opinions that we’re left to always feel the victim whenever anyone dares speak anything that offends them?

Are our feelings and opinions truly worth so much to us that we should see the very life of another worth less to them?

Can we not see the venom and taste the poison as it runs over our very own lips unto the ears and tears of those we live to tear to pieces?

Or do we even care consider what we’ve come to become in these lives so numb and dumb to the wealth we are to one another?

Friends, what if we saw one another as our sister, as our brother, as our mother and indeed treated God as if He were our Father? What if rather than hating everything and anyone we instead resorted to sort of restarting in what could then become a life lived without all of this fighting but rather some time spent striving together for our collective better? What if we put to death all that inside us remains so bitter and we thus stopped biting one another just long enough to realize we might actually be able to learn from one another?

Because the simple humility of truth is that is asks how we can know what we don’t know. For such is the general purpose of learning as it’s a growth in the understanding of what was previously either misunderstood or simply something we weren’t aware of at all. But you see, how can we then learn what we don’t know if we don’t humbly go into the company of those many around us who may have something that could help us grow into the better of us both?

And that simply because we could offer unto each other the lessons we’ve learned the hard way so as to help one another avoid some of the struggle we endured to learn them.

But no, we instead live to be served rather than to serve, and that then leaving us serving only a steady helping of hostility toward basically all of society as if they need only what we want to give all while we want nothing of them in return, not even a gift.

Yes, we’re anymore so sullen and shifty that we even despise the getting of gifts because such a horror asks that we humbly say thanks. And even this gratitude seems so contrary to our common attitude that we’d indeed rather have nothing from no one than to feel as if we owe something to someone. We want only to be ourselves, even if to be it means we do it alone. And granted, I’m perhaps the walking definition of introversion as I can sit happily by myself and feel quite heartbroken around those who are but what this world’s become. But even then I realize that if all I ever know is only all that I assume I already know enough to be right about, then I’ll never possibly know just how wrong I am.

And if I never know that, then I can never ask to be forgiven of all I forsaken or taken for granted.

But that’s exactly my point. What all are we taking for granted in this way of life that has us all playing only either victor or victim? What can come of this cancer we’re causing in the form of forlorn statements made as to the general worth of a person as anymore measured by only what end of the political spectrum they lean toward? What improvement can there be when all we see is but a daily furthering of our fall into serving one another venom as we spew again the poison that we’ve each so filled with that we apparently see no recourse but to insist onto those around us?

No, let us stop taking one another for granted, or even worse as if enemies. Because sure, while some might be thanks to what’s become of this sad reality, the truth is that not everyone we meet is someone we should hate. In fact all everyone is is but the flock to whom we’ve been sent. Ever think about that? How those around us are themselves image bearers of the same Father who sent the same Savior to save them as He has us?

Or, and this one might hurt a bit, has He truly saved us if in fact our lives are still being lived at all like those of who we claim we once were? Indeed, is there any difference to be found in us from who we were and how we lived when He first found us? And well, if there remains any hatred, any deception, any desire for the destruction of those around us, how could there be?

Look, I’m not saying that we need to all live as if everything is great and nobody does anything wrong. All I am saying is that we’re all doing things wrong that are causing us each to contribute to how great everything isn’t. And so as much as we may often feel the victims of words said without thinking or actions done similarly, the truth is that until we start treating one another like family, things won’t get any better.

And yes, every family has its differences and dysfunctions. But the point is that family tends to be more willing to put some things aside so that they don’t continue to get in the way of our collectively seeking the common good of those we love. And well, seeing as how He has called us to love even our enemies and to go so far as to bless those who curse us, it seems pretty clear then that the venom and poison we see and hear and all but anymore feel should have no place in us nor thus how we treat those around us.

For such things are but evidence of a misplaced devotion void of such things as discipline, determination, decency and discipleship. And so let us stop then going unto those around us as if we know only to hate them for what are reasons we probably haven’t found yet. For that is neither how Christ works nor then how we serve. Rather we serve He who is love personified, and that seen perfectly in how He laid down His life for us to find all the reason we could ever need to start living ours better than we ever have.

Let us then live out our share of His example in our own lives by treating others as if they’re His too. For while most may never admit that they are, He died so that they all could. And if such is something that we claim to have come to believe, then friends, venom and poison is nothing that anyone should see, hear, feel or even suspect in our lives.

No, we are here to be His light. Please don’t let the darkness of the world around us convince us to stop trying to shine a little brighter today than we ever have before.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold