Day 3911 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ephesians 5:7 NIV

A companion of fools

Such has been or at least become the rule of what’s been made of basically all company and thus our living to accompany. And no, it should have never been so allowed to reach this sort of outcome in which one is almost better off to go alone as we all go along what remains the same road aimed into the same finish. But it’s the promise of said same finish finding for us each an eternal outcome that is but one of two bitterly different results that has come to define for us the plausible need to disassociate from past or perhaps even still present associates.

Simply because a companion of fools shall still suffer harm.

Question is for how long and the answer to that is for as long as we continue to look to or lean on or learn from those around us who may well be like most here and have little to any care as to what God at first created us to be and now in Christ calls us to again become. And the odds are so incredibly slim and narrowing at that because such is the path that He who calls calls us from and thus onto. And well, there’s simply nothing that many find all that interesting about a path so narrowing.

Which leaves us to endure it in whatever way He may see fit so as to ensure us passage unto that promise that both the best is yet to come and thus the worst will be left behind.

And while that most hopeful of expectation can now offer us something of the proverbial carrot held ever before us so as to encourage our audacity to keep going into a narrowing which only gets harder than tough and tougher than we, the issue will continue to be that we’re all still here in what remains something of a race in which we’re all walking, running, crawling or crying alongside the billions of others who are themselves living and trying to spend their lives finding that ever-elusive ideal that a great many ideas have thought they had all but already accomplished.

Yes, our every human intention has long been unto the invention of a best life lived without struggle and knowing then nothing of strife. And yet despite the sheer number of those who’ve tried that road to hold and the many things they’ve done, wanted, won or worried over along their way along this plain, the fact remains that there’s not a one of we fallen creation who’ve ever actually managed to track down that idyllic place or purpose within this place without purpose.

And now that’s by no means trying to say that this place has no purpose nor thus that those who live as if this place is the only place they’ll ever be have a similar lack then of a directioning. For in all actuality all of creation was indeed created with something of a use, a reason, a value given for what remains a season in which we’ve come to lose our love for reason, for value, for worth and warmth and wanting the more that we for some reason chose to lose along the way.

And so that’s become the problem. It’s not that none of us nor any of this has any use, any purpose. It’s rather that we’ve all seemingly descended upon and settled within this overall common estimation that has us all communally believing that our grandest of reason is to merely enjoy ourselves and to seek such pleasure within whatever of the many worldly treasures that so many around us have determined to be their best.

A problem thus furthered within our feeling as though part of life is to be best lived within what are as many friendships as we might possibly make while we’re here in what remains an apparent hunting ground filled, again apparently, with so much treasure that pleasure is found around every corner and that everyday and that by everyone. For when self-indulgence becomes the goal, personal responsibility becomes a necessary casualty.

Yet one that then demands the denial of Him who created us in that very same image as was the Son created in.

And if there’s anything that Christ must be understood as, responsible is high upon that list.

I say this because He’s the One who came to us to take from us what we’d stolen from Him and given to them who had led us astray into this way in which all of us have walked and many walk still. And yet His walk was one with the weight of the cross in tow, knowing within every step where He was to go and just how few would go with Him there. Both because He knew that He came to die alone as only He could so atone for the sins of the many and somehow manage to survive the death that all sin deserves but also because He understood that there were, there are none in this earth who would choose to lose the life He came to leave.

Because He knows that none of us ache to go into that place where this life’s left to waste in what is a grave so filled with the more that still could have been. No, more of what’s here and all we’ve known is the most that many seek still to know.

Leaving the same many to suffer the harm of having made this world their home in the hopes that all here would endure at least long enough to measure up to their estimation of a life well lived before their inevitable evacuation from what has always been a place that none of us could stay nor then have any reason to live so clearly assuming we might.

And I contend that it’s such intent that has us all content to continue living in tents with those tense and tried from having given their lives unto that baser search for the lesser outcomes of a fallen earth.

Yet we do it because we seem to understand the gravity of such wisdom as that written for our benefit in such places as Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 whilst somehow simultaneously all but willfully discounting the danger discussed in Proverbs 18:24 or 1 Corinthians 15:33.

Indeed, I think we all would readily agree to the beauty beheld in Ecclesiastes telling us that “two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”

And yet we seem to have become so entangled in our collective search for such friends as those upon whom we can lean when life turns the same that we’ve, again, all but forgotten the words of warning written in at best an equal number of places in Scripture if not in vastly more. For, contrary to our lesser assumptions, “one who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin” and that simply because “bad company corrupts good character.”

A verse which explicitly begins with asking us to not be misled.

Which is the entirety of the problem at hand.

It’s that all friendships, every relationship we have is one that has the express opportunity to influence us in what are ways that no one else in the world can achieve due to the distance kept between us and most in this place. And this seems quite easy to understand as nobody can ever be friends with more than a handful of others. We may know more than that. We may have met somewhere in the neighborhood of thousands of people over the course of our time already spent.

But the fact is that our friends are but few in number as we again seem to understand the rarity in finding those scant few who do seem to have our best interests at heart.

Issue is that once we come unto that belief we never really seem to work to ensure it remains as we imagined it was. Rather we just sort of go along amassing these companions always assuming that all of them are who we thought they were and thus are there for us and want for us the best of life itself. But the growing problem is that our world’s unraveling into such a depth of selfishness that we’re all at risk of granting entrance unto our hopes and dreams unto those who don’t really care.

Not to say that nobody does. It’s simply pointing out the odds.

For again, while that verse in Proverbs does go on to say that “there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother”, the challenge is finding them. Because these days, a journey I’ve endured with pretty much every “friend” I ever had, the chances are that our companions are likely nothing more than relationships of mere convenience agreed to by all involved simply because of the ease in getting along when sharing the same vicinity for a while.

That’s why we have so many friends in school or at work or on whatever sports team we join. It’s a grouping of individuals into these circumstances that offer them the basic ingredients of the continued acknowledgement that will likely, as it always has, eventually encourage all involved to get to know one another so as to better enjoy the experience as is done with friendships.

How better can we make anything better but to go through it together?

But you see, the issue has always been and has only become even more precarious of late in that we all now walk within a world filled with so much hate and indifference and disinterest that I hate to say it but I fear that even our friendships are to many becoming unimportant. Again, I say this from personal experience as my life has grown into the loneliest it’s ever been. And yet, then again, I’m also the most content I’ve ever been with who I am and the excitement found and felt in regard to where I’m going.

And maybe that’s because I’ve always been one all but adamant upon introversion and its introspection. But the fact is that I’ve found so much failure in the elsewise widely understood appreciation of a relationship’s purpose that I feel now no need to seek again what I have every reason to believe would only find someone coming into my life only to yet again leave as I continue along what is a way that I honestly don’t know many who are willing to walk.

And that’s not to say that we have to always walk the same way as those we walk with.

But we do have to have the same destination in mind.

And that’s seemingly where I’ve managed to lose every past friend of mine.

Maybe I just came to be afraid of remaining who I was. Maybe I started seeing the danger in being around those I was. Maybe it was nothing more than the inevitability of a life spent seeking Christ in a daily growing urgency within a world that is vastly not doing the same.

Either way I just looked up one day and realized that the road I was on, though paved in fun and able to find plenty of friends, it wasn’t going where I wanted to be and thus wasn’t going to help me be who I felt I needed to become.

Thus every past partnership has now been severed and, though there were a great many moments in which I wondered why, living now this life I get to live with the hope I know I have, I can finally say that I wouldn’t take any of it back. Not because I don’t appreciate the ones that God gave me to walk with when I needed them, but simply because I understand now that I was just meant to come in this different direction aimed at what remains most prayerfully the same destination and outcome, but a life lived too differently to have the expectation of there being many if not any who will walk it with me.

And yeah, that’s scary. It’s even unfortunate seeing as how we were all created in God’s image and thus all of us are indeed God’s children and thus this means that we are all brothers and sisters descended from common ancestors who are still living alongside one another with what are so many opportunities still there to seek for the mutual edification that Scripture talks about.

But such growth in said hope is sadly not something that many here seem to be as sold upon as a few find themselves having become.

And again, that’s not to say that there are no others who believe in Christ or have surrendered unto Him theirs lives as I imagine there are many who have done just that. It’s simply to say that, judging the fruit as we’re all called to do, there remains an ease in seeing that the vast majority here are not seeking He who is the only hope any of us have of finding life when this life has run out.

Which is why we’re called here to be not partners with those who practice the things we’ve been discussing of late, things that yesterday’s verse classified as even shameful to merely mention. For if such actions are shameful even to talk about, what then makes us think that we’re somehow safe to be found walking even alongside those who we well know are walking within them? And well, what then would make us think that we’re of such a personal resolve to not eventually be then found walking within them ourselves?

Because that’s become what this world considers the overall purpose and pursuit of all friendship. It’s nothing but a source of affirmation brought close so as to be there always to tell us how great we are and how wonderfully we’re living our lives. That’s the kind of friends that people want. Those who soothe itching ears and ignore wayward deeds. Those who tell us what we want to hear out of their shared fear in losing our willingness to lie to them in return.

Yes, this world has turned friendship into mere agreement.

And yet this is exactly why friendship with the world remains enmity with God.

It’s because, again, it’s just too easy to see that the vast majority in this place are only still living to fall short of His glory and grace. Sin remains the drug of the masses, and it’s being taken in ways that are simply intolerable to see. It should absolutely shatter our hearts to see the condition of the world around us and those within it. And yet instead what we see and hear are a great and growing many cheering it on.

Leaving us in need of asking ourselves why we should continue feeling as if we need the risk of allowing those cheering on the fall to be called our friends and bring with them then the influence that they would seek to have in us? For anymore friends here seem to only want those around them who are like them. And yet then this would mean that to be friends with many would ask us to be then many things. To agree with many things. To approve of many things. To say anything that the many would want to hear us say.

To be whatever anyone else would want us to become.

But if we’re still trying to please people then we are not servants of Christ.

Because people are still living in the sinful ways of life that Christ died to call us from. We thus cannot continue to walk in step with those who so mock, belittle, betray He who is the only Way. No, we cannot serve two masters, walk two paths, live two chapters.

Simply because every road eventually forks and finds for us when it does a decision being demanded as to the direction we go and who we become along the path we choose.

A decision we thus cannot risk allowing to be made by what are a great and growing many who so clearly have so little reverence of or respect for He who is our Savior. No, we cannot give the power of influence unto those who may well use it to lead us only further away from the only hope we have of finding life waiting when this life has ended.

Because the Bible tells us that narrow is said gate and only few shall find the life promised on the other side. And that sadly then most will only remain upon the wide and suffer the fate given unto that choice.

It all comes down to the voice we listen to and just how many there be. And see, that’s the struggle because friendships, like money, they’re anymore seen as something best proven in quantity. That the more you have the better you are. And sure, this seems to make some sense as, well, if two walking together have the hope of a good journey as they can help one another, walking then with 10 or 20, or even 200 should then find us all that more ensured of good success.

Problem is we’re clearly not going the same direction, or at least toward the same outcome.

No, many here continue to do things that God has defined as abhorrent, distasteful, immoral and unrighteous. And all who practice such things will find at the end that they’ve then no inheritance in the kingdom of Heaven. They’ll have no place in that place He’s made as they lived having gave no place to Him in their hearts or lives.

And thus we find that we cannot allow for what may well prove a partnership with those willfully living to lose what none of us can find any other way.

For there remains but one Name given unto mankind by which we must be saved.

One.

And it’s that of He who endured the harm we all deserve for our having been partners in the sin that so many here remain lost within. Please don’t remain lost with them.

For while to be partners with those partnered with sin has sadly become what all have been, our remaining as we were is not at all what He who calls from the grave asks that we remain.

Because the truth is the grave is where many lives end and only few begin.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold