Day 3914 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 8:13 NIV

Living dead

Such it seems have all of us been for all of us have been living this life, at least at times, according to that which will die. And that seems like a really strange if not entirely counterproductive way to spend a life, living to die. For why so agree to let go of such an opportunity to live for more than the end of life? I mean, we’ve each been given life and it seems, at least most days, that we tend to enjoy living it. But maybe that’s the problem.

That we think we’re living it.

When in fact perhaps we aren’t. And granted, this seems like a really deep thought on this colder than average Monday morning but the truth will meet us whenever He sees we need it. And as I do every day I find that I simply sit and wait as these words come out hoping, as always, that they bring with them something of some meaning unto whomever may need to hear them. But I find that I’m more often than not perhaps who needs them most as from my heart they do flow and bring with them the truth that’s within.

And it would seem then that the truth I’ve allowed within is that I’ve lived in sin as is done whenever we do as the flesh lives to choose as is always a choice that all of us have made in this kind of life we live in which we let the flesh lead the way almost every single one of all our already many days. And we’ve indeed done this so much by now that our coming out from where we’ve gone and who we’ve been may well never be what we’ll delight to happen.

Because as the truth remains ugly, and yet flows from hearts thus the same, it brings unto us this realization as to the rusted trust that we’ve lived to place in that which wastes both effort and excitement as could both be given unto that which goes on living.

But yet we don’t.

Rather each of us confine our days to the repeating of the ways in which we’ve lost or left those we’ve already lived all but for dead in what remains a past that we not only really did live but perhaps is still allowed to be a part of the present that still we live. And it’s this ongoing life spent unchanging that acts the knife that steals the life of any and all who hear the call and do nothing different despite having heard it.

That’s what met me this morning as I awoke again to another day already as unhappy as I’ve been for as long as I can remember. It’s that reality in which I’ve drown that’s had me found in many levels of a mysterious misery that’s left me so miserly that I find that I must feel even this fear of letting go my demons for worry that without them I’ll have nothing. At least nothing to live for anymore seeing as how fully and foolishly I’ve lived for them and with them for as long as I have been.

Indeed, I worry of letting go my old ways as, well, they’re the life that I know I’ve known. I know I know how to live that life. I know I know how to live it well enough to still imagine it can measure up to at least one potential purpose for my life’s potential purpose. And I know I know this because I clearly thought I did then as well. And well, it seems that leaning always upon what we’ve always been is just about the easiest thing for us to do and thus forever be.

Problem is I don’t want to be this unhappy forever.

I don’t want to unhappy at all. And yet anymore I awake more mornings than not finding the same discontentment as the morning before. Why is that? How is that? After all, I can see so many changes and growths in hope and healing over the past several weeks and months and yet alongside them I seem to see too this falling into familiar failures to allow for hope to heal even more.

Because it seems like we learn to like the scars of this brand of life we’ve carved of idols made the same.

Yes, and this is because every idol is something of a reflection of us somehow as everything made is at least the idea of the one making it. Thus leaving the maker to make certain that it’s made into whatever it is that they’ve sought so hard to make of it. Meaning then that everything we find or feel in life is likely a direct result of some dented darkness that’s been allowed to remain alive within us. Just alive enough to inspire inside of us the willingness to make idols of even ideas.

Which manifest in patterns we repeat and possessions that possess us and material that makes us think that life means more simply because we have it, and that simply because it takes the place of all that we don’t have inside.

That’s what scares me.

It’s that I know well that life in which one lives for that which isn’t living but is rather allowed to seem alive simply because it seemingly adds unto life anything from excitement to the sense of adventure we feel in our seeking to find that which brings excitement into our lives. Problem then becomes that our being excited seems to be a feeling that only fades faster and faster the more we have.

Strange that it works like that.

That we go through this life seeking for so many things with which to fill it seeking them as we contend that they’ll help us to better feel it and yet the more of the things that we come to obtain, the less we feel of anything. It all just sort of starts to pile up into what seems a crash on this highway called life. Up potentially the point in which all we think life to be is nothing but some distant memory of some almost forgotten time in which we think we might have actually been happy.

A moment fading so faithfully due to our faithfulness unto that which has to fit somewhere.

And where better than the place of that which already was and is no more?

That too is a fear of mine, only one that I apparently find so not worth the worry that worry about it I often don’t. Rather I find that I daily hop on eBay looking for one more thing to take the place of one more thing that I’ll perhaps then have to lose to make room in my life for this one more thing that I have to buy to make me feel alive again.

Proving then that greed is death?

Sure seems to be from where I sit so surrounded by things that once pleased the flesh but apparently didn’t do so in true happiness. And that’s because my understanding is that something so amazing as happiness or joy shouldn’t be such things as those that fade so quickly. I mean, doesn’t that seem kind of a quite underhanded thing for such a good God to do?

To allow us to experience such things as joy and happiness only for them to end almost as soon as they begin?

Alongside a life in which we find that such miseries as shame and sorrow almost always seem to be still there tomorrow?

Why do we experience so much of the obviously more miserable side of life in life? Is it that God wants us miserable or just that we’re all miserable without God? Is it that He created us to feel those feelings of such things as sorrow and shame or that we’ve become so accustomed to feeling them that we think we feel closer to Him whenever we do? Is it that we know life is supposed to feel like something and so we’re simply willing to always settle for feeling whatever we can, even if it isn’t good?

Or is it all just proof that we’ve become the living dead having given room in heart and head to so much that’s not alive that nor then can we be?

I think my personal struggle is that I think I’ve managed to feel alive here lately. In fact I’ve felt more alive in the past seven months than I did in the decade before. And yet I sit here on the floor and find once more this flood of feeling the fool for having taken this rule and bent it so blindly into my new lease on life being nothing but a repeat of that past spent blinded by the things I lived buying inside my believing that I needed them simply because I wanted them.

Yeah, I get that one wrong a lot!

And while I know that for it I must blame the flesh as it’s so clearly a choice made contrary to faith, in that I find this fear that I’ve lived so faithful to the flesh that God might not have any use for me anymore. And that’s a really heavy thought to have sitting on this floor on this colder than average Monday morn.

But sometimes it’s those heavy thoughts that we have in life that bring life with them that we’ll never know without them asking us to think about what we’d likely rather not. After all, who in their right mind would consider plucking out an eye or lobbing off a limb should either cause us to return to sin? And, in our current frame of mind as has been received from a fallen man that looks too much like us for us to not trust, who would consider it sin to enjoy ourselves and fill our lives with the many things that help us do just that?

No, to many that’s why we’re here. This life for most in fact is all about living fat and getting the same if at all possible. Indeed, we live as a people who know such greed and gluttony that it’s almost as if we know to seek them incessantly. Always something more. Always another need. Something else to want. And wish to have with the will to wish for it as well.

Yet I find that at 37 going on 38 I’m tiring of this elsewise endless trying to have more and want the same. I’m tired of the guilt incurred in this doing of things that I know won’t help my happy to show. I’m growing sick and cold of this life sought to hold rather than know I’m held. I’m just getting tired of trying to do this my way because my way seems to be no way in which to feel alive.

But it’s great for losing sleep at night! It’s perfect for feeling worthless. It’s wonderful at making one question their worth and why they’re here. Yes, this way of life I’ve so often lived is just what the doctor ordered should the doctor be demented and seek only the continued ailment of their patient.

Maybe that’s it, maybe I’m just losing my patience here inside this persistence always poised to purchase that plastic that I apparently prefer over the promise.

As if plastic, or wood, or metal or music can give us what He said He has.

I know it can’t, but convincing my flesh of that? No, that seems to be arguably the greatest battle one can wage in life. And that’s because it has us fighting ourselves in what’s then a promised win won alongside a guaranteed loss. And what are we to make of that? For on the one hand we’ll end up feeling good, whether that good comes in little spurts as are found in winning online auctions or watching porn for a moment or in longer lengths as are felt in exercise and eating right. And yet on the other side we’ll feel horrible too, either in the guilt and regret we’ll meet having done what we know we shouldn’t have or in the enduring what we’d rather not knowing it the right thing to do.

Either way every day we win and every day we lose.

And yet the misery still seems to outweigh the joy.

Why is that if not because we continue to mostly choose only those things which feel good for the shortest amount of time that also make us feel bad longer than we’d like? And that while refusing to do the better we could have done that would have helped us feel better for longer over the things we know better than to do because, having done them before, we know the elation last only a moment before it’s replaced by that same emptiness that inspired us to go looking.

Guess that’s the question: What are we looking for?

Because the twisted irony is that we’re going to find it. Twisted because, well, it’s truly quite backwards. For we’re told in Scripture, and many places that be, that those who live to love their lives will only become those who lose them whereas those who opt to lay them down will be the few which find them lasting forever. That life is found in surrender and death then in feeling secure. That weeping stays for the night but is replaced by joy in the morning.

It’s just that sometimes the morning never seems to come.

Why is that? Why is this life so often more sufferable than not? Why do we feel so much more of those things like regret? Why is shame even a thing? Is it not, are they not all met in order to help us to better understand the difference between that which is good and that more which isn’t? And does not then our meeting misery in the morning mean that we even spent the night doing what we shouldn’t have? And yet what do we all, mostly, do at night if not sleep?

Does this not mean that we’d be better off to be exhausted if it means we’ve spent the time we could have rested not resting where we were as who we were? Indeed, is not losing sleep worth the cost if it helps us to shake off some of the dust and dirt that we’ve allowed to cling to hands and feet? Is that not what Christ calls us to do? To shake the dust wherever we’re not wanted or welcome?

Can’t we see that we’re not welcome nor wanted anywhere that asks that we give away part of lives?

Why do we give away so much of our time to things that don’t belong in our lives as they simply cannot offer us life at all?

Indeed, why sow to that which will die when we’ve the same time in which to sow unto that which will live? And well, what’s the difference? Well, we’re told for example to not fear those which can kill the body but cannot do the same unto the soul but to rather fear He who can, and will, destroy both body and soul in the fiery lake of His wrath. Showing us then that the body (flesh) is that which is most prone to death whilst the soul (spirit) simply isn’t.

But is it?

Is that not why God can destroy the both? Simply because we’ve lived for so long seeking to please the flesh that the soul only knows to just go along with it? Should that be the case considering how it’s the spirit that was given us with the express promise of it returning to He from whom it came?

We really think He’s going to be okay with our showing up to that day with a life we lived in want and waste, never once worried about the state of our soul because we were so focused on everything that was bought and sold?

No, I don’t think He’s to be much pleased with our living to please the part that dies. And that’s because Jesus gave up His life to give us a physical understanding of the difference.

That the flesh can die but the soul inside can still find life even once the tomb’s been entered.

Problem is that our souls can only find that promise of eternal life should we enter that tomb walking behind He who is the Way who in no way lived His life looking to fill it with anything really. Rather Jesus came to empty His life, literally pour it out in both blood and water which spilled from His side thanks to a spear. An image painting perfectly the danger found in things we can hold as they may exist only to prove death.

Perhaps then proving that the more we have of this world equates to the less we have of reason to hope that we’ll be welcomed where this world isn’t.

And well, if that doesn’t scare us then I don’t know that much can. Because the fact is that worldly we’ve been, and thus destined to die we most certainly are. And why is that? Because there is no life to be found in this place as everything here is promised to end one day.

Seems then like a pretty good idea to stop filling our worries and focuses with the things of this world and seek rather to be filled instead with He who is the dead living not the living dead.

Because there’s a massive difference defined in those two approaches to life. For Christ came to die and continues to live despite having done so. We’re all promised to die despite having lived as much life as we think we have.

Perhaps then proving that the less we have of this world equates to the more we have of reason to hope that we’ll be welcomed when this world isn’t.

For if we lose what’s here then what’s here can’t condemn us. But if we cling to what’s found here, then at least part of our focus will remain on what He’s said will be condemned.

That’s why He asks us to lay it down while we can. Because our agreeing to help Him help us shows Him that we agree we need the help. But refusing to do so only leaves us refusing the help He offers.

It’s just that His help turns life to death and death to life.

Nothing else can say that.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold