Day 3921 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

James 4:8 NIV

A light distracted

Living a life trying to measure what matters while mostly only worrying about what doesn’t. And it makes for such a strange existence, this one in which it’s always seemingly just us against the world in what’s become a pattern of competition repeated for centuries, each of us entering the race seeking some new iteration of the very same something that everyone else before us has sought only to find death in the end anyway. Maybe we do it because we know the end that’s coming.

Then again maybe what we think we know only keeps us from knowing what we could.

Or in this case should.

For the reality is that we all could know Christ, and, considering the cross and the victory achieved thereon, should know Christ. We should all want to know Him and every possible understanding of whatever measure of mercy and grace He’s willing to give unto a people who need the both but in what feel daily different depths. We should all want to know the very dregs to which we’ve sunk in what’s long been this hunt that’s found us finding nothing but a wealth of unhealthy ways and a growing lack of the humility to see them as such.

We should all want to know where we’re set to go when from this life in this land we’ve gone.

But alas, all of us are gone in ways that it takes a miracle to return from.

Thankfully the miracle’s been made, and thus the way too and that by He who is the Way itself. Issue is that He can only lead us from where He meets us, and this is a problem because our pride has lied and led us into lives in which we bind our years to trying through tears to tear unto the triumph of a time tried without tumult or tempest. And that all because we like to trust those who tell us that such an existence is actually possible.

And, being the people comfortable that we are and so selfishly wish to remain, we love hearing those kinds of things. We love every lie which meets the eye of another’s life in which wealth and warmth are the daily norm. We enjoy every journey into any jaded memory of a time better than that which still lies before us along a path lain out as such both before our lives began and thus before we’d begun to give them away to the lies of a life that now seeks only to distract.

Indeed, we just like being lied to as it seems always to soothe what are both itching ears and lustful eyes, both of which only exist to continue looking and listening for more of what most say matters the same.

But you’d think that the measure of what the world says matters that we’ve already managed to find would have helped us to see just how long we’ve been blind and that, as such, it’s probably time to open our eyes and realize we’ve been living a lie that’s caused us to hide in what is a world we don’t belong and thus from a hope that we’ve likely never known inside a time given unto thinking that hope is only wherever another human said it was.

I’m tired of listening to everyone else’s ideas!

Just want some of my own.

For it seems anymore that even those are things that I live to run from. I fear in fact that each of us are growing scared to even think our own thoughts in light of how we know responsibility to work. We know that with any responsibility comes every kind of consequence that a choice can offer. And so thus we know that there’s good and bad to everything, benefits to be gained alongside prices to be paid. And yet we live as if we know so little of this that it’s never really considered a matter worth considering.

Likely because we’re busy considering so many other things that we find no reason whatsoever to ever stop and wonder why we’re so delighted by such distraction as what just about everything in this world has been allowed to become. Because such is the danger of every idolatry. It’s something that starts out looking nothing like an idol but leads us only inevitably unto that same mentality in which we think only of ways in which to please this preference or perspective that literally relies on us to keep it alive.

And looking around at what’s become of this life, it’s impossible not to see idols innumerable and new ones every day.

But seeing them only makes you wonder then how we’ve managed to miss those made in our own lives.

Planks in eyes next to speck-filled lives led by those just as dead as we but somehow dead just differently enough to accomplish in us a continued curiosity as to what life might look like from what they see as seen from where they are as found by doing as they do as decided upon because, well, we’ve got the time seeing as how we’re not really usually doing all that much in our lives and theirs look exciting enough to inspire in us a desire to try and find what they claim they’ve found.

Leaving us once again looking to the lost to help us find what none of us ever have down here but have only ever lied about trying to make it sound like what we’re doing is what we know is right to be done.

And that despite the utter lack of the Son there to be seen in the daily scenes we steal from His Way in order to live mostly only against His will.

Indeed, we are walking enemies enjoying our enmity as the world around us does so so clearly and continually, and that without all that much in the way of any cost or consequence, that we too just grow to assume that doing as they do is both as fun as it looks and as safe as it seems. A choice which only eventually leads us to living the same lives as everyone else, believing then the same lies that they tell us and we tell ourselves about how great it’s all going and how if it then got any better we’d be both surprised and somehow shattered.

And that simply because unto a people who love to think themselves as good as they can be, and life then the same, coming upon anything in the way of growth or improvement is bound to prove of a movement aimed at more of what actually matters most, and thus away from most of what never did.

A light distracted.

And that by neon and nicotine, neck-ties and novelty ice-cream. Indeed, we are so easily pulled in what are billions of directions in which we find an equal number of distractions that exist only as detractions away from why we’re truly here and too the Way that came to lead us up and out of whatever here has so heartbreakingly become. All because He created us to be more than we’ve become. And that because all we’ve become since He created us was dumb as to why.

Because surely His purpose for our lives doesn’t exist inside all this junk we enjoy to buy or the lies we like to lead or the lives both have caused us to lose.

I just can’t make my mind understand why He who created a life like this in which we all get to experience such things as laughter and love, memories and the moments in which they were made, would make all of that and all of us just to watch it all return to dust. Why would the Living One create so many daughters and sons who’ve each the ability to experience the daily bounty of His blessings intend for all of them to just disappear one day?

And, since that doesn’t make any sense whatever, why then do we live to just daily disappear into the darkened halls of misplaced hopes as are anymore given to our favorite sports team winning or seeking our victories in wars fought in comment sections and thus only virtually? Does any of what we think matters really mean anything at all? Or do we just like to think it all does because most of those around us seem to agree it might?

I am daily disheartened by all the distractions in our lives. Not because they’re there as even Christ told us they’d be. He told us that we would indeed have trouble here and told us such so that we’d keep always our guard up against the schemes of the enemy. I just find myself sometimes wondering if He knew just how often we’d live as said enemy, and that of both Him and even ourselves.

Why do we do the things we do and that alongside the more we don’t? Is it not only because we think we know what we’re doing despite a past that proves we might not?

Friends, what if all the things we don’t ever do are actually the ones for which we’re here? Can you imagine the shock we’d find if, once we reach the end of our lives, God shows us a movie of all He planned and purposed for us to be? Do you think that movie would be the same as the life you’re living? How might it be different? Surely it would be better as He made us to be His people and went even to the grave in order to save us from all we’d settled for accepting instead of His guidance and grace.

And seeing as how our continued sinfulness proves only that we’ve missed that message, wonder what more we’ve managed to miss?

I think about this all the time.

What was that life I never lived but had every opportunity to? Who is that person I could have been had I not been so convinced back then that I knew it all? Where could this road have gone had I not gone off in search of things to want, each of them only wanted because I knew of the hole inside, and each of them different because I just didn’t know what shape the hole really was?

What if we could allow ourselves to imagine that the emptiness we feel inside is in the shape of the cross, and that because He carried one for us and asks us to do the same so that we can do then a share of what He did, and in this, maybe even grow to look like He does?

Yes, what if the emptiness we’ve all sought to fill with all this worldliness was always the only thing that He meant for us to kill on those crosses we refuse to carry most days?

And yeah, what if our refusal to then lay down a life lost has left us only to live more of a lost life?

One that will then only leave Him to find nothing of Him in us when He returns to count those carrying crosses as the only ones who apparently got the message?

I have so many of these questions, and yet the weirdness is that for once they’re all asked of me instead of my asking of Him such questions as why it has to be hard or why He won’t just give me my way or why this Way has to be as narrow as it always was back when I didn’t want to reel life in and look for only what matters most to Him.

Maybe that’s the biggest question of them all:

Why don’t we ever seem to worry about what matters to God?

Because I genuinely don’t imagine that He’s at all pleased or impressed with all that much of what we’ve all decided to do. I don’t think He enjoys watching us fight and argue all the time. Don’t believe He created us to worry about, well, probably any of what we do. Don’t think He made life to be so hard as we’ve chosen for it to be. Don’t believe that He’s all that willing to wait much longer for us to turn around and see how easy the narrow way truly is.

Why should He be?

I mean, speaking personally, He’s given me almost 38 in which to get my story straight and my path the same. And that’s because His freewill offers us the opportunity to try this our way and find that our way eventually only circles back to His will and our either humbling ourselves to upholding it well and honoring it however we might or simply continuing in the commonly known way of losing a life unto denying His will and fighting all but daily then against it.

And, as much as it hurts to say, of my almost 38 I’ve given most of them to running from Him seeking to let something else shine so that I didn’t have to try to do the same.

We allow so many lights in our lives, each of them wanted for the warmth and security they offer us down here in the dark. And yet we have to try so hard every single day to keep ourselves convinced that none of them are fake even though we have to be always the one turning on the switch or pulling on the chain or doing whatever other thing that all our idols ask we do in order for them to seem as alive as we don’t even realize we aren’t anymore.

Our lights have gone out inside what are lives that were created to be lived for His will by people created in His image.

And now all we all are is but the walking image of daily distraction, blinded by so many things that we couldn’t pick any that really matter because I think we all know deep down that nothing can matter when it seems like everything does. No, rather all that approach to a life can accomplish is just a life muddied and a light distracted.

And what a shameful thing it is to be those who in Him could be lights on hills shining for all the world to see with thus no help needed from the world to keep us shining. A shame we keep on finding because our lights have been doused by doubts shared by those around us living both in the dark and so comfortable there that they live for only more of it.

Friends, haven’t we had enough?

Enough of the doubt? Enough of the denial? Enough of all this depraved debating as to how our way is better than His simply because it’s wider and has less rules and thus less consequences? Haven’t we had enough of a life lived without limits and costs?

Can’t we see that without some kind of limit in place all we can ever be is just a light lost looking for somewhere to plug itself in so that it can shine again?

I’m tired of trying to find such a place in this place where it just doesn’t exist.

Because God didn’t create us to be brought to life by a world destined to die. Rather He created us to be a light that shines His life for all to see that only in Him can any of us live again.

But friends, how can we do that when so daily distracted by so many things that so clearly don’t mean anything? Why do we work so hard to prove meaning in what doesn’t have it whilst denying the meaning of what undeniably does? Honestly, it isn’t hard to imagine the meaning made inside the message of the cross. A meaning made even easier to understand in that He told us what it means! For we were dead in sin having lived a life earning the wage it wins, but that He who created us to be His thus obviously didn’t want us to end it like this.

Because He who is alive wants us to be the same. And so He who is the Way left Heaven behind and came to walk alongside us heathen so as to help us see who we’d become in order to help us see who He can help us be.

And that is a child of God adopted through Christ back into the family of He who is alive and seated at the right hand of Him who created us to be His.

Friends, what of this world offers us a story such as that that’s filled with such love and mercy, kindness and forgiveness? And moreover, why is it that we don’t seem to want to see it? What do we gain by allowing for all these distractions that keep us doubting our need for what He so freely gives?

Can anything here help us live?

And no, I don’t mean all this junk that we think makes our lives easier or that we’ve since become convinced we can’t live without.

I mean is there anything here that can literally add years to our lives?

Or is not everything here only a lie that seeks to destroy, to distract, to divide?

Yesterday I asked what of God is seen in us. Because, considering how we were all made in His image and called unto His purpose, there should be a lot. Problem is that a lot there is not. Rather we see instead so much of the world in us that we should honestly be terrified by the promise that from which we came is the same as to what we’ll return. Because we should all know that as these bodies are promised then to go back to the dirt from which He formed them, so too then the souls must go somewhere too.

Surely we don’t think our souls are made of dirt, of doubt, of darkness or depravity or this common delight in everything from paper to plastic. Friends, we are more than that. And as such it’s high time that we live like it. And we do that by ridding our lives of all we know doesn’t matter.

Problem is that doing so is hard because we’re convinced that a great deal of things down here are important. But this is a difficulty easily solved by our asking if it helps us to achieve what Christ calls us to try. He calls us to at first repent and seek to clothe ourselves with Him and to then go and tell the world what all He’s done for us so that some might be inspired to seek Him themselves so that He can then do the same for them.

How can we do that when we’re so torn between all these other things like politics, fad diets, celebrity gossip, mainstream media and the materials we seek to buy in order to show others that we matter?

Does anything in this world make us matter more than that empty grave?

And if it doesn’t, and it doesn’t, then why continue living of a mind so double as to think it might?

No, we’re called unto such a narrow focus because there’s but a single path home. So let’s stop looking to a dark world to light the way and realize that we’re called to be the light instead.

There is no double in His direction, but rather a single purpose for each of us: To know Him and make Him known.

Issue is that living life as a light distracted by the dark is like a fish growing unhappy that it can't swim in a landfill. Sure, it doesn't really make any sense to want to, but if we're only trying to please those who themselves think it does, it's only a matter of time before we too start living like it might.

And then the light drifts further away.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold