Day 3926 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Matthew 6:23 NIV

The best of us

What if it’s the worst of us? What if we’re only best at being wrong? What if being wrong is what we’re in fact anymore so very good at that we don’t care to become good at anything else, thanks to the defiance designed inside such a dire decay? What if indeed we’ve so come to love living this life this worst of all wrong ways that we cannot seem to ever again see any real need to be anything or do anything any differently?

Does not a delight in wrong only design a dedication to the same?

Is that not the overall purpose of such things as dedication, discipline, determination? Are not they all something of a determining as is always done upon a resolve to leave then a matter resolved? Granted, we’ve all made plenty of choices that only came around to be found as having been the wrong choices to make. But unfortunately it’s a measure of humility that such a realization always takes and thus one that is being taken advantage of less and less in these days above what’s a bottom looking better all the time.

At least unto our already blinded and only further blinding eyes.

Indeed, it’s a quite strange time we find ourselves living in within our living of this life. For it seems that life itself has shifted, fallen off the shelf and lies bleeding and in need of the very help that has in fact already come to bring sight to our blind and healing to our bones and life to our limbs, hope of a home. Those are all things that Christ did whilst here walking amongst the worst of us, those broken best and best at denying their daily breaking.

A fact proven all but verbatim within the verses regarding how it’s never those who are well and doing the same that are in need of someone to heal them, help them. No, it’s rather always the sick and hurting that need the healing, leaving doctors such as He no time to waste upon those who’d think it a waste He tried.

Leaven of the Pharisees and such.

Indeed, such it seems is upon what we’ve all come to feed, and that all but every day. And, as was expressly warned against in Galatians 5:9, a little goes a long way. And that because, as with faith, it matters not the size of the seed but rather only that it be planted and given the room and time it needs to grow. Problem then that having grown into what it is thanks to our collective nurturing of what is in every way the very worst of us.

And that seen in new ways every day.

And maybe that’s part of the problem and our continued inability to recognize it, realize it. Maybe it’s that our darkness is on display every day, a fact proven, well, every day, but that it shows itself in different ways all the time. For one moment we’ll be found as those digging into the ground seeking the substance of another god we can make of material or mischief. Another we’re seen as those screaming at Heaven for the hell we’ve chosen. Still others find us frolicking through fields of fun-felt filth, finding our enjoyment in the evilest and vilest of entertainment.

Some days we’re sitting amongst the crowds of those gathered to talk about how great they are, others we’re sitting all alone suddenly aware of how great we aren’t.

But the point is that our decay continues to show up in different ways on different days and thus likely seems something always new. And, being a people always quite pleased and rather impressed with all such novelty as this, well, we scarcely find much to fear in life for even our failures are easily forgotten when we’ve found another we’ve not learned as fallen quite yet.

And yes, all this is a learning process in which we always seem to approach it backward. For at first we enter into a day, a decision, a delight or desire with this idea inside that has us fairly certain that we know what we’re doing. Indeed, we’re always a people who have everything figured out, even those things we know nothing about. We’re just good like that. So good at life in fact that we can do every new thing with nothing of a mistake made, a wrong turn taken.

No, we know always what we’re doing and that because we’ve already all but pre-determined that we’re going to be right.

And that no matter how wrong anyone else may dare say we might well be.

That’s why so many here still know of Jesus but know nothing of His presence, His purpose, the power of His promise nor thus the place that is unlike this one we’ve so come to love that so many now wish never to leave. Again proving that we’re coming at this whole living of life thing in what is the worst of all ways we ever possibly could. And that simply because we still seem to think of the grave at where life ends.

Though, actually, in that we’re right for once.

But even that only sort of.

And that’s because, yes, life does end in the grave within which He calls us from. But it’s only the way of life we’ve come to know and always lived. It’s just the laying down of all of this, whatever it is that this has all become. And yet despite the daily meetings of things not as things should be, still we seem more inclined to stay where we are in what we all admit isn’t great than we are to leave toward what we cannot prove isn’t better.

How could it not be?

I mean, is this world honestly our reward? Is this place the best place we can ever hope to be? Is our having to all but daily see some horrible news story or a furthered failure to work together for anything even accidentally resembling the common good, is that really good enough? Are we good with what we’ve become as a people? As a person? Are you good with who you are, what you do, the plans you have being perhaps the very best for which your life can hope?

Should hope, as wonderfully beautiful and thus uplifting as it always seems, should it be something left to hands that hold most often an indecision as to where to go to look for it?

Should love be left to those filled with hate to determine the best way to show it?

Should mercy be defined by those who so often prove only they have none to give, need none themselves?

Is forgiveness possible for those who think they don’t need any?

No, no in fact it isn’t. For the Bible tells us that we’re to forgive others and that in doing so our Father in Heaven will too forgive us. And that if we don’t forgive, won’t forgive, well then neither will He. But the problem in this is that we, like He, can’t forgive what we won’t agree is in need of it. And well, as those who make the mistakes we make thinking them the right chances to take, and that alongside how we’re apparently never wrong, we thus cannot see that we are.

And if we cannot see that we are wrong, well then we can’t even forgive ourselves for being so.

Rather we’ll then just continue doing it in what then become lives lived blind to the fact that we’re making mistakes right and left by leaving behind that which is right and learning to delight in only all that is wrong. A way of life we’ve all lived for so very long that with it we’ve all but fallen in love and that love of living wrong has now left us unable to even imagine enduring the path so narrowing as to ask we lay down the same.

No, that idea has no welcome in our brain.

But then again I guess it wouldn’t fit anyway. For we’re a people of big ideas, massive plans, immeasurable goals for what is still a life we assume we hold in the palm of our hands as if it was ever the result of anything we’ve done. It isn’t. But alas, when the best of us is the worst of us, well, I guess it’s only a matter of time before we come around to finally find that we feel nothing anymore, much less that fear of finding out the little power we have altogether.

Much less then that needed to create life.

And much less that out of nothing.

And that being pretty much all we’ve chosen to become.

Just nothing.

Although, actually, nothing would be in many ways better than whatever this is that we’ve become instead. And that because nothing isn’t there as there is now no such thing as nothing on this side of that beginning in which God created all that is from all that wasn’t. And even should all that is be again wiped all but forever away, even then memories of what once was would remain and thus remind that something, someone was once there where they now are no more.

And so nothing can ever be a thing again.

So there goes that hope!

Which leads us right back to where He should leave us. After all, that is basically our call. We want Him to leave us alone. We want to do as we see fit without His warning of our lives needing to fit through the places unto the promises that we already know quite well they can’t. Yeah, we don’t need all His talk of eyes of needles and camels and stuff. For one thing it’s too small. Secondly it’s too strange. Third it thus makes no sense to those of senses singed and such. And finally, well, we don’t have time for it anyway.

Again, we’ve got plenty we’re doing and plans for plenty more.

Because we’re so good at doing what we’re doing that we have no reason to think we’ll one day find that place in time in which we’ve time on our hands to fill with ideas we’ve not had by then. No, we’re all but certain that we’re the ones who will prove able to ensure that we’ve enjoyed every morsel of whatever it is that we’ll come to want by the time we have to leave.

So busy making our plans and learning of our lusts along the way that we even often opt to deny that day coming.

A fact proving all by itself that we have no idea what we’re doing.

But don’t expect us to ever agree to that.

No, for we’re in a place in which we can be rich, and will do anything to prove it. We’ve created a world in which there’s plenty of potential for power and popularity thanks to social media pages and other algorithmic platforms. Life’s offered unto us all we’ve ever come to want, leaving us thus pretty sure we should then want only more of whatever’s still here. And we’ve in fact experienced so much of that that the same has now become us in return.

Simply because we’re but bound to become that for which we believe.

And yet whenever we say that we can’t believe how bad things have gotten, we somehow manage to miss all the ways in which we’ve helped.

For friends, nothing rots of itself. If nothing else, such decay needs at least some time, and well, wouldn’t you know it, but we’ve all in fact given some of our own time to the doing of things that have only agreed with the need for darkness to remain. Likely mostly only because we’re actually more ashamed of our mistakes than our denial of them would thus have to say.

But either way, be it a matter of enjoyment or simple embarrassment, the fact is that we’ve all enjoyed some degree of darkness for either the delights it has to offer or simply the shadows in which we think we might be able to hide the fact that we’ve ourselves delighted in them.

Indeed, though few will admit it, the fact is that our best is our worst. And our worst is all we’re good at. So good in fact that we show it off in new ways all the time. So new in fact that none have the chance to recognize it as being as wrong as none of us really wish to imagine it might really be.

Simply because to the blind, well, who can tell anyway?

No, live and let live. If it’s right for you then it’s right for you to do. If it makes you feel good or better about yourself, who then is anyone to say anything otherwise? No, live your life and do your best to make it your best while you’re at it.

Never mind that life’s become a pageant of the now criminally insane in which everything’s tattooed, pierced, angry, sad, ashamed, overweight, undernourished, often confused and that about just about everything.

Nothing to see here though.

It’s all good when everything’s bad.

Indeed, I think about that all the time it seems, how nothing can matter when everything does. How nothing means anything when everyone thinks that something different means something better. How there can never be any growth toward better whenever we stand convinced we’re already there. How we will never get anywhere other than where we are when what we are is so wicked and wrong that we’re now afraid to leave the dark and have our deeds shown for what they are.

Do we even know?

Do we have any idea how wrong we are? Any idea how bad life has gotten? Any way to even start to measure the amount of us that’s rotten, and no, not those around us. No, this is most definitely a time for planks to be plucked, the entire eye itself if need be. We’ll dive into that a little tomorrow if I’m still here and He’s not told me to stop doing this.

No, this is the time, this very day, in which we all really need to stop and take stock of what’s become allowed to become stored inside. And that because, well, as we talked yesterday, the eye is truly the window to the soul. What we look at is what we learn from. What we look for is more often than not what we find. What we search for is what we want more and more the longer we look.

What we desire is that which we become.

What then do we desire as is defined by what we’ve become?

Indeed, what are we? Who are we? I dare say scant few of us even know. I mean, personally, I’m myself still learning more about who I was created to be. It’s a journey, and as with all such trips, it takes time. It’s a person we can only find inside both being right and yet too making mistakes. That’s how we grow. It’s how we come to know who we are and whether or not who we are is who we want to be.

We try. We search. We find. We live, we love, we look, we lust, we leave behind and get left ourselves. It’s all a process in which we progress, or at least should, and that toward obviously something good. I mean, who sets out hoping to find something worse than what they had?

And well, who in their right mind would look around at where we are, what we do, who we’ve each become and honestly be able to imagine that it can’t be any better?

Friends, how can it get much worse?

The world as a whole is seemingly about to implode and most of us the same. It feels like every single day every one we meet is one wrong word away from blowing up into a sort of rage that none have seen before. Indeed, these days we have to measure every word we say because of such a wide-spread decay that’s left everyone’s fuse so very short that we’ve all got everything to lose should we say the wrong thing at the wrong time.

It’s in fact gotten so bad that we don’t even know when that wrong time might be. And so anymore we all just live all but alone and think it always the right thing to say nothing at all.

But again, nothing doesn’t exist.

Because even if our words stay quiet, our actions can’t.

What then are we saying by whatever we’re showing unto a world that is undeniably growing from worse to worst?

And well, just how much longer can we each pretend that we’re not at risk of doing the same seeing as how we’ve done it before?

Friends, all of us have at times fallen for that lie of life that tells us that we’ve the right to do anything and that, in light of that, we should feel free to do anything we want. And that idea has inspired us to make so many mistakes that it’s really no wonder as to why we anymore just live to deny we’ve done anything wrong at all.

After all, the shortest distance to anywhere is deciding to go nowhere.

And to a people who love the sound of never having to change, well, doing nothing new sounds like music to our ears that itch all the time for just such a chime.

Problem is the bell’s about to toll and the trumpet itself resound the call of all this having reached its end. How much of what’s to be left behind will there be there left to find in us when He says it’s time for us to leave?

He being the One who has no darkness in Him at all.

He thus being the One who would have no reason to welcome any darkness around Him.

Us then being those who are so darkened in ways, and blind to that fact, that we cannot see just how unwelcome we all should be.

We do understand that, right? That we don’t belong in Heaven? That such a place so perfect hasn’t any space for those aren’t? That even one word misspoken proves us so broken as to be fit to stay in this island of misfit toys, wicked little girls and evil little boys? That as those who shot holes in this ship we call life we’re thus those who deserve to go down with the ship?

Friends, the life we’ve come to live cannot hold water. We are sinking daily ever-deeper into new levels of depravity and a desire to enjoy it somehow. This world is getting darker, this much is obvious anymore. But what may not be quite so apparent is just how much of the world’s darkness we’ve let inside. It’s time we start trying to find out so that we can get it out before we don’t have time left to do so.

And no, it won’t be fun for us to come to realize the depth of darkness inside our own lives. But admitting we’ve made mistakes is the first step taken to not making them again. So we need to realize the failures and flaws in our own lives so that we can take up the fight to rid of them.

Because if we don’t, we’ll only remain defined by them.

And well, if we are to be defined by who we’ve been and what we’ve done, then we’re in trouble. Because there’s more of the world to see in us than there is of the Son who came to save us from what we’ve become.

Do not let allow any darkness to stay. For if our best remains only whatever good we’ve happened to do or become, well then we’re done.

For the Bible tells us that there are none who are good, not even one.

Doesn’t mean we have to settle for that. We have before, but hopefully we can now see reasons not to anymore.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold