Day 3932 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Philippians 3:10 NIV

Filling

For in truth, such is life, and that all the time, and that with either what is here or with all that isn’t. And this is what demands of us a daily decision made inside a distanced determination as defined and disciplined as to uphold the unique blend of what we think we know with what all we can’t know enough to even think. And I think that this is where we find ourselves so easily struggling when it comes to faith for the journey that is such a belief isn’t one always easy to see.

Let alone then easy enough to understand that we can readily find reason within.

Rather faith is a journey spent into this increasing perplexity, though oddly enough one found growing against what we have known. And that’s because in faith we will go unto this place in which all we have known becomes seen as but the very beginning of the better we hope still to find or merely the perpetually less than that we’ve then no worries in leaving. And this finds for us a quite distinct confusion in which we begin to imagine this enjoyment in what is basically losing.

That of first the life we’ve always known, and that in exchange for that we never did, and that for so long that we eventually grow to agree as to the necessity of losing our lives should that be the will of He whom we grow to see as being the only hope we could ever need.

Indeed, it is in every way a very strange thing, this faith that helps us walk in ways we’ve never known. Because it is in fact, and that every single day, the very newness of a daily renewal as is won within our constantly learning to let go what we think we know in exchange for the opportunity to know more of all we know we don’t. But again, this is likely where and when our struggles begin because, well, it just doesn’t make any sense.

As I’ve seen folks saying here lately, the math ain’t mathing.

And that’s because, well, how can we ever know what we don’t we don’t know? How can we learn what we’ve never realized we haven’t learned? How can we grow in the ways in which we never knew we always needed to? How can we have any idea what we need when we think that this world supplies more than enough? How can this world really supply what we need seeing as how we have all searched for, and found, more than plenty of what this world has to offer only to be still just as empty as we were before?

Indeed, how can we even know what was before when all we seem to care to remember are but the many plans we’ve made for days still to come?

How can we still be so dumb as to assume said days which may well not be on their way?

How can we know what way to go when all the ways we’ve always chose are the ones that left us with all we have to show and this ability to still not see it for the nothingness it really is?

How can we ever grow to become something more when we can’t seem to see the nothingness we’ve become?

How can’t we see that Christ came to lead by emptying Himself of all we too don’t need so as to help us then see that He is all we need?

And if He is all we need and the only hope we have, why then hold anything back?

What are we holding back? Why are we holding back? Where could we be if we stopped holding back? Who would we have been by now if back then we knew that holding back only kept us on the wrong side of half and that of, well, everything really?

You do understand that, don’t you?

That anything we withhold with something is thus something that said thing cannot have? That our refusals, be them written in fear or just confusion because of the constant chaos, they’re nothing but stumbling blocks to better, and ones that we place ourselves? That any delay or denial of willingness only creates within us a distance that another must then cover? That our doubts form barriers that we ourselves cannot then break through?

That thus doubting and denying the necessity of our sinful life’s demise only prevents our growing to understand the gravity of Him?

That’s the greatest stumbling block of them all! It’s this common estimation of a life’s valuation that has all of us assuming that we have to know what we’re doing so that we can always ensure that we’re doing whatever’s needed to get us where we intend to be going. But friends, just take a second and consider the past now lying dead behind you…

Did any of all the plans you made or expectations you had really prove to matter all that much? Did any of them come to fruition? If they did, was said fruition of such fullness that you feel validated in some way, obligated then to continue living that way in which you alone make all the plans for your life and thus remain the only one with any say as to where it all goes and how it unwinds?

Do not the mistakes we’ve made, and the many thereof, only seem to say that maybe we shouldn’t be the ones in the driver’s seat?

Does not His willingness to endure such suffering for us prove that He knows best what’s actually best for us, and is so sure of it that He went to the grave to prove it?

What does His going to the grave prove if not that old lives we must lose if we’re to find the new beginning aimed at everything better that we all so undeniably need?

We do know we need better, right?

I mean, we do want more out of life, do we not? And yet we do understand that if we do want more out of life we thus have to give more unto life? That greater outcomes require greater efforts? That the bigger the reward the more training we should endure? That thus this hope of Heaven and an eternity spent in the joy and peace that is He who overcame death is worth whatever we have to endure along the way? That we thus don’t need to see the way or even enjoy the luxury of it making sense?

That we kind of need to stop expecting it to?

Friends, there is nothing sensible or reasonable or even logical about much of what this faith will ask of us. But the struggles seem to come not in the journey but in our always waiting for the questions to be asked. We’re a very passive people, always sitting on the sidelines of life, of love, of hope, of joy waiting for something around us to happen that all but forces us to act, to choose, to try.

To lose.

Yes, we are so certain anymore that we’ve so much to lose that we daily refuse to risk anything at all, and that for anything at all. Instead we’ve become something of lone stalwarts lost inside this barren existence acting as if soldiers guarding what we already have. But friends, that’s just it:

What do we have?

What I mean is this: This life as lived in this world offers unto us, at best, 80-90 years in which, as most, we too come to assume that they’re supposed to be filled with as much of what’s here as we can manage to find/afford. But what then? What will we have when those 80-90 end? What will we have when we’ve eventually lost all we tried so hard to gain? What pain will we feel along the way thanks to those things we’re not able to get? What sorrow, sadness, emptiness shall we know in those coming moments in which life still refuses to go our way?

Why do we still hold so tight to this idea that it might not?

Why do we still hold so tight to this idea of our way even being a thing?

What is our way expect one great big lie that we tell only in pride thinking that we have the right, power and ability to ensure that we’re the ones who are always proven to know what we’re doing?

Friends, what are we doing?

For most of us still seem to live as if we’re winning because still we’re finding all of this success and pleasure and treasure as won within all our triumphs as touted thanks to plans made to achieve them. So many here still live as if they’re so certain of what they’re doing that they don’t even deserve to be asked what they’re doing or why. No, down here it’s all become live and let live and do so by seeking your best life as is thus defined by you alone.

What can I know of my life’s best? What can I know of my best life? Can I alone live a best life when I know that I don’t know far more than I do? Can the little I think I understand truly add up to living this life the very best I can? Can my best, be it in thought, theory, belief, effort, skill or ability really prove to be the very best?

It hasn’t yet.

So why then continue to assume it might?

Because I’m afraid to be wrong? Because I’m afraid to lose what I already have? Because I’ve learned to love my life so very much that I absolutely refuse to lay it down, let it go, admit it broke? Because if I did then I’d basically admit that I’m not good at living life, let alone good enough to live one that measures up to what I or anyone else could ever think is best?

I mean, even those who are the richest and most powerful, most beautiful, most famous, influential and encouraging have someone who hates them.

What then are we living to accomplish if someone here will think we blew it?

Why do we still worry so much about worldly opinions?

Why do we still worry so much about our own?

Are not our opinions formed only upon the meager amount of information we can only at best assume we have figured out and understood correctly? Does that really sound like the solid ground we should continue building our lives upon? Should we be the ones to continue determining how and where to build our lives seeing as how it was our pasts and the choices we’d made within them that demand now the death of sin?

Should we still be then so averse to perhaps hearing Him out on this whole invitation unto our sharing in Him?

Why do we if not because we know His fullness is half misery?

That’s the struggle of the cross as is seen from our perspective, which is the only one we know to look from. It’s that from down here on this wrong side of right, and that chosen because of this prideful kind of life, we see only the death. We see the suffering. We see the gate through which we need to enter if we’re to find the hope of what we can’t see on the other side. We see only a brutal kind of torture that leads only to a tomb, which we know only to fill and never empty.

Nobody else I know has ever come back from the grave.

And so we’ve then nothing with which to compare Him against. And yet we try. We look for something we know to wrap Him around so that He makes more sense. We seek out some understanding we think we’ve understood that can stand as the basis for what is a belief in His kind of new thing being always done. We seek this version of faith in which He’s forced to fit what we think we know all so that we don’t have to admit that what we know is why He suffered.

Simply because that would again have us admitting that we’re the ones who should have suffered, and too, that instead He took the full brunt of our punishment so that we could skip most of it and instead jump straight to the hope held in He who held our cross, lost our loss, and, in doing so, found for us a kind of hope we ought to know we could have never had any other way.

All because all our way of life knows how to find is simply what we can see, thus binding us perpetually to only what this world has to offer.

Leaving then our very best hopes and biggest aspirations nothing more than some entirely unproven existence lived with the pain we’ve already felt and the plenty that’s still never enough.

Indeed, we are never satisfied in life. Banks accounts never say that’s enough. Our stomachs never say no more. Our eyes can always look for more to see. Our ears never tire of hearing what makes us feel good. Our bodies never get sick of doing what makes them feel good. We have no limits.

Other than that grave which itself is never satisfied.

A grave so unsatisfied that it literally demands life from everyone who’s ever lived one.

Yet we still live as if we can miss it somehow.

Friends, why try to miss what’s inevitable when we could simply seek to know the fullness of He who came to overcome it?

If not because, again, we know that His fullness is half misery?

Again though, my question is so what? So what if His path is miserable? So what if His Way is narrow and hard? So what if His will asks us to lay things down, let things go, leave stuff behind? Aren’t we doing that already anyway? Indeed, every single one of us is promised to lose this life! What then do we have to lose in our laying it down ahead of time and living out the rest of our stay here seeking to know more of the fullness of He who didn’t stay here?

What do we have to lose by finding the hope of Heaven and allowing that hope to grow in us daily? A few plans that probably wouldn’t have gone according to plan anyway? Some goals we may well have talked ourselves out of when they got hard to accomplish? A handful of treasures that only know how to tarnish? A lust for that which is returning to dust and already gathering the same? A name we’ve tried so hard to make matter?

A life we’ve tried to live in just such a way so as to flatter those around us who both likely don’t even know we’re here and are literally losing their lives here too?

Friends, we have so many priorities in this place, and we give them so much of us, and yet they accomplish nothing! And we know this because we keep chasing! We keep looking. We keep craving. We keep caving to this pressure placed on us in this place, by this place to be like this place and to do this by agreeing that life is only lived within this place and thus this place is the only place in which to look for all that can fill and fulfill a life.

But what are we living for if we wouldn’t die for anything?

What can anything really mean if we’d not give up everything else to have it?

What of all we have would give itself up so that we could have even another minute?

Why do we hold back from He who gave His life so that we could stop worrying about minutes and instead find our hopes stored in Heaven where time doesn’t exist because keeping track of eternity seems counterproductive?

What else in our lives is counterproductive?

Friends, I get it, none of us want to experience pain or endure loss or face tragedy. None of us want to admit we’re lost, need some help, are ashamed to ask. Nobody enjoys facing their fears, confessing their sins, embracing their costs. But the problem is that we will. All of us will experience all the above. The problem is that we so often allow our fear of such inevitables to inspire inside this delusion that says we can maybe avoid them.

But they’re inevitable.

Loss, pain, fear, worry, sorrow, shame, they’re all inevitable. Why then keep trying to avoid them? Why not face them now and get them out of the way? Why not surrender what’s already proven not near enough and experience then Christ filling in us? What do we think we stand to lose when we live to grow in He who promises us eternal life?

Or is it not only what we know we’ll be asked to get rid of that keeps us from reaching out for that hope? Things such as comfort? Peace?

Yes, His fullness begins in misery. His path is one walked in agony. His life here was one lived in such a way that brought Him so much heat and hate that the world insisted He die, and that brutally! And well, we’re all rightly afraid of suffering because, well, we’ve again never seen anybody survive something like that. But friends, that’s just it! Seeing isn’t necessary in believing. In fact, seeing kind of negates the purpose of believing!

We don’t need to see the way through to a life lived without suffering in a place in which we’re guaranteed some suffering. We just simply need to stop trying to find some impossible way of avoiding what’s coming and find instead the courage to get it over with.

That’s what He offers us!

Christ is our shortcut to hope. He is our express lane to life. He is the very sacrifice that we all need to be made right with God and thus welcomed to spend eternity with the same. What then are we waiting for? To find another way? To avoid some of the pain? To prove we’re not the ones who deserve what He endured?

Good luck with that!

I’m tired of trying to live as if I’m not dying. I’m tired of trying to find some way to avoid life’s suffering. I’m tired of thinking that I don’t deserve to be miserable. I’m amazed I’m not more miserable than I am! I’m blown away that He’s given me as much time as He has!

And so I’m done holding back. No, come what may. Bring on the worst. Give me my suffering now in what is a life that I knows only ends. Everything here will cease one day.

Why then live a life of pleasure, of profit, of peace even?

Yes, why look for peace in the one place that none of us will stay? I want peace forever, joy forever, purpose forever.

He offers us all that and more.

Who cares if the first steps of that journey taken to those things are taken in misery, in suffering, in shame or struggle? It’s not what we go through that matters. It’s where we go to.

And friends, if the hope of Heaven is still on the table, does it really matter what we go through to get there?

Only in the fullness of Christ is that hope found. And yeah, His fullness means we will lose some things, suffer sometimes. So what? He’s shown us that in Him even death ends.

What then do we have to lose by embracing His fullness?

Life is either filling or emptying, and that depending solely upon His presence in us.

What’s it to be?

Just keep in mind He flips things upside down.

Full now: Empty later.

Do you get it yet?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold