Day 3934 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 6:5 NIV

All in, halfway

Such is all but almost certainly what this life in all of its gradient entirety seems to weigh. For here we both find ourselves quite obviously alive but at that living a life lost inside the awareness of the nearness of our life here proving far from endless. And it’s from this that we all gain, along our own way, what feels only unto us as our lone awareness of both what this life means and what more that means as seen inside how we live it. A collective then of choices all aimed at either upholding our growing understandings of a life’s gravity or rather joining with those undermining the same.

Either way, it seems most days that we’re each both all in and yet only halfway.

Home, that is.

And that is because this is still a scene which so often seems like home. And granted, that does make some sense seeing as how we are all here for what is a long time, even in a short life. And that’s because literally all the time we’ll ever have is had only here. Which brings to mind a rather ironic undertone buried often underneath one of our more common reasons reached for in regard to any moment in which we’re found lacking movement in regard to growth or improvement.

Yes, when our lives become stagnant and there find us standing in place as if unsure of what to do, where to go, who we are, what that means, all lost in between this rather consistent consideration of all the choices lain out ahead, we love to boast about how we’ve all the time in the world to figure it out and follow it through.

And we do.

We do indeed have all the time in the world to figure out such things as who we are, where to go to become a bettered version thereof, what all we’ll have to do in order to make those moves toward those better lives, and even mostly importantly why we’ll so agree to the undertaking of this personal responsibility to move in what is to be determined, even if by us alone or those around us looking for the time, to be a decision we made at the then obvious expense of the others we could have.

Thus asking us to pick one and move all in, at least in terms of direction and discipline as, well, we all know we literally cannot move in two differed directions at once, and too that any decision demands at least a little determination so as to see at least where it seems it might go on to lead.

Problem is we’re entirely ready to pack up and leave at the first hint of something being hard or becoming heavy.

Like those crosses sat beside us for example.

Indeed, we know the weight of them as we’ve ourselves lived the entirety of the life they weigh. We’re the ones who made all those mistakes that now all make what is the weight of both regret and redemption. We’re the ones who chose to chase all those costs and what have now turned into only their inevitable consequences. We’re the ones who decided to do all the things we’ve done as were done under the sun assuming we’d had all the time to do them and fix them if needed.

And now we’re the ones tasked with fixing all we’ve broken, and all by ourselves and all alone, to the very tune of whatever our every sin may truly owe.

Issue then becomes we know we can’t pay it.

Not even for one misspoken word, let alone a life lived as if a lie speaking in the very language of lunacy as has been learned by all who’ve learned to lie to anyone at all.

Alas, our many lies as told and acted upon within this life have been aimed at us mostly. Not quite only, but close enough to have accounted in us a vast uncertainty as to how to fix all we literally delighted to break, forsake, forget. A problem then compounded in that we’ve too become a people who simply know to throw away all that’s broken, to never care about that which was already forsaken and well, it’s pretty hard to remember what we’ve all but willingly chosen to forget.

Not sure then how we’re supposed to fix any of this.

Let alone by ourselves.

Thankfully there’s a story given unto us which tells that we don’t have to, at least the fixing it all alone part. Still have to fix it, find it, unforsake whatever we may have forgot. Good News is that the help we’re offered has had a bit of training as a carpenter.

So that works out.

Hard part is that He’s also a Shepherd who thus really needs us, if we’re to truly be the sheep of His pasture, to allow Him to pastor in what are then lives to be lived following His lead. And well, this is already enough to inspire in us a great deal of questions, most of which likely begin with why. Why do we have to? Why is His way so hard? Why can’t it thus be easier? Why do we have to lose so much? Why did we do what all we did that now demands we lose so much? Why can’t the shame just go away?

Why do we sometimes not want the sorrow to leave?

It’s all weird, this journey spent back to life away from home. And that firstly because, well we are alive. Or so we thought. And so there’s that. We’ve to at first come to terms with the realization as to the discrepancies designed inside the life we’ve been living and the death it’s has us living for, in what’s then not the home we’ve made here out to be. And indeed, this alone is more than enough to cause in us a years-long wrestling with many of those why-based wonderings.

And that’s just the beginning!

For they say that the very first step to solving a problem is admitting one present. Thus our problem is that proven in both admitting there’s one present, but also that it’s far more than one we’ve to deal with along what is this journey of eyes opening to see all we’ve done that we shouldn’t, said that we shouldn’t, thought that we shouldn’t, will thus most likely still say, think or do that we will eventually come to understand we shouldn’t.

It’s in many ways as if life itself turns on itself in something of self-cannibalism.

And yeah, that’s a weird thing to think about!

But the truth is that part of this gift of eternal life unto which we’ve all been called is carried in the killing of a man.

Two actually.

For in all actuality, we’ve all done had our hand in killing the Son of Heaven. Granted, we didn’t see it that way at the time in which we chose all those willful mistakes we’ve made. Didn’t even see the mistakes as being quite so mistaken as we see them now to be. Instead we saw them as fun, entertaining, enjoyable even. And that all because such is what sinners make sin out to seem.

And we see this all the time anymore in what’s now that world of which we’ve been warned in which good is put for evil and evil thus considered good.

A confusion designed inside delusion that found Him desired to leave Heaven behind to come and try and find we lost sheep so as to bring us back into the fold.

Behind a rock so cold that still none of us seek it for its warmth, let alone the life we often remain unable to imagine waiting inside.

No, we’re again too busy seeing this as our home and making ourselves feel the same. At home. Doing as we delight. Dancing through every night. Destroying every single life we might happen to meet along the way to wherever it is that we’ll eventually determine to go. For now we don’t know. In fact we all know far less than we think we might for in darkness we still delight, in lie we speak, in depravity we sink. And we laugh. We smile. We regale those around us of the fun and foolishness which found us last Friday night when we hit the town and the painted the same.

Still killing the Son.

Still a truth often unseen.

Because we don’t want to. Don’t want to realize the gravity in our having given our lives to what is a way in which we’ve so ran away from the light that we too have learned to delight in the dark seeking to hide deeds maybe starting to seem perhaps a little wicked.

Just alas, just a little.

Thankfully that image grows as we go toward wherever it is that we’re going.

Problem is it’s growing in only one of two very different directions.

For our enjoyment of what is in every way a sinful life is either growing to more deeply enjoy it or to rather come to see more of it as the life we were never created to live. The first is most obviously the easiest as all it asks of us is to basically keep on doing as we’ve been doing. To just continue basically not caring as to much, if any, of all we do, say, think, assume. To literally change nothing, other than the degree of delight we have in those deeds of the night.

Easy to see why that’s the most common way.

And considering as how the other is indeed as different as a direction may be, well, it’s easy then to see just how much of all we’d have to lose.

Because the other direction is that grown in a realization as to the so wonderfully deserved condemnation that we’ve each earned what is about a million times over. Thus it’s the decision that demands we do something different. And well, that seems to ask we stop then the doing of whatever we have been. No matter how long we have been. For in Him even time doesn’t matter anymore.

For why continue to count either our lives or the many mistakes we’ve made inside them when, in Him, we’ve both the promise of an eternity in which time thus cannot exist and that gift as is given only in His full and complete forgiveness?

He is endless, but so too then all He asks of us while we’re still here in what is a hotel, and one that even still we didn’t rent.

No, rather this life has always been His, just one left us on loan so as to see who of us delight to become His own and they as self-separated, and delightfully so, from those many more who only continue to grow in the other direction: Deeper into the darkness.

But you see, such is His fairness. It’s that found in how He allows us to both learn of His Name and the story it proclaims of a people forgiven, but only of that which they’ll agree forsaken. But that learning thus found alongside a personal decision in regard to whether or not we now the kill the second.

For we’ll either continue doing as we shouldn’t, and driving those nails deeper into Him every time we do, or we’ll rather turn the hammer unto ourselves and start nailing our mistakes to the crosses He calls us to carry.

Either way, it’s a difficult task to be sure. But alas, it’s easy to see how living a way of life still spent killing Him is the far easier choice to make as, well, the consequences then seem as if not ours to pay.

And true, continuing to do as we’ve always done in what is then a clear decision to not join Him in His laying down of a sinful flesh found living a sinful life earning the wage that all sin wins, well, that’s far easier than doing something about it. And that’s because the doing something about it would demand that we determine that doing as we always have isn’t all it’s been made out to be.

And thus then nor I suppose are we!

Indeed, maybe we’re not quite so innocent as we’ve long sought to assume we still could be. Maybe we have gotten some things wrong. Maybe, looking back, we’ve gotten quite a lot wrong at that. Maybe we’ve in fact gotten so much so wrong, done so much that we shouldn’t have even imagined doing, maybe that has in fact amounted to this dire degree of death we now need to seek.

And, for once, not of anyone else.

No, maybe our having lived in sin inside the life for which the Son came to atone so as to save, maybe it deserves to be done. To be lost. To be left behind and forsaken for once.

Yes, maybe the fact that we’ve spent our lives blind to the fact that we’ve been the ones holding the nails and swinging the hammer driving them home into the flesh of He who’s done us no harm but rather offers us in Him a home, yes, maybe that can design inside a willingness, no, an urgency to die unto ourselves.

Killing then the second, and that because they killed the First.

And that hopefully soon as He’s also told us plain that so too is He the Last. Alpha and Omega. Beginning and End. He who was, is and is thus coming again. Lord of Lords. King of Kings. Son of Heaven and God of all.

Or is He God at all?

Yeah, that’s perhaps one of the biggest questions I’ve ever asked!

And yet, it’s too the very one we answer with every single choice we make and word we speak.

Who is He? A question answered literally in how we live our lives having all heard His Name. Who is Jesus to us? Is He merely a prophet as some contend? A really nice guy who just exists to do miracles and such? A wayward idea found in the failing fragments of a fragile mind? A friend of gluttons and thieves? Some jerk who speaks against the lives we’ve come to love living? Some heathen who chose to hang out with the same, something then of an excuse for us to do so too?

Is He something of a comic book hero, a caped crusader sweeping in to save that day, but that of only damsels in distress? Is He is worry over which we stress in what remains then that often-sought middle ground between where are (and delight mostly to stay) and where we could be as who we could become? A bridge between here and home? The only One to carry a cross? The only One with a life now lost? The only One who need pay for our debts?

Or is He instead the One we now seek to pay back?

And that even though we can’t.

What do we owe Him? Is it merely some selfish prayers prayed for things to still go only our way? Is it a Sunday morning spent different than the six day, seven night vacation from personal responsibility we enjoy the rest of the week? Is it just some hope we try to seek when the life we’ve learned to love seems to be running low on such? Is it only the forgiveness we want, the kind found alongside the changes we don’t?

Or is it more than that?

From whom much is given doth the same become required.

How much then do we estimate we’ve been given?

Just a little forgiveness, and that for things we still don’t really think all that bad? A life lived hopefully more happy, a little less sad? A really big book to read, and that filled with names we can’t pronounce and ideas we can’t understand? A fancy building with wooden benches inside, and hopefully warm coffee too? A little piece of jewelry dangling from our necks or a bumper stick for our car? A Bible verse tattooed on our arm?

Lips that sometimes dare to speak what the heart’s still afraid to say?

That we were wrong? That we messed up? That we don’t want to remain who we are, where we are, why we are whatever we are?

That we don’t want to merely lay down the hammer anymore but rather seem to find ourselves coming unto an understanding as to the fullness of this faith in us, for us, before us?

A realization that we need to turn the hammer on us and to hammer some nails into crosses our own?

Friends, the entire basis of the Gospel is poured in parity. It’s an equal share kind of thing. Sharing being the word used most often in this ongoing translation of His hope into our hell. We are all called to share in Christ, but no, not just those easy parts we like. Because, sure, it’s easy to find reason to enjoy the hope of Heaven, the freedom from shame, the joy of imagining life on the other side of the death we all know we all owe.

It’s a whole different game when we find out that we’re called to share in the rest of who He is and what He does and what He did and what that means.

Because He died for our sins.

How then dare we go on living in them?

No, that’s the other half of Him who went all in for us to bring us far closer than only that half way toward home walked in the steps that we ourselves can manage to take. For again, it’s fun to think about Heaven, about freedom, about forgiveness. All of us enjoy talking about mercy and glory and grace. We love getting all dressed up and looking good on Sunday morning, acting then as if good we are because we look the part for once.

But how many of us are as eager to carry our cross? How many of us are so excited to surrender our lives and how we’d likely rather live them? How many of us are out of our minds elated at the thought of suffering in this life via the losing of that which we’ve always known and thus likely learned to love?

Yes, how many of us are ready to utterly hate who we’ve become, so much so that we seek daily that share in His misery as met in our laying down the sinful flesh?

Because friends, such is the cost of entry into the rest of eternity.

Sure, He did the heavy lifting in that cross carrying the weight of all our mistakes. Does He not then deserve to see us shoulder the responsibility of now living life responsibly?

Seems He should see more in us than just us doing more of what we’ve always done.

Because He calls us to share in His victory over death, but friends, one can only achieve victory over that which they face.

We have to stop running away from the fullness into which we’ve been called. And yeah, it will hurt to let go of what all we’ve all but come to live for. It’s entirely antithetical to life itself. But such is the hand we’ve dealt ourselves inside these lives in which we’ve lived only for ourselves. We are all sinners who deserve to die.

And we will one day.

Question is whether or not we’ll live again shortly thereafter.

He says we can, and that is a joyous promise to be sure. But friends, to find that promise we have to go all in. And when doing so causes us to realize that that means we’re here only half way with what’s then still a long journey spent learning more of Him and thus more of who we never should have been, let us focus on the promise lain out before us.

Not the rest of this heavy half that we’ve still to carry following His Way home.

Because the real question is if we are all in, why then ever stop growing in Him in what’s then a place seen as only, at best, but halfway there?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold