Day 3936 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 6:3 NIV

The art of dying

It’s in every way something that takes all of us an entire lifetime to learn as it’s in every way something that seems entirely antithetical to life as we so fervently love to assume we understand it. And yet, that’s quite the problem, isn’t it? That despite however much time we have been alive in what thus seems clearly a life that’s afforded us then a continued growth in what ought to be an understanding as to how to live a life, we don’t. We don’t. And while this is something which could be seen in those many, many things that still we somehow manage to learn along the way, maybe it’s something best seen inside another scene.

A scene shown in our dying.

Which just so happens to be the movie we never seem willing to see, to show, to act as if we know. For no, again, it seems a life’s greatest enemy, this act of dying. After all, as far as we know, when we die, we just go. We leave. We vacate the present premises. Exit stage left kind thing. In fact, that’s the vast majority of what we royally seem to best misunderstand about death. For we see it in terms of this impending measurement as to all we’ll one day leave, things we’ve learned to like and lived to love just being left.

That’s death.

But what we seem to misconstrue is the contemplation as to whether there might be any life in it.

Which is where our faith comes in but only to begin what’s then a new dance with our own demise as seen through opened eyes finally alive to the great divide between the death we’ve lived and the life we’ve yet to find. And sure, it’s all a really strange confusion, this allurement of what is a life lived leaving before needed. But it just becomes something that some of us can’t help but actually find to bring hope.

All because death becomes something of a freedom from all that has been, from who we have been. It’s indeed a grand letting go of life, and yeah, that has most folks around here quite literally to tears at the mere thought of it. And that’s why so many are so put off by it. Because again, nobody living their understanding as to what life is meant to be wants to so readily contemplate the end of it all. It’s too fun. Too enjoyable. Too able still to offer more of what all of us have come to want.

Indeed, it’s comfortable, this life we lead. Why then delight to leave? Why wish to let it go? Why welcome the emptying of one’s self of all said self has stored inside plans made for pleasure had and profit found? Why let it all start to fade when we’ve still time left on the clock?

Why?

Because clocks only tick here.

And where we’re going, or at least should hope to be headed, they don’t. Not tick, they literally don’t exist. Time is a symptom of the human condition. We use it to keep track of how fast life is going and how slow our struggles seem to pass. We use it as a measure of our movement, our motives, their motivations as made within this mundanity that we’ve become. All because we live as if time is both friend and foe, something offering us plenty more chances to enjoy what we do and yet going entirely too fast to enjoy as much as we might.

Thus we exist in this fight. This angst. This uncertainty as to when our time will meet its expiry. In fact, life here has become something of a great wrestling with our days seeking inside the struggle to prove some way in which to add more onto the number thereof.

But we can’t.

No, the very best that we can possibly do in regard to the overall length of life with which we’ve been allotted to live is just ignore it. To act as if its end’s not coming. As if we’re not then closer every single day, within every breath we take. To give ourselves as fully as we can to the seeking and sifting through whatever kind of sand we might take within the hand and thereby have something to soothe the cry inside asking that we get to living before we can’t.

And we fight this fight every chance we get, even going so far as to make stuff up just to give us something to worry about rather than risking our wandering a little too close to that sign inside that says it’s about time to go.

Where?

Well, many here don’t know that one either. And, well, I can easily see as to how that would make this problem only exponentially bigger! I think about that all the time anymore. How I honestly don’t know what I’d do, how I’d feel, for what I’d try if I had not this hope inside of another life still waiting in a place that isn’t so breaking as this has so quickly become. Indeed, it’s like all of creation is anymore something of a quicksand in which we can’t stand as we’re expected to just succumb to it all.

Whatever the world chooses to do and insists we go along with. That’s all folks seem to be living for anymore.

And yet they’re worried, afraid, angry even when someone has the audacity to mention Heaven and how we’ve all been given the glorious opportunity to start packing now so that we can do our part to make sure that we’ve nothing left to leave when we’ve left to go?

Indeed, what a nightmare to have been given such a hope!

More life? Eternal peace? A perfect place in which rest is a given as there’s simply nothing there to undermine His plans and purposes anymore? A place where not even we can comprehend how we might try doing so again?

A place we’ve not ruined with all our worry and war? A place where there’s said to be no more sorrow or shame? A place where pain is gone and persecution too?

A place in which we just bask in the impossible goodness of God?

What a nightmare indeed!

Compared to our approach to life at least.

And yeah, it is in every possible way as contrary as can be. But friends, why does that make us worry? Why does it instill all this fear we can feel? Why do we fight so hard against a promise so good? If not simply because we’ve honestly come to believe that what we have here is good? That His plans for us can only at best try and measure up to our own? That we still know best somehow how best to live this life despite our neither having ever been this far before and how badly we’ve all but botched most of what we have done before?

What are we holding on for? And, well, what will that leave us holding when all that’s here is vanished?

Yeah, we don’t like to think about it. Don’t like to talk about. We honestly seem as if we’d be none too happy to never have the idea mentioned again. Would that make it go away? Would being that left alone to live this life however we delight really prove our delights able to give us life?

Do our delights give us life or do they merely add onto it for a time?

Can any of us, by worrying, add even an hour unto our lives?

And if worrying doesn’t help do such a thing, can wanting really say otherwise?

Or are not want and worry merely twins, just the fraternal kind as opposed to the identical variety? While we all know the identical twins who look just alike, fraternal twins may not be so similar in appearance but still share up to half of their genetic inheritance. Meaning then that they’re roughly half the same. And are not worry and want perhaps at least half similar? Do we not worry about getting what we want? Has not getting some of what we’ve wanted only ended up leaving us worried?

Should either then be so allowed to remain to form what remains a rather large basis of our every existence?

All of us are so often lost in between worry and want that we only seem to know to bounce between the both. Is that life? Giving so much time to what we worry about getting or wanting something different? Is that why we’re here? Is that what we’re afraid to leave?

Does any of it change the fact that we will?

Does a few of us finding hope if not joy growing in that promise really define us as freaks unfit to be heard?

Sure seems to.

Should those of us who do find hope in the promise of another home, a better home, a better life, does this world not understanding that really deserve to douse our fire, put out our light? Should the world’s refusal to believe, defined by an inability to do so designed inside their delight in this night in which we’re all found for now, does that give them the right to continue having some sort of sway within the way in which we come to live, or do so by preparing to leave?

Why are we so worried about pleasing people still? Why are we still so quick to get ourselves entangled, ensnared in civilian affairs? Are we still civilians? Is pleasing people still a part of our purpose? Can living as if we still belong here really help us get ready for when we’re not here?

Why do it then?

Why worry about offending people who choose to live as if they’ll never die? Why worry about living differently from those who contend that Christ is a lie? Why give any of our time, how precious little we’ve left, to looking to the world to inspire us in any way as to how best to live a life that most here have every intention of never leaving and are more than willing to tell you all about why they so continue to deny He who came to die so as to inspire us to get the hard part over too?

That’s all we really stand to lose!

It’s not the stuff we’ve learned to love. It isn’t the relationships we’ve tried to forge. It’s not the life we’ve built in, of, on the ground we’re presently found along. If anything, it’s at worst the plans we once had that likely had a better than average chance of going bad again. It’s the memories of mistakes we’ve made within plans we had that already went bad. It’s the sorrow, the sadness, the shame we feel and continue to find in a life that we’re just bad at living well.

That’s all.

It’s nothing more than that arrogant idea that has us all believing that we’re good at living.

And yeah, that is the hard part because, well, we’ve been buying that bull for as long as we’ve been here. It’s all we know how to comprehend. It’s the only thing we understand. All we seem to be able to wrap our minds around is that with which we hope to fill what are still lives that are rapidly emptying of time.

Friends, God knows our needs. He understands that we’ll physically die without such things as food, water, and in most circumstances, some kind of shelter. He gets it. I mean, He’s the One who created us after all, and so who better to understand the best operating procedure than He who invented the invention? God knows far better than we do, as we continue to prove, what this life is for.

And yet He’s the One who came in the Son to lay down His life to pay our debt as charged up in our having done all we never should have become so able to imagine we should have.

The God who created life came to die because we who didn’t create life took it upon ourselves to start thinking that we knew better than the Creator how to live what we didn’t create.

We are literally broken jars all but laughing in the face of the Potter, our Father, within what have been the most obtuse approaches to the living of a life ever attempted before.

How much more do we really need to see, to hear, to feel of what life here has so sadly become before we finally come to see fully why He calls us to die? Like I said at the start, the art of dying is something that it takes all of us a lifetime to learn.

Blessed are those who find inside their souls something stirring that asks they daily consider how to start before it all just falls apart and we’re so twisted and torn that we’ve nothing left of any opportunity to take active part in our coming apart from a world that’s coming apart.

In other words, in a world that lives as if everything’s perfectly fine and thus that we’re all living these lives that just don’t deserve to die, the lucky ones are those who come to terms with the fact that we deserve far worse than death and begin living out the rest of their days doing something about it coming.

We’d all be so much better off if we started dying now so that by the time we’ve no time here left we were so ready to go that we could look at the eye of that needle and smile as we knew we’d given years, decades maybe to practicing for this very moment in which we put our lives where our faith lived to be.

Alas, it again takes all of us a lifetime to practice for such a test as that.

And worse still, we live in a world that does all it can to inspire us all to never start.

And the most heartbreaking part?

It’s that the Bible tells us that most here never will.

That’s what I hate the thought of. It’s not dying as I’m trying all I can, and that every single day, to move further within the Way that is the Truth that bought the Life by laying His down. It’s not the laying down of a life as I, again daily, seem to see more of those things that I’ve chosen to do that I hate myself for having done. It’s not the changes that this arrogant world loves to pretend are never needed. It’s not the shame I’ve felt or still happen to find. It’s not the humility all the above design inside.

No, what I hate isn’t the death of me as I know, having lived my past, I know I can live better without the vast majority of who I’ve been and what I’ve done. I just hate the idea that so many here will never know life.

All because so many here will never know Christ.

All because all they know of He who is the Name is that, if He came, He only died.

That’s all they see.

Just the loss. The suffering. The shame, agony, misery of it all. This world sees only all they think they stand to lose by kneeling before a God who we all know has every right to rid this world of our every life. And yeah, that only adds to the fear and worry, that knowing that God has no reason to welcome us back having lived like we all know we all have.

But friends, we’re all going to be found before Him one day anyway.

Do you really think it the best idea showing up to Heaven as who you know you’ve been carrying then only the life you lived in sin?

Or would it rather be better to be found before Him clothed in the mercy of Christ, leaning so fully upon Him that all we can say is nothing but His Name?

Which do you think will achieve the better outcome?

Honestly, it’s not even a question! Yet so often we live as if it’s the one question that we just don’t want to ask.

What good can come of that?

And, on the other hand, what good might come if we too shed this sinful skin we’ve been living in and started then the practicing for that coming Day?

Sure, we’d lose some things. We’d find some changes we need to make. We’d definitely feel all sorts of shame and guilt for having missed it as long as we have. And yeah, that will all make us feel pretty bad. After all, death isn’t a fun thing to do, especially when we’ve been living a life in which we never have to lose. We don’t have to lose anything in this life! We can do as the world will continue and continue living only to store up for ourselves as much treasure and pleasure and profit as we might produce in this place in which such things are produced every single day.

Or, we can take the hard way. We can forsake the easy. We can welcome the pain, the misery, the suffering that is death. Not because it’s fun.

But just to get it out of the way.

Friends, that’s what this world will continue to misunderstand in regard to life and the living thereof. It’s that life here is an experience blended of both joy and suffering, of pain and healing, of hope and doubt. Faith, as placed in Christ, it only offers us the opportunity to rid ourselves of the burden borne within those considered bad. Doesn’t mean our lives never experience them again, just that when we do, they just don’t sting as much.

Indeed, in Him, death itself loses its sting. How? Because we again turn unto a way of life spent practicing the art thereof whereby we learn, slowly and with an extraordinary amount of patience and grace given our way, to beat our biggest enemy at its own game. We learn to die so that, when we do, we’ve here nothing left to lose.

That’s the art of dying. It’s the chance at living a new kind of life that learns to let go of all that can’t come where we also learn to hope we really do get to go.

And yeah, it’s a lot we’ll lose along the Way that is both narrow and yet narrowing still. But friends, unless we come to learn that life isn’t about what we have, all we’ll have in terms of life is just a heap of junk that’s left behind. Now sure, we can do as most here are and save that grand goodbye for one moment right there at the end, with then absolutely no focus or faith given unto whatever comes next.

Or we can do it little by little along the way so that when we too reach what’s then our end, all we have left is to simply wave goodbye to what we lived learned to let go anyway.

Again, which sounds easier?

And, more importantly, which has the greater chance of finding us approved of by God:

Living the life we all have as if we’ll not die?

Or taking up the art of dying in this life so that we’ve no worries, nor fears, nor regrets when we reach the finish line?

All because we helped Him help us get ready ahead of time?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold