Day 3937 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 2:21 NIV

Not to lead but to learn

Such is among the earliest and yet most certainly far from easiest of all lessons left of life. For all of us have become lost within this lie in which we think of life in terms of being only our own to lead. And indeed, we are the only ones who can live these lives that we’ve been given to keep on living. But friends, so too must we become the only ones who endure the loss of the life we’ve lived to lead and likely led ourselves to lose already more than just a time or two.

No, one of the gravest realizations as to our every life’s experience is the waking up one day to finally see fully all the many mistakes we’d made in thinking their doing was right.

But as we talked about yesterday, it’s this realization that sometimes takes an entire life. And this is where this journey of faith proves quite precarious because it finds for us the approach unto that realization long before many here ever will, if they even will ever at all. And it’s this general fall away from the general way in which all have walked and all have won, in which all have found friendship and felt their fun, it’s this most generous generality that defines for us the true oddity of what becomes an audacity to leave it all behind.

And that for what we know well we’ve no ability to find.

That’s why this Christian walk seems so weird to, well, all of us, but some of us for longer than others. It’s again something that takes all of us a very unique and thus quite specified amount of time to finally find reason to even consider let alone there begin to contemplate. And that’s because, well, most here see the Christian walk for only the death it asks of all most here have come to enjoy. They see this faith as the long loss of a life they love.

They measure it as meaning the leaving of all they like and enjoy and appreciate and thus, thanks to our lesser assumptions, assume we’d be able to continue enjoying and appreciating for the length of life we still like to believe we have still left to live. As if we’re truly of an ability to so measure what we ourselves should have always known we never created in the first place.

Alas, it’s our sunken soul’s selfish assumptions, such as how life is a matter or means of our own creation as is to be then defined by what we do, what we like, what we don’t and what we buy, that has now left us within this vast need to die unto the very same selves that have by now so solidified those solemn assumptions that they all but form the very foundations of our every belief.

Just that we are the masters of our own destinies and are thus forever here tasked with the gravity of ensuring our lives are led in the way in which we think best for them to go.

But friends, how do we know?

How can we remain of the arrogance to actually estimate that we can investigate the unique idiosyncrasies of our own individualities when, as judged from the past, we’ve somehow always managed to pass on that which could have led us in a better direction and there found us as being in fact better people? In fact, how can we even so embrace such a means of measure as our now standard estimation that most are generally good when the past proves so perfectly otherwise?

How can we trust our eyes when we know them to look for the roads thin of struggle and empty of strife?

No, as a people of such penchants for those paths of least resistance, we’re thus in no means the ones who’ve any business thinking we know anything at all of this living business, let alone enough to measure unto us the means by which to think we can make our own way and do so well enough to amount for us unto the baser expectations that we all make for ourselves in regard to what is a life well lived.

We can’t have the foggiest idea as to what a life well lived is, not when considering how the fog is found and felt in only the better life we’ve never known having opted instead for the one we know we’ve known as is known not for much that can be proven better but rather as having been only less than even we hoped to find.

Yes, we’re the ones who craft our own expectations, plan all our paths paved in lesser resistance toward them, and somehow manage to always still never find them.

And yet we still have the boldness to believe that we can be the ones to prove our way better than His, and that simply because, though we can see neither, we know we can always alter our own so as to make sure it ends up looking just like we claim we wanted it to.

Indeed, we are a people who can talk ourselves into accepting anything so long as the doing so allows us to appear as though we knew what we were doing and did it well enough that it measured up to our every plan along the way.

Never seeing the shame shown in that scene said of plans changed.

No, we’ll just say we meant it for it to go that way. We planned for the problems. We expected the setbacks. We perhaps even looked forward to the losses of what we’ll, by the time we lose them, will have fashioned some excuse that makes it seem like we don’t feel bad about it.

All because we’re always the ones who have to live as if we know best how to live a life.

And that despite our every mistake, our every failure, our every better opportunity to have been something better entirely forsaken. No, when we’re the ones who know what’s best, well, then so too are we the ones who can always rewrite the lies we tell to make it seem like it’s all gone well.

Problem is that while we may be able to convince ourselves, and those around us, I don’t think we’ll find the same kind of success when found knelt before God.

And that because He’s the One with the real plans, the true purpose, the actual blueprints for how our lives were meant to go, and so thus He knows just how far off course we’ve veered looking to live as if we knew better than He ever could.

Which is why He came to live a life that veered not at all, a life that was rather lived in the sort of supreme surrender that all of us should have aimed for all along.

A life we’ve rather never aimed for, and thus never came anywhere close to emulating, simply because the scene shown at its ending.

Yes, we’re a people so good at living that we live afraid of dying as, well, death seems unto us only the end of all our fun. And why do that? Why welcome that? Why want that? No, that’s a mindset that makes no sense at all.

At least to those who think it makes sense to keep on living afraid of really the only thing we’re all promised to find.

And sure, there’s a really impressive irony in that that isn’t at all hard to find, but as with our astounding ability to defy God, it’s equally amazing just what all you can’t see when you’ve become quite convinced that there’s nothing more to look for. And well, as a people so certain that we know always what we’re doing, we’ve too stopped looking for ways in which we might be wrong.

For again, why do that?

No, that seems only the very best way for us to find out just how mistaken we’ve never imagined we could have always been.

And well, that seems to just about all but promise to pretty much perfectly upend this general approach to life that’s found us all living for quite some time as if we alone knew best how to lead a life.

And, actually, having just said that, I guess we do.

We do know better than anyone else how to lead a life.

Only issue is that it’s right over the edge into what’s become a daily depravity met at what are newfound depths thanks to desires so decrepit that we actually think darkness is somehow more conducive to the living of a life than the light ever could be.

Guess then neither have we seen the signs of His having been raised to life as was done to prove to all that He alone knows the way to not only live a life, but to even lead us all to find one on the other side of the very death of which most are still afraid.

A fear felt only because the lack of practice.

Indeed, you’ve likely heard it said that practice makes perfect, a mini-sermon aimed at inspiring us to keep on trying at that for which we’ve determined to seek perfection. And yes, this works in a rather general sense as that which you practice is the same as that at which you thus improve. Problem is that we never seem all that inspired to practice at what it means to lose.

Much less the loss of life of which we’re, again, entirely promised to experience.

Wonder why?

Well, it’s actually no wonder at all as, again, we’ve all managed to make our way toward what remains in many ways quite the lavish existence. I mean we’ve amassed all a glutton could ever crave! Fun, friendships, fandoms. We’ve got followers and platforms and a sense of importance oozing from them. We have plans for futures that we’re sure are coming. We’ve got ways of denying mistakes made in the past, from which we’re fleeing. We have ways of making it seem like we’re not failing.

Just a lot of laughing and smiling mostly.

Might make one start to wonder if we’ve gone round the bend what with all this giggling and smirking and such.

But no, no those things are now standard procedure in what’s become a life all but dumb unto the growth we’re missing in the hope we simply cannot have seeing as how it’s a hope held on only the other side of the grave.

Which is again why He came. Because Heaven isn’t here. Because in Heaven there’s no lies heard, no pain felt, no failures known. There’s no sorrow, no sadness, no shame whatever. Heaven holds no such allowance for such substance as greed, gluttony, jealousy or other such hypocrisy as the lot. In fact, Heaven’s said to be just about everything this place can never be.

And yet we walk as if our best is something to be proven here.

Where Heaven isn’t.

All because still we think that Heaven is only the reward promised only unto those who prove themselves as having been able to find their own way there through what are lives thus lived their own way. Yes, we’ve all bought this lie in which we live as if it’s on us to prove we can find whatever it is that we want. And well, as much as it makes perfect sense for all of us to want that hope of Heaven, it makes absolutely no sense to live as if we can find our way there.

And that because the example we’ve been given shows us that Heaven is found not in the leading of a sinful lie but rather in the sacrifice of the same.

And that’s the one thing that we’ve never learned how to do having followed instead the examples of the world around us that have not even the slightest semblance of sacrifice at all.

No, around here we’re increasingly unwilling to deny ourselves anything. We’ve even reached the point in which we seek for ways to make lust, laziness, lunacy even seem as if things commendable. All so that we needn’t refuse ourselves the enjoyment of our declining indulgences.

All of which can only ever amount to a life declining similarly. And that all because we’ve become quite well convinced that since Heaven is said to be a place of surpassing peace and joy and rest, well, having experienced some semblance of all the above within the ways in which we’ve come to love living this life, we too think that perhaps Heaven has already been found.

Simply because we think ourselves now gods.

Thus Heaven must be here as it’s nothing but the place that God resides.

Right?

Well, yes. But the issue then is that we’re not the gods we’ve made ourselves out to be in what are lives we’ve made out to seem as having gone so very well as our very past proves not a one of them ever has. No, we’ve all made entirely too many mistakes to actually think ourselves divine. In fact, we’ve all messed up so much and done so many things we should have never even been able to think of that Christ had to come to show us the way in which to live a life that honors God alone.

Not us, but God.

And that’s the lesson that it takes us all a lifetime to learn thanks to what’s been a lifetime in which we’ve only learned to honor only ourselves, and that even in ways that are entirely dishonorable.

Indeed, at best we’ve gotten it backwards and can thus find better by simply turning around. Problem is that we’re all anymore so turned around that we’re likely unable to estimate that which we’ve merely gotten backwards from that which we’ve utterly flipped on its head and all but set on fire.

Yeah, our way of leading a life is perhaps best described as something of a dumpster filled with manure sat on fire and rolled down the street of what’s an abandoned city that was left so empty because none could survive the nuclear fallout.

We couldn’t do right if our lives depended on it.

And I say this because the cross kind of hints they might.

Not that eternal life is dependent upon our doing good as to thus earn our way there. No, what I simply mean to say is that Heaven is the promise of those who admit they can’t make it no matter how good they have long thought themselves to be at living a life.

Eternal life depends on our living right, and thus this leaves us with a perfect problem in that we both can’t live right and yet have long thought we always have. All because that’s the lie of life we’ve learned to live. Because that’s the only life this world knows to try. Just that in which we lie about knowing what we’re doing, where we’re going, why we’re getting nowhere along the way.

And that’s why it takes us a lifetime to come close to the willingness to reach for the hem of Him who came to lead the way.

It’s because we’ve always thought we knew the way. That we could be the ones who did it on our own, got all the glory for doing so. That glory was something we could actually have, and know what to do with when we did. We don’t. We don’t honestly know what to do with anything. We’re all still just either figuring it out or simply making it up as we go.

And that still mostly getting nowhere simply because we don’t really want to be anywhere else, anyone else.

We like us. We like this. We like life as it is and thus have no reason to change it.

So little reason to even welcome any hint of change within it that we’re left to just fear losing it.

All because we again refuse to practice.

Simply because we still apparently don’t understand the message which says that whomever loves their life will lose it whereas those who lose their lives will find them.

It’s a promise proven in letting go of what we think we know and rather taking hold of the hand reaching down from the cross, not necessarily to always pull us up and out of our struggles, but often to simply point to the crosses lain beside us.

Deaths He asks us to embrace in what is a show of faith that says we trust Him to provide even when we agree to die.

Do we?

Do we believe that He can redeem that which we agree to lay down? Do we believe that He can give better versions of whatever we give unto the crosses He calls us to carry? Do we believe that Heaven is the hope of those who get there still carrying what are all the joys they found and the fun they had and the friends they made with a world defined as filled with those who will not make it through those gates?

Or do we rather believe that nothing He said was said without explicit purpose, thus meaning the eye of the needle may not be quite so figurative as our arrogance has likely long hoped?

Friends, point is that Christ came to leave us with an example that is in every entirely unlike every other example we’ve followed or considered learning from.

And He did this by doing a thing so new that He started with death and from there went on ahead to prepare a place saved for those who admit they can’t save themselves, not even by their living of what they alone think a good life.

No, Heaven isn’t the reward of those who prove themselves capable of doing right.

It’s the promise given those who hit their knees every single day and there admit that they can do nothing without the goodness of God’s grace giving them that daily opportunity to enter unto the grave and thereby lay waste all they’ve been living in what are likely still entirely too often lives lived as we know what we’re doing.

He simply asks us to stop trying to find the way or figure out how to make it all make sense and merely trust that salvation does not so rely upon us.

But that it is rather the gift of God given unto those who come to see that life is not ours to lead but simply ours to learn.

And that it’s best learned from He who lived in such a way that has proven able to find life even after death.

For once you come to see the sin you've been living in, dying only becomes something of an art you practice so you can live again.

All because that’s the example He’s given us to follow.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold