Day 3942 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 5:9 NIV

Into the fold

Aimed into the fray of what then becomes a way spent forever behind the Way that came to save from the ways we’d gone in search for what we’d both found but never actually known. No, such is the sheerest gravity of every life as lived here in what remains for now a land so lost that most folks think themselves both found and thus capable of finding that which becomes only blinding and then binding unto what is in all truth a place we’re leaving behind.

That’s why He went first.

It’s because He alone knows the way in which life can be redeemed from what we’ve all insisted a scene seen for such sin that in Him we’ve shown no share. And I dare say that at our worst none of us would have ever really cared. For such is the cancer that all sin causes. It’s a completely caustic confusion that designs inside a delusion that denies any measure of every better that we could be so easily as simply turning around and daring deny ourselves even a lone something if even just once.

Yes, such is the audacity demanded of all humility. It’s that willingness to wonder what it might be to wander away from what is in search for what most here assume cannot be. It’s the curiosity as considered inside the life that hides in those places we never go as those people we thus never become. It’s the weight of a worry as won within our waiting for always something more but never doing anything the same. It’s a realization as to our tendency unto continuation.

A tendency that simply must die if we’re ever to find what is the life we haven’t lived.

And yet, as a people such as we who seem so blind as to somehow always see something good in holding fast to what’s keeping us lost, well, we thus likely see no such wonder within the war waged within the Way we’ve not followed. Simply because we know of no such weight over which to worry nor weary here within what is our way of living a life not living at all.

It’s just that somehow we’ve become quite okay with that.

The never knowing.

The never growing.

The never going toward anything at all really. We just awake every day to repeat the past merely for whatever we solemnly assume was best within it. Indeed, of this I am myself most guilty as I’ve recently confessed myself of the mess that is nostalgia. It’s in fact a maze I’m intent on working through as I grapple with this understanding that God gives us both the ability to experience and the capacity to remember alongside what is a call to set our hearts and heads upon Heaven in what is a growing belief that better is only had there.

And I don’t at present know quite what to make of it, that blend of truly believing that at least some of what I’ve witnessed and walked through, the trials I’ve won, they seem in many ways worth remembering for the joy and hope and purpose they seem to have offered as mixed with the hope I have of literally leaving everything behind and just going home.

But I think that such thorns are those given us as to inspire within us a measure of that humility that speaks daily, hourly even unto how we indeed know not what we’re doing.

A fact elsewise always missed by blind eyes still vastly convinced they’re able to see.

Such is the verdict of the Pharisee. For Christ, within one of His many confrontations with such religious factions, found Himself deeming condemned those who claimed they could see. For indeed, we’re unable to account for that which we know not, the very innocence aimed toward within His very first commandment given to those very first of our ancestors to stay away from that tree.

A simple request all but broken which left both they and now we entirely and eternally unwelcome within what remains that Garden planted in and of and for both God’s goodness and our good.

Simply because that initial sin continues to pay its damning dividends even millennia now removed.

Which makes me wonder as to just how long my mistakes might take to be removed.

Because, as much as I’m of a mind that’s seemingly amazing at remembering the good I’ve seen and felt along the way, so too does it cause me to recall many of the times in which I too chose to fall for what is that lie that says still that surely we will not die.

No, friends, surely we will. For as much as fruit may taste sweet to a tongue-tied soul craving always only what it’s never known, it’s the bitterness that it begins within us that becomes within us this detriment that has us so certain that we’re among those seeing through what is a sight that still assumes the night best for the ability to hide what we ironically don’t want seen. Indeed, it’s all of our secrets that now combine to condemn us because, well, they’ve never agreed to be hidden from Him.

Simply because our choices and voices haven’t the sway to even earn a say outside of that spoken in the heart broken begging the Name to come and save.

Do we know that song?

We sure know the way.

Because, as we’ve been talking of late, Christ is defined within the Word as the example that’s been given for all to follow if any are to be ever where He came to go. And yet, the issue is that we do know. We know the example. We’ve read, at least hopefully, the recounts of His story in the Gospels. We’ve heard them preached. We’re about to celebrate our annual gathering together with the purpose of making memories and keeping tradition alive, such as that of the giving of gifts in the expressing of love.

Something begun because of the greatest gift ever given, the Name which came from Heaven and did so so as to save us all from all our sins.

Thing is that He cannot forgive whatever we won’t confess. And this is what has gotten us into this mess in which we’re so lost worried about arguing as to proper dates for things that happened long ago and the right way in which the general processions should go and how one sect is more wrong than another whilst we’re all just wrong about more than we might dare figure.

And why is that?

Why do we allow for such division and distraction? Why are we so always inclined toward the arguing about matters that don’t matter? Why so much legal debate and public discourse? Why such incivility and inhumanity and immodesty and dishonesty and decay and depravity? Why do we so like living life this way?

I mean, that is why we don’t change isn’t it?

We must be good with whatever both we and life have become seeing as how we seem all but numb if not dumb unto the capacity we have to improve. Indeed, can’t fix what ain’t broken, right? And so we just seek for ways to make everything we’re doing seem okay so that we don’t ever have to fix or change a thing. Because that’s easier than doing anything that asks anything of even a foggy confession as seen inside a soul yearning to grow toward anything that would be, as of now, better in every way.

And that because once you’ve reached rock bottom, well, the only direction left to try is up.

Alas, we’ve instead just spread out. Why? Because again we know the way. We know that it’s one paved in pain and persecution. It’s a walk walked within weight and war as waged against, get this, ourselves. Yes. That’s why there remain so few of even a passing interest in that willingness to do what He calls us to. It’s not because it lacks in the simplicity we so clearly prefer. It actually couldn’t be easier to understand.

No, it’s just that it’s too easy to understand what the Way will ask and that, well, we’re not yet ready to offer Him that.

Why?

Because it’s our life.

That’s what God asks in Christ. That we accept the gift of life by at first joining Him within the laying down of one. And it’s entirely easy to understand why this is such the necessity. I mean, who can actually live two lives at once? Granted, many have tried. But even that is something of a sin that they’ve opted for living in as it involves lying to loved ones and thus loving no one at all. And so even our known attempts at that have failed, and well, they’ve failed bad.

Problem is that it still seems better to maybe even live in what is a way that may well hurt others than to embrace the pain ourselves, such as that won within what is the only way in which we’re to be welcomed back into the fold.

Indeed, we mind not the misery of others so long as it allows us to miss out on meeting our own. That’s why we give no thought to crosses worn as mere jewelry for only then fashion’s sake. We think they make us look pious, penitent, repentant perhaps. But it’s most only always the very show that we show every other day in every other way in which still we walk in what are any of a million diverging directions from the straight and narrow unto which we’re asked.

A request passed upon simply because the personal pain involved.

All because we’re still convinced that we can see and thus find a life that’s ever easier, one found only when leant upon our sight to know the way to go.

Ironically leaving us never leaning toward that which narrows and thus throws us overboard.

You know, it seems as though our every single life is something lived within the way of Jonah. Growing up I was always fascinated by the story of him and his fish. Pretty sure that was mostly only because of the whale involved and my interest in those giant beasts of the deep. Even had my childhood’s bedroom walls painted and plastered in posters and pictures of whales and dolphins and such. But having gotten older now I see so much of a different similarity to the story than I ever did before.

For I, like Jonah, have so often lived my life based upon what I felt right as always measured by what little I couldn’t see I didn’t understand thanks to a life spent leaning on sight and assumption. It’s left me walking a walk in which I’ve always tried to find meaning, reason, purpose in everything so as to make it make sense, to feel the need of my doing something, doing anything really.

And indeed, it would seem that Jonah perhaps lived the same. For Jonah was called to go and give this message to a people that he frankly didn’t see any reason to give the message to. And that was for who knows how many reasons. But one reason that we’re given is that Jonah knew that God is a “gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”

In other words, he knew that God would relent from the promised disaster if He in any way could. And so Jonah knew that his going to Nineveh was of little need. He knew God would do as God determined to no matter if he went or not. And so, to Jonah, he perhaps only saw this call as a waste of time, a risk to safety, a fairly worthless venture that would likely bring more risk than reward.

And indeed, I do this very kind of thinking all the time. For again, I seem to always seek to find some reason, some purpose, some profit in doing something. I think we all do that. We tend to lean toward the doing of those things which we estimate to mean the most or promise us the most gain in the end. And thus we too lean away from, walk away from anything which appears in any way worthless, risky or helpless.

And this is true even in regard to our faith, if not ever more so. Or at least it is for mine. And that’s because I so often find myself, like Jonah, all but basically running away from the doing of that which He asks, hopping a ship and setting sail away from what I don’t personally see any point in doing or assume only danger in trying. All because I think that everything He does needs to make sense to me.

But friends, if everything God did made sense to us, then He wouldn’t be such a big God after all.

Would He?

No, rather the fact remains that He is big God who does big things that don’t make much sense to we who are of both little faith and arguably even less life. And well, that’s because the point and purpose isn’t always about our being comforted by our understanding of what He’s doing and why. The point is often rather measuring our obedience and helping us to grow in the same.

And yeah, sometimes that’s done via His asking us to do things that seem pointless. Or things that look dangerous. Or things that we know He won’t likely do thanks to His kindness and mercy. But friends, faith isn’t about what we know but rather learning that we don’t know everything. It’s about our embracing the constant growth of humility, and that no matter how we may all but insist it come.

Which is the irony found in humility.

It’s that we’re the ones, the only ones, who all but determine where and when we meet it, how it comes our way, and if we either lean into it or again just walk away. And we do this via these forsaken eyes and hearts and minds that look to all these lies that lead us to comfort, yes, but also nowhere too. And that’s because we cannot grow if we do not move. We can’t get stronger if we’re never tried or tested. We will never know anything of our breaking points, least of all how to bolster them, if we’re never forced to face them.

And that’s His whole point!

That’s what we’ve been talking about for days now. It’s that His entire purpose for this path lain out before us isn’t necessarily to punish us, or humiliate us or cause us to experience any other such pains or miseries we so often assume every hardship to be. Now granted, we will experience some of those thing. I think we all know that already as all of us have endured struggle and stumble and mistake and mayhem. We all know them.

So what then are we running from if not the reality that maybe this life isn’t supposed to go as we see fit but is rather aimed at helping us to again reach that point in which we fit where we’ve not been worried about trying to end up?

How’s that for a really hard truth on this Monday afternoon!

That for all our lives we’ve all tried so hard to hide that we’ve ended up only hiding from Heaven. That every time we see a storm coming in life and choose to take that easier path of selfishly trying to avoid it, we only avoid then the reason He sent it. That so long as we run away from everything hard, everything scary, any and every part of this journey that asks of us humility, humility is then the one thing in which we can’t grow and thus what won’t grow in us.

And yet, friends, how can we ever expect to be welcome by He who is humility if we’ll not ever dare to share in His humbling Himself unto a cross carried?

Look, I fully understand it, I really do. In what’s long been a world that does so much to make so much so comfortable and safe and successful, there’s not really much logic left to be seen inside welcoming the struggle. It’s stupid, at least according to worldly wisdom. But friends, that’s the point!

Everything God calls us to is brought about with the express purpose of helping us grow in the fear of God, a reverent kind in which we learn to walk within a growing sense of awe and wonder as to all He is and all He does and all He both sends our way but always gets us through.

And that’s what we simply cannot learn any time we run away.

For if we just keep seeing the storms in this life, the calls He issues which bring them, for the struggle and strife they bring, we’ll never become of the courage to endure them in the trust that on the other side we’ll learn why He sent them.

Simply because you cannot learn anything from a lesson you refuse to experience.

Does that make sense?

What I’m getting at is that this journey we call life as is spent either following His direction and directives or likewise running always away from the same, it doesn’t need to be nearly as hard as we so often make it. And yet we make it so hard because we do so often run and hide whenever life gets hard. In other words, we refuse to obey simply because we fear that it won’t go okay as it rarely seems to go our way.

Again friends, that’s the point!

It’s that He is doing all He can to break us of this blind trust in our way because He knows that it was our way that got us into this mess in the first place. What mess? Sin and the death it wins. That’s why Jesus came to walk in the obedience that found Him not only willing but in fact adamant to do what He came to do. He chose to lay down His life so that we could find in Him a courage to do the same.

And yet instead we mostly choose only to refuse. And that’s what makes both life and faith so hard. It’s because we, like Jonah, could just do as He calls us to without all the trying to understand why and the running away to hide when we don’t.

And in doing so we too could avoid the whales He has to send to bring us back to reality!

In the end it all just comes again down to humility and just how willing we are to welcome it. Problem is that humility never comes in the form of something we think we can handle as that would pretty much defeat the purpose.

Rather I’m all but completely convinced that much of what He calls us to do has little to do with the actions and undertakings involved and far more to do with the willingness to do it no matter what.

Guess it’s on us as to just how quickly we learn that.

And thus just how hard it becomes to do so along the way.

Either way, we’re all headed back toward Him. Just seems better to get there having followed the Way He called us to take than spending the rest of our time trying to find an easier path that doesn’t exist.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold