Day 3944 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 5:18 NIV

One act

One choice. One chance. One change. One breath. One belief. One moment spent seeking not relief from whatever life has been allowed to have become but rather one asking only to experience the gravity of the monstrosity so as to, finally, hopefully do something about it that can affect it, effect it, impact it, move it, make it into something different. Indeed, what if we shared no longer in Adam’s one act chosen in a moment of disinterest or disregard, defiance either way, but rather in Christ’s audacity to trust one act with undoing all that had been done within the fall we’ve all found ever since that first sin?

I dare say we cannot possibly begin to even start imagining what all might be different.

Much less then how we might all be better.

For alas, rather than living our lives as if the gravity of life might be made within a single moment, a lone choice we make, instead we make it up as we go along so that we never need feel bad or shallow or the sorrow of shame as has came in those many moments in which we’ve made so many choices that caused us to become nothing more than whatever we were just the moment before.

All because, whilst fear is involved, it seems sadly that the only fear we feel obliged to face is that which allows us to cower before change as we see it only for the cost it insists upon the moments in which we agree to it doing as it insists. Yes, we loathe change, even those so small as to be made in a moment, simply because we know we’re of such limited time remaining that we must remain straining in whatever direction we’ve already delighted to go.

Directions we mostly only ever chose because we find delight along the way and, liking the taste, we return to the bottle from which it drank so as to continue drinking ourselves dry upon what then is never a life.

No, I am rather convinced that one day we’ll find that whatever this is that we’ve been living, it’s never been a life. In fact it’s quite brazen that we even consider ourselves alive! I mean, what sign might we have of such a consideration? You know, considering how our every investigation only turns up evidence of our turning back toward yesterday and that never minding the many mistakes we made nor the fact that even still we have no good reason why.

Indeed, what is our reasoning to be, our excuse we’ll use with which to excuse our lack of a life spent on the move? Again, as I feel I’ve mentioned a lot of late, we do understand that life is a moving thing, right? And thus that anything which appears as a mere repeat of the past is only a continuation of that which has passed?

This is the very danger of nostalgia that so many warn against. It’s the rehashing of a past that has itself already moved on. Do we not get that either? That the past is gone? That yesterday is over and cannot come back? That we cannot go back to where we’ve already been, at least not as the people we’ve become since then?

Unless we’ve become nothing different and nothing else has changed either?

Which is the problem!

It’s that everything’s changed. Everything. I was just thinking about this the other day in regard to my sifting still through heaps of old ashes and digging up so many dry bones in the process. What does it prove? That the past was enjoyable? Okay. That I had some fun? Made some friends? Had some memories, some of which I still have? Cool. Does drowning in that which is done help me do anything new? Does sorting so neatly the past now behind me allow me to make better sense of the path still paved out before me?

Or does it only pull me back to where, what, who I’ve been and thus away from who, what, where I might still be or have the chance to become?

What hit me is that it’s all gone. Not the memories, but the moments. They’re literally history. The place I had my first job: out of business. Second job too. And third. The friends I’d made: moved. Remember their every face and name and the nuances that made them all so unique. Doesn’t change I haven’t talked to any of them in decades. The high school I loved is now a middle school lost in the shadows of the massive new build next to it meant to house the growing community’s need of a more impressive home to that four-year finish line.

My one and only girlfriend’s now married to another guy and living in another corner of the state, at least last I heard. Every truck sold. The house I grew up in is now the home-base for a different family. Every apartment since then now filled with others hopefully moving and leaving them behind too.

Even happen to have let my hair grow out a little longer having not felt well for a bit over a week and, wow, just caught a glimpse and realized how much of even my own hair has moved on.

When will I?

For such is life. It’s a matter made and thus meant to move. Yes, both on and forward, it moves. And yet we cling so fiercely to that which was that we don’t realize we leave then less room for both what is and even less for what isn’t.

And every single moment, opportunity, growth, misery, it’s all a choice. A single drop in this ocean we call life that we sadly still see as so miniscule and ordinary.

Why?

If not because we allow them to seem so?

Indeed, I cannot know whether I can ever forgive me for that every opportunity I already had but never accepted to have been or become by now who I am not, that me that would be different. Maybe I can and perhaps I should as, well, if I contend this hard that God can and will forgive that I sit here for hours a day trying to find some way in which to translate His hope into our misery then surely there must be some way for me to forgive me.

Haven’t found it yet.

But that’s probably just because I spend so much time looking back on what already was. Again living then a life in which my every moment is nothing more than a reflection of one prior. And yet, if my present is merely a repeat of the past, then what hope does my future have? Will it not then be only a reflection of the repeat?

How is that neat?

It isn’t. Granted, if we were truly as perfect as we so often try and make ourselves out to seem, then sure, we’d need to change nothing. We’d have in fact no reason to do anything any different as any deviation away from perfection would be only mistaken.

Issue is that perfect we aren’t. And so too then life cannot be. And we should all know this personally as, well, we all make mistakes. Oddly enough some of which are in fact different than those mistakes we’ve made in the past, and that simply because life around us has changed and that requires us to do new things, learn new things, mess up new things then too.

Unless we’ve moved to an island in which it’s still 1960 something and we get no news, buy no food, have no friends and want nothing more.

Perhaps that’s the problem.

That we want nothing more here amongst a world insisting that it has more to offer. A more we’re all more than open to welcoming as is seen inside our houses getting bigger and our belts following suit.

But then again I guess that hasn’t really changed either for it’s really nothing more than the same sense of settling in gluttony that we’ve always been known for as what began as a people who knew only to crave that which was off limits for reason, a single choice made that we have absolutely no reason to so continue repeating as we so sadly do.

Reason even taken still further away when the Savior He came to undo all we’d done in our continuing to do nothing new under either the sun or now the Son.

A lack of change in life that we like simply because it’s obviously easier to only go wherever you’ve already been in what’s then a life lived as only whoever you always were.

A direction then chosen for where it aims and thus against every other opportunity.

That’s why Jesus came the way He did and did what He said He’d do. It was because, despite all our spite shown unto the Father who sent Him, He still intended for us to experience the more of life still out ahead of us. But alongside those intentions paved in both agony and hope, seems as though He also knows that it’s perfectly impossible for us to find that way to everything better if we’ll never agree to do anything different.

And He also knows that we’re a people who beg still for a sign that His is the right way to take. And yet the sign of Jonah remains all He’s going to give as, well, that’s really all we should have ever needed to see in the first place. And yet, despite the story of Jonah warning us as to the foolish futility of running away from God and His call and command, still Jesus came to help us see it all again.

Three days in and then back on the road toward the purpose for which He’s called us unto such a loss of personal arrogance that there’s finally made room in us for a hope in something more.

Do you have that room in you?

That dare to dream bigger than whatever you or your life has become? Do you have that uncautioned curiosity that asks you daily to do something new just so the old you falls further behind? Do you have the tenacity to insist that the old you never catch up, a choice made to make choices in perpetuity that drive you toward a destiny you cannot see, chosen simply because of the past you can?

Yes, what are we running from and what has it left us or allowed us to run toward?

Sadly, most of this fallen humanity is still running away from God, a choice that leaves us running toward only more of all He never asked us to want or have or hope to become. A choice made because it’s again just so easy to make the same choices we’ve already known.

Do you want more of the life you’ve already known?

Sure, like you I know well that nostalgia offers us this rather cherry-picked portrait of the past as it oddly enough always manages to remember the good old days, days held onto because they weren’t the bad ones. Doesn’t mean the bad old days didn’t exist, does it? No. For truth be told, life is what life was. It’s a collective of time accounted in days and decades that achieve for us a unique measurement as to our experience in this one place in which time matters.

But regardless of the measure we’ve been given in which to experience this existence, the reality is that every single day is a unique blend of both good and not so much.

Yes, even the past that many of us get lost living through.

That’s why it’s not wise to ask why the old days were better than these we’re living now, as if those still to come can only be not as good either. Should we really be so quick to estimate that we’ve already experienced life at its best? Is God’s best work behind Him? Did we really pass Heaven on the way here? The cross only able to accomplish whatever this is that we’re living for now?

Nothing more than this?

Gotta tell you, as much I love the life I’ve lived and sit often in awe as to the days gone by and how wonderful they were, if Heaven was found in the 1990’s, I’m gonna end up being pretty angry.

Because surely God’s got more up His sleeve than just the decade in which I grew up. Surely He has more in store than only the stores I loved shopping in when I was a kid and toy stores were a thing. Surely He has more planned, a greater promise, a better purpose than only what we knew in the past.

For how heartbreaking would it be if indeed the best was behind us?

Back in those days when we fell off our bikes and bloodied our knees? Back when we wore all the goofy clothes and thought boybands were cool? Back when we were first introduced to a pocket calendar someone stole from their lustful father and brought to school in order to introduce their friends to images nude, opening the door to a decades-long struggle with adult content?

Yeah, so many wonderful memories of what was a perfect life.

Right?

Friends, there is no perfect life as has been lived by we the fallen. Sure, we’ve had some fun and made some friends, but all good things come to their end. But that’s my question: Should good things end? I think we can all agree that we like it when bad things do, tough times too. I wouldn’t imagine that any of us miss the days of Covid and lockdowns and such. Don’t think our veterans are itching to head back to Normandy or Vietnam. Don’t think our country could survive another Civil War, though it seems like so many are inching us toward it.

I’m not interested or willing at all to grab my phone and go looking for the filth I used to find the time to think I liked.

But if we can in fact move on from such mistakes as that, can’t we see that we can and thus should do the same with sin? After all, sin is nothing more than our knowing the right things to do and doing something else instead. Indeed, anyone who knows the good they should do and yet fails to do it, this is sin for them.

Is it not good for us to stop living what has always been a mistaken way of life?

Does it matter if some of our mistakes have been considered enjoyable? Does it matter that our sins have helped us make friends? Does our doing wrong in a world that thinks it’s right make it right for us to do the same? Friends, we are in the place in which good is put for evil and evil still considered good, all but applauded as it’s paraded through our streets and even into our schools!

Should we truly stop here and just accept whatever this is as the best life can be?

Are we the best that we can be?

I sure used to think I was. But, then again, that was back when I was young enough to know everything except that eating like an animal while playing video games and getting next to no physical activity would one day lead to obesity, nor that looking at pornography would all but put the kibosh on finding an actual relationship with a real person, nor that every friend I tried so hard keep would only leave me feeling as if I’d never existed.

Again, don’t think we should really allow for so much stopping, quitting, giving up in and on life as we do.

I’m sure thankful that Jesus didn’t.

Because, like my avoiding exercise all those years, He could have refused to carry that cross. Like all the times I didn't care about anyone other than myself, He could have refused to endure what He didn’t deserve. And, well, just like all those times I gave up on Him in all those years in which I didn’t read the Word, didn’t go to church, didn’t write these posts, didn’t say a single prayer, yeah, He could have so easily agreed and left me without one.

Yes, I, knowing the past I’ve lived and the person I’ve been, I should have no prayer of anything better than whatever I already was.

And yet I sit here today different in so many ways. And, as with the concept of this verse, all of those changes and improvements were made in a single moment in which a single choice was chosen to do something different knowing that different is always the only way to better.

Did you get that?

Different is always the only way to better.

Otherwise all we can ever find by doing the same things is just more of the same things. And, again, if we were as perfect as our pride and arrogance so often loves to pretend are, then we’d have no reason, no need to do anything any differently.

But friends, last I checked, we’re all still sinners who get things wrong every single day.

Yeah, safe then to say that we should be doing as much as different as we possibly can!

Not because it’s easy. Definitely not safe. Probably going to open us up to making even more mistakes. But friends, that’s the only way to grow. To learn. To try. To fail. To realize that we are far better at failing than we are at getting everything right.

He knows we can’t get everything right as He both knows our past and now exists to still intercede on behalf of our present. He knows we’re not perfect.

But He did something about it.

One act. One chance. One change. One choice.

Sometimes that is literally all it takes to impact a life in such a way that everything is changed for the better. And let’s be honest, even if finding better takes us the rest of our lives, don’t we want to at least say we tried?

After all, in Jesus’ sacrifice we find every reason we need to do just that, to try. Don’t we offer Him at least that?

One act?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold