Day 3954 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Corinthians 1:27 NIV

Capsized

For it was to God’s pleasure to prove our pleasures perfectly negligent when it comes to what pleases Him thanks to our having learned from one another to hate our sisters and harm our brothers in what’s become a heart so hard that ears can hear but won’t listen, minds can imagine but refuse to believe, eyes can most certainly see but have not any interest in looking beyond what they wish to notice, and indeed our very souls have thus sunken inside what’s become a way of life in which we live entirely antithetical to life itself.

All by denying both the second death we owe and He who died on our behalf so that we’d need only endure the first that we too could have missed.

How?

By never having become so high on ourselves that we took it upon ourselves to wreck ourselves thanks to our coming to consider that all checks need be is only cashed as this encouraged us to partake of no checks checked along the way. And indeed, thou who doth not check thyself doth truly, perhaps if only eventually, but inevitably wreck thyself.

And here we walk within what’s long been a world living upside down inside the masses thinking themselves right despite so much going wrong and only getting worse. And indeed, this has left me with a cherished convincing that only deepens daily in regard to God being there and there being where I wish more deeply to be with every breath I breathe.

For it will one day turn out that among all of God’s incredible blessings and the miracles which make them both possible and indeed provided unto all who’ve eyes to see and ears that hear and minds that imagine still that hearts are made for more than beating one another senseless, among His greatest accomplishments is this ability to have allowed us all to remain convinced that we’re wise whilst become only more foolish all the time.

It’s truly quite the show to see!

But indeed, what we see is what was always bound to be here beside a world gone dry having drunk all there was to drink of everything lie we’ve been taught to speak and thought we’ve refused to think. All the above chosen because we’ve all fallen victim, willingly even, to what is a world that delights to debate both God and thus those few who truly do believe in Him and all He’s done and remains now doing to get both through to us and us through to Heaven.

All because His ways are not our ways as our ways are highways paved straight to hell and His hopes for us have always been something at least exponentially better than our burning forever with both nobody to put out the fire but all well aware of the flame.

Indeed, He who bears the Name came to embrace that blame that stoked that flame and burned our better intentions to the ground long about, oh, a few millennia ago. It all started in a Garden in a place that’s since become a landfill filled with what is in every way a daily proving that we truly know not what we’re doing thanks to our thinking that we know what we’re doing simply because we’re doing whatever it is that we always have and have no reason to do anything any different as we’ve not yet met the cost but instead do rather well so long as we continue to coast.

For such is what the world expects, and in fact rewards quite well as, well, doing as the world does both proves to them that we’re right where they too think they belong and are willing to join with them in an agreement that whatever is done here is both right to do and thus can bring about nothing wrong.

Like consequences. Or confusion. Or deception, delusion.

No, surely such things could never befall a people who’ve fallen so far from the good for which they were created to do that they now do only less good every single day in what is a way in which all have walked as if there is no real benefit to even trying to begin striving for a life spent doing something a little more than merely surviving.

Thriving’s for the birds as they’re the only ones with wings and, despite our having invented planes, we still just can’t quite prove ourselves able to get quite high enough to actually reach Heaven via metal and a failing mind’s mettle.

Failing because it turns out that it’s pretty hard to become anything better when you’re of the whether that worries only about what all you stand to lose in order to gain what you simply couldn’t have any other way.

And indeed, it’s in every way perfectly foolish to worry so much about all we’re losing that we leave no time in life nor space in mind for the considering as to what we’ll find when we’re found on a different ground not yet hollowed by those who think this dirt we’re on somehow hallowed simply because we’re at present blessing it with our apparently impressive presence.

A most hollow mindset if ever there was one.

And in truth, there’ve been a lot of them!

A lot of mindsets.

A lot of misunderstandings. A lot of mayhem. A lot of madness. A lot of anger mostly. Why? Because, outside of giving us life and such abilities within it as say the enjoyment of things and the wherewithal to remember many of said enjoyments, He just really crossed the line when He came to find the lost and happened to accidently point out that all of us are they.

That’s we’re all the one who wandered away from the 99, leaving the Good Shepherd all but torn to pieces in worry wanting to bring back into the fold those who had fled, not merely to have His whole herd back together but to even further bring them back into His care and protection as was proven so perfectly in His laying down His very life for them.

Indeed, not only does Jesus simply want to free us from our many chosen captivities as have been chosen on our behalf by those at best half-dead themselves in sins they too refuse to acknowledge as such thanks to the horror show that is humility waiting to be found if ever they would, He wants to go a little further and show how to leave death behind us for good.

As in both forever and that for better.

But no.

No, this idea cannot be as, well, as far as we can tell we’re doing pretty darn okay as it is. I mean, as we’ve been talking, we’ve gotten to the point in our progressing through and to progression that we’re kind of running out of ways to improve. After all, we’ve all but invented things intended to make our lives so stinking easy that we barely have to be awake to live them. Our dinners are brought to our doors. Our TVs know what we want to watch without our even having to ask, and if it runs out of ideas all we have to do is talk to the remote and it’ll find whatever we’re looking for. Our cars can drive themselves so that we can spend the commute to those jobs we hate posting all over someone else’s scrolling about the newest treasure we found in some online auction that is, again, brought right to our door!

We are nailing it!

Apparently.

And this apparent belief as to our endless winning streak now daily leaves us thinking of fewer and fewer reasons to embrace the enduring of the loss of a life we’ve learned well how to love thanks to our having done well within the living thereof as is measured via the dollars and cents we earn at what are jobs we hate worked for bosses we can’t stand who themselves are just trying to provide for a family that they too never see all that much thanks to our societal assumption that we’re far better off to work in order to live rather than living while we work.

All because, despite our being apparently able to uphold this whole “multitasking” idea, turns out that we can only do one thing at a time.

And even it not all that well.

Why?

Because to do anything well demands that someone admit all along the way to that better, which just continues to move further (asking us to follow for what should be obvious reasons), that better is neither what they are but have instead every desire to always become.

All because better is something we can always be.

Alas, we seem instead to have apparently already arrived at our very best and, well, what better then have we left than to just live it up until we live no more?

For that has even become what seems to be the very best outcome that many here are willing to believe. That all of this life, the mistakes we make, the memories we have of when we didn’t make a mistake, the growths we experience, the times life tries to kill us but fails to get the job done, the people we love, those who start out hating us but eventually come to see that we’re maybe not their enemies, the lessons we learn, the love we feel, the hope we have, the happiness we meet in the strangest of places, that it all just adds up to nothing.

Such is the wisdom of this world which finds no real need for God to exist as, well, again, we’re doing pretty okay on our own.

Because we think are alone. Because we asked nicely at first to be left alone and then we kind of did all we could to prove how much we really, really meant it when the owner of this vineyard sent His very own Son thinking, “surely they won’t kill this One like they did all the others that I sent that they called prophets.” But alas, we’ve become so wise in our own ways that we thought to ourselves, “Hey, if we kill the Son then we could have the inheritance!

Not at all sure what kind of sense that makes.

But hey, here we are!

Where are we?

Well, in a world entirely upside down thanks to our thinking always the wrong way around trying to find some way for this all to come out just as we’re pretty sure we’d really like it to despite our both never having lived this far seeing as how today we’re one day older than we’ve ever been (or one year, Happy Birthday Mom!), and too we’ve thus never had quite so much in the way of knowledge and understanding in regard to what are things we’ve never seen in what is today a life we’ve never lived.

Do you get that?

That every single day every life is made brand new? That there’s not technically any written rule that says we have to do the same things over and over again? That we don’t even have to desire the things that everyone around us has settled for? That we can want something more, do something new, become something better?

And that every single day!

No, while it’s in every way sad to say it seems as if most here don’t realize that as we instead just wake up with plans already made that are planning on merely adding onto or maybe slightly adjusting the day we lived yesterday, which was itself just a continuation of the day before which was nothing more than repeating of the pattern made and settled for inside every day we’d lived before.

All because within our wisdom we think it far better to change nothing and do little new so as to never risk having to.

Why?

Because it could either go wrong or go right and we’re just so terrified of the wrong that we think it now our right to do nothing so we’ll lose nothing of what is a life we’ve both already lost and that thanks to our having lost our minds thinking it wrong to do right simply because the wise things of this world, the strong people in this world, the successful and pretty ones to whom we look to glean what we should do to become like them, they all tell us only to live as if we’re number one and thus there can be no other and thus God’s not our Father as we’re all products of our own creation and thus endowed only with the responsibility to keep doing whatever got us here atop these ivory towers built so high that we can’t rightly remember how low we had to go to get here.

How’s that for a run-on sentence?

Should please those who think that writing is made for rules rather than sharing ideas and hopefully a spot of learning along the way.

But that’s the thing, my entire point for today actually. It’s that, as even the Bible mentions perfectly plainly, our existence has become nothing more than an abidance unto what are “mere human rules” all of which we adhere to because we too have become convinced that we belong both in and thus to this place simply because we are at present in this place.

Thus proving the wisdom of this world in how where you are apparently has the right and ability to dictate who you are and that as defined best by what you do.

But hey, guess we’ve at least got one part of that right!

For indeed, we are known by our fruit, just as the Bible tells us (which kind of seems to hint that perhaps we should judge some things every now and then despite that being considered the unkind thing to do). And it’s considered unkind because, well, turns out our fruit is rotten and has gathered the interested of they who are the maggots which feed upon the underbelly of a world that feeds them only a steady diet of this fallen assumption that those who know best what to do with a life are only those who have the most in this life as is measured via material as opposed to such things as mercy or modesty or meekness.

No, those things are reserved for the weakest. For the losers. For the freaks who sleep in the streets as if they agree that here they have no home but rather rejoice in their daily looking for the Kingdom come into which they’ve been told, and foolishly chosen to believe, they’ve a King who chose to get killed by a people who never had the ability to so steal from Him what was never actually ours to so misuse as we so clearly have.

For it makes no sense that someone would willingly opt to lay down their lives.

Nor that they could then turn right around and take them back up, building again the very Temple they’d promised to tear down.

A confusion born inside our sinful delusion that has us all convinced that Jesus was talking about a building simply because we’ve all forgotten that our bodies were meant to be temples of the Holy Spirit.

A fact we’ve forgotten because we too have turned these bodies into dens of robbers, a sort of one-stop-shop for all manner of misunderstanding, malcontent and malfeasance.

All because we think it best to do as the Romans do despite the Romans being gone.

Just as with everyone we’ve ever known because such is the overall promise of all life here thanks to our having chosen to ourselves partake of the fruit that’s said to make us smarter and stronger thanks to our knowing more and thus controlling the same. Yes, we think that the more we know the more power we have, even say as much in such clichés as how ‘knowledge is power’, thus again proving our tendency unto forgetting the Wisdom of God’s Word which reads that, “with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”

Kind of seeming to say that if ‘knowledge is power’ but “more knowledge” bring only “more grief” then perhaps power is grief and we’d then be far better off to be meek, humble, lowly in spirit and last of all so that He might come again to do as He’s done and flip things once more so upside down that the last are truly first and the first then last and thus the humble made royal and the royals finally humbled but hopefully not through an eternity spent in hell.

Which is considered unfair despite our having become a people of such wonderful progressions as human exploitation, climate decimation, and an all but finally completely desensitization to the very murdering of one another.

And that even over words and differences of opinion.

Which is why God has chosen the foolish things, the weak things, the lowly things, the despised things, and even those things which most here consider to be nothing to shame those who think themselves wise, who believe themselves strong, who pass themselves off as being these bright and shining pillars of all human potential as is proven best, apparently, in public praise as gained in parades in which the crowds roar louder when we do things wronger.

A choice He’s chosen to make it obvious that it was never about us and what we’ve made ourselves out to be. For everything from life to eternity and the salvation needed in the middle, they never had anything to do with our strength. Heaven isn’t found by those wise enough to think they don’t need to look for it. Peace is not some prize promised only to those dripping with pride. Life is not guaranteed by man’s ability to even live it.

Rather life is a promise given to those of the humbled audacity to do something different from this world.

And why would anyone do that?

Because it’s becoming pretty stinking easy to see why doing as this world does has no possible way of helping us find anything better. Because all this world does is done in regard to this common belief that we’re each gods and thus that He is not.

And well, if that were the case then show me the proof.

How’s that for a table turned?

For you see, we always ask for a sign. Show us something and then we’ll believe it.

Friends, God has shown us our sign and we didn’t want to see it because we thought it beneath us.

So then show me proof of our being better than God and thus having both better plans and greater promises than His.

But the problem is that we can’t as, well, nothing can rival the promise of Heaven and none of those around us would die for us to get to something that isn’t possible.

Thankfully Heaven is more than possible. It’s promised. But friends, it will only be found by those lowly enough to admit they have no chance of finding it, let alone being welcomed.

And that kind of humility is nothing this world will ever know. So let us stop trying to know the world and hope the world agrees to know us and rather turn our eyes to the skies and wait in eager expectation for He who’s said He won’t deny us if we’ll not deny Him.

Because He comes again to once more capsize these confusions our world is drowning in. Don’t live a life that leaves you afraid when He comes. For fear is found by only those willfully unready. That’s why He asked us to stay awake.

For He comes when none will expect. And when He does, many a life will be wrecked when it turns out that our wisdom, our strength, our ability, they all meant nothing if not used unto His glory.

Don’t join the world in their risking of waiting one breath too long to learn that lesson.

Because, in this case, our lives really do depend on it.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold