Day 3959 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 9:6 NIV

Unto us

Among all the days of the year, of what is but one of the many years we live, this one here always is the one in which I find that I might struggle worst of all when it comes to the words to write. Why? Because, well, how do you describe it all? How can you explain the very meaning of what means everything?

What is the definition of everything and how might one put that into words that cover enough to measure there up to the concept of completion in terms of something we’re all just now learning?

Indeed, how can we ever expect a language, as unlimited as ours so often seems to be, to somehow be still so able when what’s being discussed is the very One who breathed this breath into our lungs which flows either out through our fingers or slips atop our tongues in our trying to talk or type what is our try to convey a message that means more with every passing day?

No, it’s not possible as, well, again it’s something more all the time as inside this life He still comes to find we these lost who know only to wander into wonder and there find ourselves, thus far forever, so turned around and torn asunder from what was always supposed to remain the simple promise of a coming Day upon which all will kneel and all will say what was to be nothing more than what they’d been made to spend a lifetime practicing.

Such a length of learning given because of the sheer gravity of both God and the very eternity that He Himself created, a celebration met upon this Christmas morning inside the arrival of a Savior who was met in a manger as there was no room for Him at the inn, a scene already seen inside how He is our Savior, sent to save us from the life we’d lived in which we hadn’t room either.

And that’s why life is long. It’s why life is hard. It’s this combination of our all but daily fighting against the very call of creation to remember who we were as compared against who we are and why that division, that distance, that dance away from God’s design into a life given so sadly unto darkness now demands us to distance from who we’ve become in a life lived numb to the meager existence of our Savior and what that should mean for us.

But alas, it’s not stuff. It’s not success. It’s not cars and houses and hours spent away from our families and shelving our faith in order to afford the above. It’s not even our understanding of love as has been made into mere agreement as bound incessantly unto appeasement due only to its easement of a cement that assures we’re creatures still of the comfort we’ve known in a life we’ve grown to please the masses and assume they’ll return the favor.

No, no this is a far different favor, a favor of another flavor, a flavor from another layer of what is a life we’ve either never known or only knew back when we one or maybe two in which we perhaps spoke better the language of the Lord, back before our estimation of human performance and its perfection got in the way and led us out of the same.

The Way.

Such is He who came, the Truth, the Life, the Way. Came to save by being the Way by which to take to eventually come to make we who were His and sadly only forgot to be again His as those who have since fought to forget, forsake, fumble, fail and finally walk away from who we’d become in that life spent numb to the love of Heaven that chose to come in the humblest of ways on the most random of days to lay in some hay and then spend His journey speaking to clay who lost sight of their purpose having embraced the blindness of their parents.

Not that such is what any mom or dad might wish to so pass on to their children.

It’s just what all of us were born into a life spent knowing.

Chaos.

Confusion.

Doubt.

Delusion.

Depravity and its demand of collusion as has been always aimed to rob the owner of this vineyard of the fruit He’s due, killing His heir in this air of our thinking that doing so would somehow accomplish for us the achievement of gaining the fullness of His inheritance.

Thus proving us of a greed so deep that all we’ve found is mere foolishness as that’s simply not how it works!

And yet that’s the overall estimation of all our lives standard vocation.

None of it works.

It’s all just confusion wrapped in chaos but sold with a bow that tells us that this is how it’s supposed to be simply because it’s what we’ve all gotten used to continuing to see and that so much that now we expect nothing more.

We expect nothing more.

And this itself leaves us seeking nothing more. And that accomplishes only our too becoming nothing more. And this leaves us living still those lives that caused Him to leave Heaven behind in order to come and find we who’d strayed into this way in which we walk not toward home but toward rome, all because such is where the masses go in order for their to know the most prosperous way to lose this life here in this night in which we find that we’d rather hide than hope, hate than heal, rob and steal and even that the glory that we should all see as being so due our Father that we really do treat one another as our sister, as our brother.

But no.

No, we’ve forgotten how. In fact, we’ve forgotten a lot! But yet it seems that our forgetting said lot has only left us again not looking for what we seem to know is missing. And we seem to know that something inside of us is empty because we do keep looking, but sadly only to those very same places that the same empty faces we’ve long called our friends tell us to keep trying even though they themselves continue to fail in their finding of some sort of something that could make life again feel like anything.

An emptiness held inside our holding fast to this life spent living the same, a choice all have made as we seem to also know that we’re running short of time in which to try and find some way to tie this life back together and make it make sense.

Because in our way, it doesn’t. Nothing makes sense about how we live. And that’s because it’s all vanity and taxes. It’s nothing but some solemn blending of what we want and what we owe having tried to get what all we’ve got only to find that it didn’t fill our lives either.

And it’s all of this trying of worldly wares and woes that has left us known as those who know so much of the world that, again, we don’t look anywhere else anymore for the anything more that we know is there but seemingly so far that we measure it not worth the pleasure of the pain that’s always so sure to come just as soon as we go off thinking that something else found somewhere else by we’d who be by then someone else just isn’t worth the risk.

So we stay. And that wherever we are as, well, what easier to find than whatever you’ve already found? Doesn’t mean it’s good. Doesn’t mean we enjoy it. Doesn’t often add up to being worth the moment in which we think it matters followed by a million in which we learn it didn’t.

We do it simply because it’s easy.

And it’s easy because, despite it being defined by our being lost, we know where we are as we live it every day, and that kind of continued continuity has allowed for us to practice over the course of years our little routes, routines, ruins and ruts so as to find our way safely around what’s become a town we’ve no intent to leave.

Because if we did then we’d just have to spend all that time again learning those patterns that all but all of life has become.

Is that what He meant for life to be? Just this endless sea of things already seen? Our never knowing anything of everything more than we’ve never seen, heard, held, known, thought, tried before? Our never being anything other than whatever we’ve always been?

Is that why Christ was sent?

To leave where we were living as who we were as those counted time and again all throughout Scripture as those who are enemies living in enmity both against God and thus against themselves?

Do we still not realize that?

That our having been made in God’s image means that when we do as we shouldn’t we not only let Him down but we do the same unto ourselves? For we were meant to be like Him, children created in His image and thus endowed with the existence spent in that Garden He at first created. That was His intention. Peace. Hope. Joy. Love. Mercy. Kindness. Provision.

The promise of all the above provided in endless fashion.

But no. No, all of that we’ve forgotten in our now lifelong search for the substance of something else. What? It’s different all the time. For, sadly, such is what we want out of life. Just something different all the time. One day it’s to be surrounded by friends, the next it’s to be left alone to wallow in the shame of what we did at the parties we had to go to in order to feel something other than alone for a while. One day it’s some trophy or trinket we’ve come to treasure, the next day it’s another as we slowly learn that no worldly triumph really matters.

One day it’s the hope of Heaven as found inside the humility known of a Savior who left Heaven behind to come and find we who’d gotten so lost that we’re desperately seeking said hope, and the next we’re again right back to measuring hope by the dollar.

And this is our normal. This is our common.

This is our life.

All of it defined by a glaring lack thereof.

And that’s why God sent Christ to come down from up above in order to meet us where we were so as to, from where we were, lead us back up toward who we were made to be.

And where did His story start of His coming to find a people falling apart?

In a manger surrounded by farm animals.

Almost as if to say that we’d gotten ourselves so lost and turned around that we too were living a life working the ground for whoever we’d submitted to owning us via the common thoughts and theories we’d bought in a life on the brink of a kind of collapse from which there is no coming back.

That’s why He came like that. It was to show us the fullness of our fall so as to help us find a fullness of faith that would, in humility, allow Him to be the One to lead us back to that place, that life that we’d lost and left behind in our search to find what none have found because better isn’t there. There is nothing better than His plans and purposes for us.

Just that we lost sight of that trust and embraced another truth, a different truth in which we live to lose and yet love to live doing so.

Which pretty much explains the Wonderful Counselor part as, well, we’re all so mixed up in our thinking that we need some wonderful counseling if we’re ever to come even close to understanding again what life was always meant to be.

Why?

Because it ain’t this!

In fact, I’m daily convinced that we’re somehow daily further away from what life was always meant to be.

Why?

Because we just keep going the directions already known making the same decisions we’ve always have. All while thinking that something better will come of that! Something we’ve been trying for centuries, this hunting for some other meaning, purpose, path or plan that we could follow to lead us to what we’ve sadly taken it upon ourselves to estimate all of life to mean.

But again, how are we to define such a thing?

Who are we to define such a thing?

Not to bash the blind, but friends, how can they ever manage to find what they’ve never known before? And, well, how can we still not see that better we cannot be unless and until we too find what we’ve never found before? And, well, how can we ever find the better we’ve never been if we’ll not humbly admit that we don’t know where to look thanks to our having become this blind to the better we so often deny here inside a way of life in actions defined as those undertaken by the lost still following the same blind guides that all of us have so excitedly become?

And, again, how then are we to define why Jesus would leave Heaven behind to come and find a people who’ve so lastingly proven that they wish only to remain lost?

It’s impossible.

There simply are no words to convey the meaning of this day as it marks the coming of a King that came as one counted among the lepers and loners of a world in which still you’re nothing if you don’t have a fancy car and impressive title. Granted, King of Kings is truly as impressive a title as it gets, alas it wasn’t one bestowed by us and so we don’t live as if we feel the need to agree with it.

All because such is the life we’ve assumed to be the best way to live one.

That lived as if we’re somehow able to accomplish the very design and definition of everything.

And that despite our track record of so ruining everything that God Himself had to come in human form to save the same from their, our having become so convinced that we know better than Him how to uphold this gift that is this life that we didn’t give ourselves.

And it’s in this that we find that it’s also impossible to find any possible way in which to define just how lost and confused we truly are.

A fact which blends perfectly with the impossibility of describing the gravity of this Christmas Day as it all joins together to stand and say that none of it makes any sense and it’s all so undeserved on both sides that we shouldn’t be able to celebrate such a thing as Christmas and the coming of Christ.

Simply because He had no reason to come at all!

Because we’ve given Him only reasons not to.

Thankfully He came in order to prove that it was never on us to know what we’re doing, let alone live as if we might.

No, rather it’s always been our lot to let Him be Lord as we enjoy the existence as what are but sheep of His pasture, each leaning fully upon Him to provide everything we need, all because He is everything we need.

But again, how does one truly put that into words that we the lost can understand?

You can’t.

And yet, that’s somehow the beauty of Christmas. It’s the day on which we rejoice in God doing what we couldn’t, and doing it in such a way that even words don’t matter anymore. No, all that matters for today is the wonder and awe in which this story was written. Because friends, it’s not something for us to figure out. It’s not a problem we’re here to wrap our minds around. It isn’t another mystery that we can take to the internet to research and there plumb the depths of.

It’s actually all rather simpler than that.

I mean, what could be simpler than a baby?

And yet, so too what could be more complex than what said little one would grow to mean?

I think my point for today, as rambling and random as it perhaps may have seemed, is that so often in life we try so hard to understand everything but only to eventually then limit everything to what little we can actually understand. And in the doing of this to life we only cause ourselves to misunderstand faith. And I know that because I know that it doesn’t need to be as hard as we try to make it seem.

Again, it’s a baby.

I would hope that we’d all take today and allow it to just be what it is. It’s not about the presents. It’s not about the trees. It’s not the traditions or even the memories. Not that those aren’t all wonderful things because they truly are, and things themselves that we all should be grateful for.

But the true meaning of Christmas is that God has chosen to come and find us, and He did so by starting off as a baby in a manger surrounded by the humblest of welcoming parties possible.

Maybe there’s some hints of where we too could start looking for the hope of where He came to go.

For in the end, the ultimate goal isn’t some life filled with all a person could ever want. No, the goal is the hope of Heaven being proven a home into which we’re somehow welcomed.

And that somehow is what we celebrate today.

It’s that in Christ God came to make the way, to be the Way for us to return to where we were always meant to be.

Just let that be what it’s supposed to be.

As simple and complex as it needs to be.

Because again, the point isn’t our finding the right words or some way by which to explain the gravity of this gift that we call life, let alone that gift called Christ.

The point is that God will make a way even if that way doesn’t make sense.

It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s not supposed to fit into words. It’s not supposed to be so limited by our abilities at all.

It’s just meant to be accepted and appreciated.

And yeah, while that may sound like a massive over-simplification of this story of our salvation, I think the message of today is one meant to say that sometimes in life the greatest stories are those which start with pretty simple beginnings.

So let us all let today be that simple beginning.

Of what becomes an eternal life spent looking unto Him who’s come unto us.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold