Day 3961 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 1:11 NIV

Unwelcome

It’s the one feeling that sends everyone reeling into a most solemn of wondering as to why they don’t fit, what they did wrong, how they might change so as to better align with this sought after way of life as is lived by those amongst whom we try to belong. And this is something that all have faced in this place in which we are so surrounded with the sounds of a society amongst whom we walk, with whom we talk, like whom we look and of whom we love.

All because we are all so vastly similar that we’ve really no extemporaneous need to treat one another as if strangers but rather as sisters and brothers, family and friend.

But no, no sadly such a thing has befallen a fallen man that we know rather to hate first and ask questions later. We walk in this way in which everyone else is guilty of something that therefore validates or justifies our disinterest in their lives, even up to and including still perhaps the potential of their losing their ability to keep living it.

That’s just how deeply seated our doubt and denial are inside what are hearts so hard that had we had the chance to see our bad, wicked and wrong and turn from them being allowed to remain what we’d go on ahead to become, well, history now tells that we would literally do nothing of the sort.

That we would instead truly delight to deny that opportunity to turn from darkness, decay, depravity simply because we’d become so staunch in our rebellions that not even God could make a dent should He come yelling from Heaven that Heaven itself had come near and was offering unto all a free pass through gates so narrow that none could fit elsewise.

A fact shown in that He did exactly that and told us precisely the same.

And, well, wasn’t to the tune of the fame that we’ve all come to seek.

Rather it was an almost blanket rejection. Now that’s not to say that none did receive Him as the Scriptures recount an untold amount coming to at first see this babe having been born upon what’s now celebrated as Christmas morn up to those many who began gathering in around Him seeking to be helped or healed in whatever manner they believed this stranger from said manger could provide or produce on to those who saw said produce in the form of a few loafs and a couple fish feeding far more than logic would contend they could all the way up to a select few beating the sun’s rise in their racing to the tomb on that third day to see if He really meant what He said.

And well, He who was dead was suddenly not there but rather had been replaced by an angel who told them that He’d already got up and got back on His way and that He would meet them where He’d told them to be, going on to appear to a couple along the way and then finally to the rest, even proving to the doubtful of the group that it all was true thanks to the holes and folds of a flesh that had been put through some stuff.

But what about the rest? What about those who didn’t believe even before they could see Him hanging there in the torment that they themselves had cheered upon Him? What about those who’d argued with Him throughout His journey from that manger to that danger? What about the ones who mocked and jeered, cheered and sneered as He was roundly rejected and mostly doubted by those who had eyes and ears but no idea that neither worked as they should?

What about the world that still knows the Name and can read the Word and has heard of church and seen images of the cross and yet still either opts or does so quite delightfully to remain all but fully convinced that He’s not there and never was?

What hope, what joy, what life might those have who contend that He hasn’t one?

What about the fact that all of us have lived a life wrapped within that way in which we too existed as if He didn’t, a fact proven in our sharing of society’s delusion that not merely delights in darkness but all but demands that we therein join hands and sing the songs as we go along the wall of what is a wickedness we’re still piling so high that when He comes to split the sky He will probably have to cut through our contentions all over again too?

And what about the furthered fact as found in what should be a fear of our always being well capable of falling back into what we’ve already known, especially when what we’ve known was known far longer, and thus remains far more familiar, than the fear and failure that we’re sure to find in our trying to figure out how to follow this Stranger that we both cannot see and often cannot hear whilst still amongst that great and growing many who contend it foolish to believe in such a thing at all?

Indeed, such is the basis for the continuation of the fall!

It’s that still we walk within the very same world that knows the very same doubt that inspired them all, us all to all but insist that it was His blood poured out, not for the remission of sin, no, simply because we didn’t like that He called Himself the Son and dared then to hint that we’d forgotten that we too were once sons and daughters of the same Most High that came to die in order not to condemn but rather to set free those who had been, have been lost inside a life spent in chains and misery.

Yes, we hate Him because of the truth within Him as said honesty stands in constant hostility to the rampant pride and vanity that has become for us not mere hollow addendums added on then to a life that could elsewise readily turn toward something better.

No, rather such arrogance and stupidity has become our very life as they’re found inside every word we speak, every thing we do, every thought we think, a veritable testimony unto the very Scriptures which testify to the validity of Christ as so too doth the same say that He’s known from the very start, literally Genesis stuff here, that “every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.”

Leading Him to quite easily deduce “how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth.”

It’s all described right there in the sixth chapter of the very first book of the Bible.

Six chapters in to the very first of what would grow to be 66 books amassing a total of 1,189 chapters.

He’s known the odds all along.

And still He came all alone to do what He knew needed to be done if any of we the lost were to be found as those who’d managed to find themselves so freed of their share of that common way of life, the very one which grumbled against God in the desert on their way to the Promised Land from that land of their enslavement, the same as which fought against and even killed many of the prophets, the same which split off into different sects who all joined together again in their debating and dismissing of Jesus simply because He proved them as wrong as their ego couldn’t allow them to see themselves to be.

The same as that which today still uses His Name in vain, leaves His book either at best gathering dust or at worst still sitting on a shelf in some store having never gone to a copy look for.

The same that which today would still happily do all over again what they did to Him way back when the Way came to speak the Truth that brings the Life unto those somehow still increasing few who dare to believe that, yeah, maybe they don’t know what to do, what they’re doing, how to do anything any better having become of the whether that wants to deny that which is hard, that which is scary, that which is anything of anything silly unto those amongst whom we’ve all sought to belong and there feel thus welcomed.

For such is one of the most logical and reasonable things to seek in this life as lived in this place.

After all, it just doesn’t make any sense to be so surrounded by so very many who might as well be our friends so that we can all get together and make plans for weekend parties and month-long vacations and perhaps even life-long marriages with those of the opposite sex who, when with, we find a joy inside that inspires us to hit a knee and/or say yes.

Because, yes, God did create all of us and we are all then of the same beginning, the same foundation, the same construction, the same invention and intention.

We’re all one big family!

And yet rather we delight to treat one another hatefully if not dreadfully so.

Why?

Because it’s what we know. We know so much doubt, so much fear, so many feelings of worry and war that anymore we’re sure of nothing but that everyone around us is out to get us and take what we have and want what we want and beat us to the getting thereof. We are convinced that everyone we see is either a competition or a prey, and honestly most days even those two are seen the same.

Just as nothing more than an enemy that we’re here to hate so wonderfully that we both eventually just agree to cast aside any and all limitations and just resort to whatever we ourselves deem necessary to ensure that we get ours and that none take it away or prevent our getting toward wherever it is that has whatever it is that to us is worth enough to hate anyone and everyone we happen to meet along the way.

That’s why His own did not receive Him. That’s why we still don’t receive Him. It’s because, well, as He Himself says again in another part of Scripture, His ways are not our ways. His plans are not our plans. His purposes have purposes whereas ours know only profit and pride. But differences aside, which we can rarely agree to set aside anymore as they’re better seen as grounds for yet another deemed our enemy, the bigger problem seems to be that He at first dared to say that His ways are higher, i.e., better.

And then came in the unveiled audacity to prove it via His losing a life unto at first being vastly unwelcomed despite His mercy and healing having restored sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, life to the dead only to eventually be, as we’d perceive, permanently unwelcomed thanks to our having, as Pilate wisely tried, washed our hands of Him via our hanging Him in that one place we were, and most still are, quite certain He can’t return from.

And that empty grave then proves us wrong yet again.

But rather than taking all we’ve seen, heard, maybe even felt inside and allowing it to begin the good work we might imagine it could be, and may be well able to even believe we do in fact need, no. No instead we just continue to throw our hats and hearts in with those lost in hate and the sheer heaviness thereof. Maybe that’s why we do it. Maybe it’s because the heaviness of hatred helps to weigh down the heart in just such a way that it manages to help us go on believing that here we will stay.

In what is a world that houses a way that we call home.

And indeed, this seems to be chief amongst the complaints charged against Him when He walked amongst them who even He knew intended to do Him harm. It was then, as it manages to remain now, this charge of what’s basically sedition as is defined as “conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch.” The “state or monarch” here being, well, us and, more specifically, the way of life we’ve come to live in which we’ve only come to idolize the way of life we live.

A choice we make because we’re both terrified of change and that because we’re more than okay with all the creature comforts we’ve managed to find in this place such as, again, pride, profit, power, all proven via public praise and adoration.

All things that we’re all incredibly disinterested if not utterly unwilling to give up!

Which is why the rich young man went away from Jesus sad. It was because he’d just managed to learn that finding oneself welcome in Heaven wasn’t to be accomplished by merely upholding the law but rather in laying down the life that all have spent living in violent opposition to it.

All because the Law stipulates that we’re to have no other gods and that, in that, we’re to love others as ourselves as love is from God and whoever loves knows God but whoever doesn’t, well, doesn’t.

A fact proven a failure for each of us in how we’ve all basically been found guilty of murder thanks to that part of Scripture which posits that “anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer,” which goes on to add that, “and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.”

A verdict which really doesn’t sound all that pleasing unto a people who either think they’ll live forever despite everyone else dropping like flies along the way or that they elsewise deserve the hope of eternal life despite whatever wrong they may or may not do within this one spent leading up to.

A delusion we’ve designed inside the very same denial of Christ that continues to inspire most to live in such ways that have them doing such things as spreading gossip and slander (both of which the Bible speaks against), withholding help from foreigners and strangers (also not big on the Bible’s list of things to do), ignoring the widow and orphan (something God’s really against), even something so small as standing in judgement as if we’ve successfully both found and managed to remove every plank in our eyes and lives.

Which we can’t actually see to do.

All things that Christ not only came to prove but in fact proved so fully that, as Scripture says, we are now without excuse. Yep, we have no excuse to continue living this life we choose. Why? Because now everything’s on the table. All the cards have been shown. Or, well, at least He has. He’s shown us both what is good and that, to Him at least, it is in fact worth dying for.

Which is pretty much right where our tracks jump the train as we’re not putting up with this idea that we might need to die in order to find something better as, well, what we have as it sits is seemingly more than just fine and we didn’t have to die in order to find it.

Or did we?

Yeah, seems that such will remain the mystery that keeps so many so consumed inside themselves seeking the answer to the riddle (that isn’t there to find in what we ourselves like to think) or just some excuse to not think about the greater gravities of life such as how we’ve all messed it up and yet still think it wise to deny He who said the same and died to the same overcome, a gift we refuse because we refuse to lose our grip on what we still think is our life, that we’re holding onto so tight that we’re basically all turning blue thanks to a lack of oxygen making to the brains that, well, wouldn’t think even if it got there.

All because we seem to have arrived at the place in time in which most seem to contend that even thinking thoughts is dangerous.

Best to let cell phones and their algorithms think them for us.

And why do so many agree to this? Because everyone else is, and well, the best way to be found worthy of being welcomed by those around us is to do what they do, speak like they speak, want what they want, live how they live, love what they love, hate who they hate, die how they die.

The last one in what is a way of life in which our chief aspiration is to be found welcomed by those who likely still reject Christ to what is the promised outcome of not eternal life but rather everlasting death in that place that, logically, nobody would want anyone to go, not even their worst enemies. Of whom everyone is seen anymore. A fact that we apparently find still as the very grounds for the very hatred that shows neither love nor life as love is from God and God is life and thus hate is from someone else that leads somewhere else.

Never mind all that though for we know what we’re doing as is proven so certain thanks to the sheer number of those who are doing the same things and thus probably seen as our friends.

Basically overlooking the warning that friendship with the world is enmity against God.

But hey, it’s a number’s game right? Odds then on our side? Something we seem to have proven in how we always get rid of those outliers who do things differently?

Yeah, we are so very powerful that we alone retain the rights to determine who lives and who dies, as solemn fact seen most nights on the news anymore.

And yet we think we have something good in store despite such scenes of such horror and tragedy having become so common that we barely blink when whenever we hear of them?

Indeed, it’s become commonplace to hate one another, thus apparently arriving us at the place we wanted to be: A world filled with kings and queens who lord it over whomever they manage to convince to seek their favor via serving their fakeness.

Yes, we do so love fakeness, a fact proven in filters and foul language thought of as funny simply for the shock-value.

All proving how Jesus couldn’t be welcome here.

Because, despite our having been made in His image before He was made into ours, that He had to come in the form of sinful flesh kind of proves the problem.

For He wouldn’t have had to do so had we not done such a bad job at living life that we all earned a strange interest in living to die.

An interest that manages to thrive thanks to sin being allowed to do the same.

A fact that ought to make us wonder why we all still try so hard to feel so welcome in what remains the very same place that has already proven, both in that cross and in every line we’ve crossed since then, what He who is both Love and Life embodied still wasn’t, isn’t and will sadly never be:

Welcome.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold