Day 3964 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Acts 28:27 NIV

A resilient resistance

Such is what allows for the formation of a callous heart otherwise defined as a hardened heart, as is indeed quite the same as the hardened hands which themselves are referred to being as such thanks to the calluses which form upon them. Callus and callous are in basically every way the exact same thing, even down to being all but identical in spelling, in formation, in feeling even. For both are formed due to repeated friction, pressure or irritation which inspires the flesh involved to harden itself so as to in a way protect itself.

A protection sought from that which it understands as posing risk of further injury, pain or similar misery.

Problem is that the difference is that a callus you can see, you can feel, you can run your fingertips along the inside of a human hand and feel the hardened, slightly bumpy and/or rough patches that have built up into this toughened exterior due to the years of such manual labor as lifting heavy loads or sweeping dirty floors or shoveling out stalls so as to provide a safe and sustainable place for livestock to live.

You can’t necessarily see, touch, feel or perhaps even notice a callous though.

Let’s take for example a callous heart, a pretty poignant example if I do say so myself. The issue there is that you can’t see the heart, and, even if you could, you wouldn’t be able to see the hardness of it as such toughening due to years of such miserable labor as carrying heavy burdens or sweeping mistakes under the rug or shoveling foolishness until the pile is sky-high so as hopefully accomplish a safe and sustainable darkness behind which to hide in what is a life lived as if some of those livestock that many farmers raise and tend and hope to see succeed and offer then a measure of prosperity.

Rather it would just look like a heart, and feel the same as any other.

Because the problem runs much deeper in the callous as opposed to the callus.

Guess we could blame it on the o.

Which, knowing who we’ve become in these lives as we’re widely known for having chosen to live them, seems exactly like something we’d be none too happy to try. Why? Because we blame everything bad or wrong or seemingly failed or fallen in one way or another on whomever we might delight to try and pretend caused this trouble, this folly, this failure that we’re all to be found walking in, living in, saddest of all believing in.

For indeed, there is a necessity of belief unto every human intention as none of us will do anything if at first we don’t believe that there’s a reason, a purpose, a profit waiting to be won within our so doing of whatever the task or trial is that we’re debating. It’s like that farmer mentioned above. He wakes up every morning to go out and muck the stalls and feed the animals and ensure that they’re well cared for so that they can grow and remain healthy and eventually become either food for his family or a stock worth a windfall on the market.

He does it all because he believes it will be worth it.

Much like how we always set to determine, to decide, to differentiate even between the varied and various options given us in terms of what to do, what to want, what we need and how badly certain things are needed which demands their pursuit supersedes that of other things. It’s like these survival shows that my family and I have gone down the rabbit hole watching. There’s this generally understood hierarchy in regard to the necessities which need to be sought and solidified should one ever find themselves in a survival-type situation.

For every human needs food, water, shelter. But these are broken down further in terms of importance because, well, while we can go for a couple of weeks without food, we can only survive about 3-4 days without water. And so then water becomes the highest of priority.

And then food.

And then shelter is something we worry about eventually after the other two more highly needed items have been proverbially checked off the list of things to get done in order to not die.

What’s really weird is that, of all the little checklists and plans and paths toward them that we seem to have in this life, we don’t ever really seem all that worried about that list of things to get done in order to not die. Rather, for whatever reason, we seem to have determined it best to just live as if we won’t. Or that we might but that if so nothing really happens after we do. And that because, well, if these weirdos are right and we’re then found not only wrong but so patterned and repeated in being so that our hearts have become calloused, then we might be in some real trouble.

Like that kind that there’s pretty much literally no coming back from.

Because the same weirdos believe in the same Bible which talks a lot about forever and how there are but two places, vastly different in every possible way, in which all of us will find said forever stayed.

But hey, not that big a deal right now, right?

I mean, truly, we are indeed not there yet. And, even more so, we’re rather still in what we can easily assume the middle of what’s been a life of however many years filled each with hundreds of days that all amass into this estimation that we’ve still thousands more in which to worry, to weary, to wonder and wander and want more of either as is to be determined always later when we find ourselves both who we’d become and yet then only a people known for want but by then of new things from what will prove both the same place and yet likely quite different.

Simply because all of life as we know it is being lived on this planet and yet society in this planet is seeking so sternly such technologic and thus technocratic progression that who knows but that in a mere 5-10 years life as we know it will be even further lived via technology and all the idolatrous reliance we have upon it.

For we’re a people who, again, determine always which paths to take in life as based upon what seems to offer the best results in terms of wealth, health, happiness.

There’s even a whole new “gospel” that’s being preached that’s pushing those very things as all but promised unto those who pray hard enough and provide fiscally enough unto the “churches” and “pastors” who push this stuff unto a people desperate for relief from what is in fact a difficult and challenging and often even heartbreaking way of life.

And indeed, as the Bible reads, many here “put up with it easily enough.”

Why?

Because it offers a semblance of both belief and the piety which should always be evidenced in such a hope-based undertaking as that formed in the humility of a God who would leave the safety and security and superiority of Heaven behind to come on this earth in order to die so as to atone for sins He didn’t commit committed instead by a people who’d chosen to forget that He is God and they are not.

A fact we forget so easily because we’re told constantly that we are masters of our own destinies, a lie which inspires us unto the repetition of the undertakings that eventually grow to become such ruts that our hearts are hardened along them due to the friction, pressure and irritation caused either within them or due to the opposition of other life options found running against them.

In short, it is our patterns in life, as chosen for whatever reason, that are to always exist in opposition to another choice we could have made, a different path we could have taken, a strange existence we could have chosen that would have been likely nothing much like the one we have chosen as has been chosen mostly due to the comfort, the safety, the pride, posterity and profit as promised unto all people who here fall in line behind this mind that is so blind as to think life is best to be lived putting ourselves first and considering still nothing else, nothing different thereafter.

No, rather we become so intent, so content upon this existence in which we’re fed until we’re fat, pleased until we pop, loved until we’re lost inside these feelings of such affirmation and adoration and the applause which pours from the crowds which gather today on phones sending little virtual hearts and thumbs-up offering an agreeance with our existence that achieves for us this feeling that everything we’re doing is both right and thus right to keep doing.

And in this the patterns are laid and then the plans made to continue repeating them.

And repeating them.

And repeating them until our hearts and minds and ears and eyes and lives are so hardened in the one direction that we’ve determined most delightful to go that nothing, no matter the mercy or majesty thereof, nothing can make a dent anymore. Our souls, thanks to sin, become themselves so hardened, so calloused within that not even the promise of Heaven can prove enough unto those who eventually become of the pride and arrogance that has them certain that they can either find it inside their many plans and preferences, or that they can perhaps even top it in the same.

All because a calloused heart and hardened soul loses slowly the ability to consider anything outside of itself. And in this the self becomes the god we serve. And in this the pleasure of the self becomes the service we give. And in this the service we choose to offer becomes only that which pleases these gods we estimate ourselves to be.

And in all of this we become so lost inside what is a self-assurance that we’ve found the very purpose of life itself that we will even grow to fight, at first verbally but eventually violently too, against any and all who dare suggest we lose any of all that is our way of life as is being lived already in the sort of pleasure, gain and victory that seems to testify that what we’re doing is right.

A determination that defines anything else as equally then wrong.

Even if said anything else is everything that Christ is as is defined by everything Christ did as was all done so as to, as the Son, atone for the sins of those who had worked so hard against God for so long as all of humanity has that they themselves managed to lose sight of the image in which they were made, setting then aside as well the fact which states that those of shared image but of younger age are but children of the image bearer from which they’ve thus clearly come.

In other words, we’ve wanted to be gods for so long that we’ve forgotten that we are God’s.

And in this we’ve stumbled upon so many delightful patterns that offer us such things as the pleasure all flesh seeks and the success that every society assumes we need as is found or formed in coins and chaos that such things are all we know to seek.

And we know equally to fight fervently against any who call us toward a different way toward a different place that is promised only to those who live a different life.

Something we know not how to do, how to want, thus how to welcome.

Because it seems to us as only the loss of everything we’ve worked for, fought for, dreamed for. And, well, why give all that up? Why let go of what’s become a fairly easy and arguably quite successful way of life? Indeed, all of us are something akin to that rich man which asked Jesus what more he needed to do having done everything by the book in terms of law and the expectations thereof.

“All these I have kept”, that young man said.

“Give what you have to those have not and then come and follow me”, said the One he asked.

And the young man went away sad because he simply had too much to give and wanted not to lose any of it no matter the promise which might have been gained in having so done.

No, we all, from where we stand, we see that we’ve too much to lose that we’ve worked so hard to have and hold that our hearts themselves have grown cold toward any other effort, any other direction, any other promise.

Yes, even that of Heaven!

Indeed, that so many among us would hear of such a hopeful promise and turn yet back to what is a life that is being lived in what is a land that is promised to end, this is the greatest testament to our housing of hearts so hardened that they literally cannot anymore even comprehend the joy, the peace, the mercy that’s waiting for them to do so little as stand up and turn around.

That’s truly all He asks.

That we welcome His help in coming to realize that we have fallen amongst the fallen having fallen for the same lies that have led us to live the same lives as those who are now to the point of lying, of stealing, of murdering, and to, seeing in the fall what we too might become, begin the truly arduous task of repenting from every sinful inclination that we ourselves have accepted as if validation of our being successful in what is a life as lived in a place in which, because sin wins, people choose to continue to chase whatever sin might win them the most.

But friends, there’s a foundationally simple question which all this confusion begs be asked:

What will it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet forfeit his soul in the process?

We see this very predicament play out in the recounting of Jesus’ temptation, or rather the devil’s attempt there at. For the adversary takes Jesus to the highest lookout and shows Him there all the kingdoms of the earth and, going just a little further to sweeten the offer, tells Jesus that all these he will give Him if only He will bow down in worship of he who is evil, so much so that his very name is the very word but with a d to lead the way.

Jesus responds that one must worship none but the Father and, in this, declines the devil’s offer.

An offer of which we sadly can’t quite say the same. For instead all of us have at best chosen to hear him out and see what all he might have to offer. We’ve all tasted and seen the apparent success and arguably proven satisfaction of the many ways and wares of the devil’s woes. All of us have in fact enjoyed some thereof that the same have became the very idols that the Bible warned expressly against. But we’ve ignored said Word for long enough that our hearts, ears, eyes have become hardened against it.

Indeed, it’s as if some are to the point in which they believe that they might well die were they to ever read the Word, go to church, send up a prayer.

And, well, perhaps there’s some validity to that fear as, well, it’s pretty hard to not know of God’s opinion of the way of life we’ve been living. And so, yeah, it’s easy to see why all are so afraid of venturing near His Way. We know what we deserve to find having been found guilty of letting Him down so many times that He Himself came down to remind us of what sin earns in His bearing of the wage that we all owe.

Question then becomes why we continue in the way of life that continues earning the same debt.

If not because we’re inside so dead thanks to hearts so calloused and cold that we know of doubt, dread, denial when it comes to the idea of faith, of forgiveness, of facing the Father who is well capable of either ending us or welcoming us. A difference which we again understand which side we deserve to find.

But friends, if all we continue to find is only all that we’ve already found and there found reason to want only more, then yeah, our fears and doubts and dreads will be proven true. But in the event that we welcome the humility that begins inspiring us to share in His doing of something, of everything new, then so too might we find a different outcome. Might even find ourselves welcomed into a different place with a different peace as was promised to those few who walk here a different path.

Alas, it seems to be at least partly on us as to just how hard we remain stood against it. For the Scriptures posit in many places the call to choose for ourselves whom we follow, what we believe, what we seek in this life as is all accomplished inside a choice we choose or a change we won’t. Just so happens that change is what we need, leaving then whether or not we ever welcome it proving the problem.

For God has made clear His willingness to welcome and extend the forgiveness which allows for such a people as we to be found anything but obliterated before a God such as He. And so too have we sadly made clear our response. Issue then is that part in which it’s said that God doesn’t change, and that with the understanding that Christ has came and here did die and that for sin.

Meaning then that should we remain hardened in our calloused hearts in what is a life in which we raised callused hands shaking them against Him each and every time we fall into sin, we’ll have thus rejected His mercy, denied His offering, and lived out our lives as if He didn’t lay His down.

And make no mistake, many there be in this place who will do just that. But friends, while doing as the world does is something we’ve done enough of ourselves to have become toughened to the task, willing and able to keep repeating the same, this doesn’t mean that we should.

For while it might offer to shatter us now to ourselves lay down what’s been a life we’ve grown to understand enough to prove successful and perhaps well-pleased in repeating, earning more of that wage of death just seems blatantly stupid.

Because He, for today, offers still to forgive.

Will we, still for today, choose to refuse?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold