Day 3965 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Matthew 15:8-9 NIV

Merely human

Barely human at this point if we were to be honest, which sadly most often we’re not as among our human rules of such vanity as the ego and idols in which we daily bow to worship is found this idea that dishonesty is somehow a better policy as it provides a profit of praise sent back our way from those whom we seek not to offend and thus continue thinking us their friends because we speak the lies that allow them to remain in lives that are but a collection of time that’s dying both slowly and yet still quicker than we could ever imagine.

Just slow enough to inspire in us this vast unwillingness to live as if our lives are on the line, lives themselves lived so fast that we think they’re not because we think we’re living life at its best already.

Yep, we’ve done arrived at the very pinnacle of all human potential!

So indeed, let us gather together upon this last day of yet another year gone by and pat ourselves on the back as we raise our heads high still stuck to that, in that same pride of life that at first demanded we taste the fruit that opened our hearts to knowing the better we ought to do and met there only a growing sense of disinterest, displeasure even in the doing of, well, as of today much at all. For again, if we have so reached the very epitome of all human ability, then what more is there to try for?

No, if that be truly the case then we have in truth every reason to so waste the rest of these days, these years upon our doing of nothing new, nothing more, nothing better then.

Which seems to be basically the message the masses are sending in its entirety. That we’re done. That we’re good enough as it is. That we needn’t worry ourselves nor weary ourselves with the working ourselves for, toward something better as there is no such thing unto a people of such pride and vanity as this we see daily of this society in which everyone seems to know everything despite how we’re all doing different things or maybe even the same things but for different reasons seeking likely different outcomes or destinations.

Indeed, we’re all doing so many different things and living as such different people and yet we’re all so roundly convinced that we alone have taken hold of the greatest goal of common sense as defined by our own very existence as we alone have found the proverbial fount of all human faith, fame, fortune, favoritism, friendship and yet fight, failure, folly, foolishness and thus a following that’s left us thinking ourselves as if leaders despite the blindness into which we’re each daily led.

Blindness we clearly can’t see inside what are lives in which ears hear but don’t listen, minds confuse and never imagine, hearts strengthen but that in their own hardening, and thus life itself continues to die again so slowly that we still think it best to measure it in time as opposed to opportunity.

A blindness thus furthered perpetually as there can be no end to the depth or darkness of human decay and depravity when hearts won’t beat and minds won’t think and ears refuse to listen to those that our eyes see as only our enemies thanks to their audacity to speak so bluntly, brashly, brazenly and boldly against these lives we’re holding as if both holy and yet hostage.

Seeing always only the first as we do so love to think ourselves gods, never then seeming to notice the second because we seem to have so fully forgotten that instead we are God’s.

That line spilled out upon this blank whiteness yesterday morning as I once again sat to seek some way by which to try and translate His hope into these hearts which seek it not because they think it not needed as we’ve instead come together and formed everything from our own language to our every ability to deny, debate, dismiss and thus plunge into a daily-deepened disinterest in regard to anything mentioned by anyone that in any way stands in our way of living our way as has been so idolized that we cannot see that we’re not living lives.

But that rather life anymore is living us.

All because we’ve become so finished in fervor for faith, for healing, for hope, joy, purpose and meaning (you know, having again found them all) that we’ve rather resorted to sort of outsourcing basically everything that is to be done, needed, wanted or won within a life. We let strangers bring us our meals on wheels that we pay for the convenience. We allow machines to make up our minds for us through such progressions as algorithms learning our rhythms and feeding us a daily banquet of exactly what it knows we’d like.

We let robots build things that we’re too busy doing nothing to create ourselves. We ask pills and needles to do our healing, our losing of weight, our growing of hair even. We lean upon politicians to make our decisions and bankers to instruct us in regard to where to trust our assets to achieve for us a return on such investments as the time we took for granted that we gave away to jobs that are being replaced by aliens and outlaws, computers and criminals seeking to steal from the underbelly of a world grown so dark and dingy that we’re each now but perfectly desensitized to the danger and disgust we should see and be there heartbroken by on the news every night.

But we’re not.

In truth we don’t really seem to care about any of it anymore. We just accept it as the way things are which is, as everyone seems to be living in agreeance, the way things are meant to be. Because we have such things as bigger houses that are empty in terms of love. We have faster cars that help us get to the very same nowhere our lives have us going. We have fatter bank accounts thanks in large part to this ever-swelling minimum wage which requires prices to continue climbing higher, thus negating the making of more money as we need to spend more upon the same things that cost half of what they did just 5 years ago.

We have cars which drive themselves as we’ve apparently lost the interest in what was once a rite of passage into our becoming of adults. We again have drugs which help us address the outward aspects of ourselves and our bodies that we don’t like but have never hated enough to do anything about, drugs that do untold works inside said bodies that we can only hope are not detrimental in ways that blood, sweat and effort seem to be to a people so lazy as we.

Indeed, we are lazy to a fault and it’s no fault but our own that we’ve come to live life this way.

Sure, we can and will someday blame it on someone else or at least the overall consensus that such confusions have formed in what we’ve found to be these commonly expected acceptances of what is a life that we just ain’t interested in living anymore. No, that fact will never be found amongst our excuses when upon that day we’re asked what we did with the time He gave and the many opportunities He ensured it daily overloaded with.

Rather we’ll just say that it was the way we were taught in what we never wanted to accept were mere human rules taught us from those who likely are too of such vanity that all for which they themselves worry is but money and comfort. Riches and retirement. Success and it allowing us to slip further into a stupor that allows us to think it actually best to give up on the call to grow in what is that call to come unto the Christ as is found daily at the foot of the cross that we’re now tasked to carry so as to ourselves crucify upon it all the many deaths we’re still to find living inside these lives the way we’ve been taught to live them.

By those we somehow think better at living than we are for no reasons other than their having more fame or fortune than we do.

Thus finding us perpetually measuring our abilities and their worth as based upon whatever another has, is, isn’t becoming having become what they themselves have been led to believe is the very epitome of successful or beautiful or powerful or prestigious.

Simply because such things are all we all seek in the vanity that has become us so deeply, so fully, so wonderfully that we, as of today, wonder for nothing but rather want still for the very same more than those we look to are seeking themselves in what must then be lives that are not quite so perfect at being lived so fully as they spend their lives daily trying to make them seem so as to retain their seat upon some social throne before which the masses huddle and throw their hope at the feet of those who have eyes that can see but won’t look and ears that can hear but never listen and minds that can think but refuse to fathom thanks to hearts that do beat but only to the tune of human.

Not that of Heaven.

Because such a song isn’t sung by those to whom we daily crawl seeking our morning dose of dopamine as discovered in their once more telling us what to do, who to be, where to go in order to be what they want to see which is but another reflection, another repetition of their very own existence as we all seem to assume both safety in such numbers and also evidence of our success inside the same.

This is why we’re all so engrossed in fame and celebrity and politic and the puppetry of it all. We see these people who have masses hanging upon their every word and whim and we then so easily think them as these pillars of human potential as is sought anymore, as always before, in merely such things as prosperity and power, both of which are measured best in the dollars and cents that we’ve lost our sense seeking to amass for ourselves.

Simply because such is both the lie that sells and thus the lie we buy.

It’s all this grand estimation that the best way to live life is the way that everyone here is losing it. To seek for always only whatever another already has, already is. To measure ourselves against only those around us and never those behind, as in who we were yesterday. To in fact not even strive to remember yesterday but rather to always plan for tomorrow in this ongoing looking out for number one as is always us alone. Yes, this is the best way to live a life!

To look out for ourselves as is accomplished in plans made and profits found and priorities always placed to achieve the same this time tomorrow.

We’re a people living always a day ahead, taking then always for granted this day we have.

One of which will be our last!

But no, such is not a worry for which we’ve been taught to worry. Rather we all align daily with this devotion to this commotion that continues to confuse via human tradition and social intention as is anymore proven via words that sound right as are heard by ears that don’t listen let alone look for their being evidenced inside the actions of those who are at this point literally showing the world who they really are.

Sights we somehow fail to see, likely because we know what we’d find were we to look.

Which is why we don’t. Rather, as discussed yesterday, we’ve closed our eyes, plugged our ears, hardened our hearts and given our years to only furthering the above.

Why?

Because it’s what we’ve been taught to believe is the best possible path through what is a world that’s getting quite bad, but the same that we don’t want to speak about because we know the conversation might happen to circle around upon the part we’ve played in it all falling down. We don’t want our lies to become known as being so deceptive as we’ve learned to lie about their being. We don’t want our actions seen as they’re not a scene which paints a very pretty picture for our social media followers.

And we definitely don’t want our faiths or foolishnesses to be found for what they truly are as they likely aren’t as aligned with mankind as we so often try so hard to make them seem so to hopefully achieve our feeling as if we’re welcomed amongst those who only welcome those who look like them, live like them, lie like them.

So that’s what we do having been daily taught to. We speak in a common vernacular that’s void of any real substance. We think in thoughts given us from those we tune into on the nightly news channel we choose because of it aligning with what we’ve been taught to believe. We live and breathe in all these lies we hear, these lies we see, and we never ask any questions as we’ve been taught that such a thing is unkind, offensive, unwarranted.

No, just fall in line, do as you’re told, do not touch, do not taste, do not see for yourself that life as we’ve known it has been nothing but the lies we’ve been sold about how best to hold what was never ours to so estimate as our being so able to so insist in whatever direction we alone think best to go. No, rather life is a gift given from He who then retains the right to withhold and define the manner and measure in which we’re expected to approach, uplift, uphold what is thus a gift we’ve neither given nor thus designed ourselves.

Life is not ours.

Rather our lives are His.

The difference then to be defined by the distance between.

Us and Him.

us and Him.

See what I did there?

It’s a decapitalization in what, to us, likely seems, feels, looks like a veritable decapitation as it seeks to remove the vain glory which we’ve all sought to assume inside our story. A choice made because He must become greater, leaving us to become less until such time as we hopefully come to find that we are His rather than our own.

A hope I hold for everyone as we begin a new calendar tomorrow.

That in this coming year would we learn to fear God rather than man and their expectations. That we would ask Him to open daily our eyes to the blessings poured into our lives so that we take never again for granted these lives we’ve been given nor that He gave for us to begin their being lived better than we ever did before. That we cease this reliance upon what is indeed mere human tradition, expectation, excitement or disappointment as it met in our either adhering to what those around us want us to do our rather our failure thereof.

Yes, I hope that all of us find inside of us that still small voice that we spend this new year getting to know, even if, no, especially when it speaks a word that sounds nothing like what the world around us seems to hear.

Indeed I pray that we all start doing things differently down here, chief among them accepting that we are down here and He up there and in this turn our eyes to the skies and seek to begin living that life in which we grow daily in a humbled expectancy of His glorious return that will there mark our leaving for the home we sought not amongst the fallen, not in step with the heathen, not in friendship with the hellion, but rather that of Heaven which we grew to believe in so deeply, so fervently, so fully that we elated at every opportunity we had to rid ourselves, our lives of anything of this world that remained inside.

Because we too grew to believe that everything here is passing away and thus not meant to stay inside of us if we’re ever to fit through the eye of the needle which is the Pearled Gate of Heaven.

And I understand what this hope entails and that it be the asking that we embrace what is basically the promise of persecution as is levied always against anyone who fails to fall in line and do as their told and thus please their overlords. It means we will be hated by those who insist upon conformity and strike violently against any and all who fail to uphold such a mimicry of society’s many chosen mundanities and mediocrities.

Yes, I know that even daring to say that so much of what so many have settled for seeing as their best, as life’s best is truly nothing but a settlement for limitations and laziness and lunacy is grounds for being found unwelcome here in what is a world rife with affirmation and the endless applause, approval, acceptance and adoration that such always seeks for the very verification that what we’re doing is right to be done so that we needn’t then on worry that we might need to change, to humble, to turn.

Because this world doesn’t want that. We’ve rather become so certain that what we’re doing is so right that we cannot be wrong.

And in this we’re on a chosen collision course with He who died to posit otherwise.

Friends, my point is that we’ve each lived now long enough in what has been a blanket and blind agreement with a world that, in appeasement, seeks to daily deny, disprove, destroy the very Gospel which offers to save and set free. Thus this world will remain lost in its enmity against He who is truly our only hope of anything better than everything we’ve been, become.

We should want that better far more than human praise or approval as such human opinion and expectation can achieve for us nothing of everything that cross accomplished.

Let us not waste another year seeking to please those who have but breath in their lungs and yet use it to speak only lies and death with their lips.

No, rather let us do as called and leave the dead to bury their dead as we seek instead to come under the wings of He who is our Head as only He can lead us home. And let us understand that honoring Him is something which cannot be done in word alone but rather must be undertaken in action, in deed, in work as such are the fruit by which we’ll be judged. And now this doesn’t mean that He won’t weigh our words as well, but that when He does if they’re found in opposition to our actions, our deeds, our workings, well, we’ll just then have more to answer for with the same nothing we’ll be able to say.

Don’t live listening to those who say otherwise. For such is their choice in how to lose a life.

Nothing ever said that their choice to lose had to become ours as well. Rather let us seek to lose ours differently, as in doing so now whilst we’ve still time to find His help in putting on the new before all that is is no more and that chance then gone.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold