Day 3967 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ezekiel 36:26 NIV

Ask and you shall receive

Problem is we tend to be quite surprised when His answer us finds in the form of something being removed in order to make way, to make room for the new that we’ve asked Him to give, to bring, to help us find or help us leave. You see, I think we so easily get accustomed to this baser approach to the living of a life in which we do so little that’s even useful, ever meaningful that we begin to believe that the greatest changes we’re likely to face are to be themselves quite small and miniscule.

And what’s worse is that our living so often inside this box of our limited abilities causes us to perceive limits to God’s abilities too.

Until we eventually lose sight of the very God who both created seas so as to swallow what just wasn’t working anymore but also parted the same so as to save the part that He wasn’t yet quite so ready to wash His hands of. And it’s in this measuring of God’s abilities via our often inability to even understand the limited nature of our own that finds us tending toward a great deal of confusion and discomfort when it turns out that not only can God hear us, not only will He help us, but He in fact has always planned on doing just that in what are ways that just might shake the earth.

For indeed, He does have plans for us that are not for disaster but rather plans of such hope, such grandeur that He’s literally been working since the very dawn of creation itself to guide our lives in the directions they should go toward what we too should learn to hope in as being the very best outcomes, accomplishments, adventures and oddities that we could ever imagine.

But again, the problem is that while we like to come before Him asking for such things as that request discussed just yesterday, a request made of new hearts, pure hearts and of a right spirit to guide them into their then staying the same, we often fail to expect the loss of what then can’t stay the same. Which seems strange as why would we ask for something so new as new hearts and yet not understand or expect that, seeing as how we can only have one, the old must thus be lost in order to make room for the new.

And even more, why ask for new hearts, new lives, new eyes to see the differences between they and the old they’re to replace if we know we’ll eventually just give it all back away thanks to spirits that haven’t themselves been so renewed alongside them?

For you see then that the issue is likely found in the newness of it all. Because again, as we mentioned yesterday, we’ve become a people who sometimes struggle with such novelty as things made new. It’s not that we don’t know or understand the importance of such shifts in life as we all endure the sleepless nights and restless days in which we slog through the general continuation of our old ways as lived in old days in which things looked, felt, seemed the same.

And well, there’s only so much restlessness that a soul can bear before we start to hear that still small voice reminding us that it needn’t be whatever it’s rather become.

And in that we might even start to wonder as to these easier yokes and lighter burdens that we’ve heard rumor of. Promises that seem to offer a sense of relief from the difficulties of the ways of life in which we tend to ourselves find as are measured in such burdens as everything from doubt to despair. Miseries that make us eventually either so raw emotionally and spiritually that we finally hit our knees because we just need help or rather so hardened that we’d never consider welcoming the same.

I’ll let you guess which of the two we’ve picked.

Thankfully it’s quite easy to see as the hardness is anymore plastered upon nearly face we see around us. It’s for years now seemed like everyone here is just caught in this daunting climb to even the surface of life. A climb that instead seems to find us all slipping and sliding and there sinking further into a fervor that’s of such anger that rather than asking God for help we blame Him for not sending it the way we want it.

It truly becomes a quite odd happening. For when it comes to our need of help, of healing, of hope even, we always seem of this now innate ability to somehow skip over humility and rush right into hostility. It’s as if we’ve actually become so prideful that we can neither see the depth of our need for help nor any danger in the anger that we manage to find because of it.

We live as if needing help, not being perfect, not being able, not being enough is something of a grounds for war as waged against whomever we might think to blame for our failures and shortfalls.

And, well, who better to blame than He who created us with such limitations and strugglings?

Indeed, among our very first reactions to anything bad, hard, scary happening is to blame God for apparently just refusing to make it easy. Because we want it easy. We want it safe. We want things so easily understood and understandable that we needn’t even rise in order to stand unto the occasions which merely ask that we stand and watch God work His will within our lives.

We’ve actually become a people who can’t even manage to be still and wait for God to do what He’s done time and again already.

Rather we’re of the measure that we ourselves must always be doing something to ensure our requests, our rewards are always nearing us in as rapid an approach as possible.

A mindset which arrives us right back in that life spent leaning on ourselves and their selfish arrogance which always sees things from only our self-testified blinded eyes. I mean, how many times have we confessed that we just couldn’t see any way through whatever mess we were up against? How many times have we doubted that God could make a way? How many days have we all but forfeited to the fear that something of which we were then afraid was going to just completely ruin our lives?

And how many times did it?

How many of those hard days did we actually fail to get through? How many illnesses and pains have never really healed? How many troubles have never left our side? How many worries are we still carrying as if a second skin?

How many has He actually made a way to be removed, to be let loose, to be left behind?

See, the issue I believe is that we’re all of the mind that gives greater weight to the worries and woes than we do the blessings and prose which promises even more of both. And indeed, that’s perhaps why some refuse to read the Word which was breathed for our benefit in such things as humility, as belief, as the boldness to welcome our grief in this life in what we grow to understand is meant to be a share in that life that He left Heaven to live.

It’s because Christ himself even promises that in this world we will have trouble. Trouble such as being hated and persecuted. Trouble such as being misunderstood and mistreated. Trouble such as coming upon the mistakes we’ve made and learning from their number our tendency toward getting basically everything wrong. Trouble such as the then arduous process of repentance which is the lifelong turning away from things we’d already spent a lifetime racing toward.

And indeed, I believe that the struggle of faith isn’t in that we have to repent nor that we have to at first come to see all the things we’ve done that we need to so turn from.

No, among the greatest difficulties of faith is our actually having to walk away, to give away much if not all of all we’ve gotten, wanted, hoped to find and come to be.

It’s not made a struggle because of the asking for such things as new hearts, pure hearts, open eyes to see and their then starting to see all the things in us that need such washing away as that accomplished only by the blood. No, rather it’s the removing of what we may have once been even ourselves willing to bleed in order to have, in order to keep.

And indeed, this makes sense as, well, those already alive are likely to do whatever it takes to keep it that way!

And so we needn’t really tinker with this thought space in which we struggle with the call to laying lives down in exchange for only taking up crosses to finish off the job. No, it’s easy to see why those who have for so long been given over to comfort’s complacency and complacency’s comfort would readily struggle with that.

What’s not so easy to understand is why we still don’t seem to understand that in order for us to be given something new it demands the removing, the letting go, the giving away of whatever has been in its place.

Granted, we’ve all become of such ego and arrogance that we often seem as if unable to see any limitations in our lives. Rather it seems as if we’re always able to find room for one more thing, thought or theory that we can easily add to our already bursting collections of the same. There’s always room in our rooms to hang one more thing. Always room in our phones for one more picture. Always room in our minds for one more worry or wondering.

And if we do happen to run out of room, rather than getting rid of something, no, no instead we buy flash drives and storage totes and maybe even storage lockers.

Why?

Because we’ve become convinced that life isn’t lived in the getting rid of what isn’t alive.

Instead we seem all but completely convinced that life might consist of an abundance of possessions despite His Word literally saying exactly otherwise. But indeed, perhaps that’s again why we don’t even read His Word anymore. It’s because He dares to say things like that that go completely against the very way of life that we’ve, if we’re honest, come to love getting to live.

We love this life and all that we always manage to fit inside.

We adore this opportunity to delve daily back into the sea of want which drowns this world in the endless delight of dopamine highs found best in the novelty of something new.

This is why social media has all but taken over our lives!

Something new and exciting is always just a swipe away. Bored? Slide your finger across your phone and it’ll show you a brand new picture, post, video that allows the entertainment value to be redeemed once more. We love it! Love it so much that we loathe boredom. We hate the quiet. We avoid peace even as in the still we’re left alone with who we are and, sadly, we don’t know them anymore.

We have forgotten ourselves inside this endless sea of something to see, something to want, something to buy and then have forever.

It reminds me of a line from a 3 Doors Down song:

“To want is to buy but to live is to die and you can’t take it all.”

A truth we’ve resoundingly gotten rid of, both proving that we can actually survive removing things from our lives but that we only ever allow removed those parts and promises that have nothing to do with the ease we seek.

Which is where the struggle comes in because, well, life ain’t easy. It’s not always safe. It’s anymore becoming harder and harder to even understand what with all the fluidity of a society losing their stinking minds all the time in their always trying to find some novel wickedness that will keep the dopamine flowing and the darkness growing and the souls not knowing where they’re going and why they’re not growing toward, let alone in, He who is the Light of life itself.

Nobody cares anymore as even something as proof positive of life itself as movement and growth and learning and knowing our need for all the above, it’s all so easily set aside as again grabbing our phones.

We never have to sit with who we are anymore. We don’t listen to our own thoughts. We don’t wrestle with our worries. We don’t grapple with our struggles but rather just choose the filter that shows the world that we have none. And we slowly become convinced that we really have none and thus need no help and thus should welcome none who offer it.

Because they apparently must be lying as we just got a bunch of likes and followers who thus must agree with everything they see which is all we agree to show which is all we slowly become.

Just puppets on the string of a society sewed to social media and selfishness.

So when God comes along and offers to help, we crucify Him.

Literally.

And then when life wanes toward being hard again, we blame Him for not helping.

And this process repeats itself endlessly as we have about the same ability to always either deny our need for help or blame someone else for not offering what we told them we either didn’t need or simply don’t want.

And in none of this do we apparently see any foolishness or stupidity.

Why?

Because we’ve become such fountains of the both that we’re rightly terrified of His promise to remove them from us as He takes out of us those hearts of stone that were hardened as such due to such things as doubt and denial, the very dread of our soul’s revival unto a new life lived a new way toward a new hope of a new home that we don’t really want to think about as it would only add further to the reality that this life in this place isn’t all we’ve cracked it up to be.

And because that would only prove us as cracked as we’ve never imagine we could be.

Thus we ask for nothing.

Gone are the days in which it common for man to seek for God’s gift of renewal, of redemption, of the intention of repentance as is for none to perish but all to find everlasting life. No. No, we’re good with this one. We’re okay with things as they are. Are they perfect? No. Are we perfect? No. But hey, at least if we never change anything then we never have to worry about losing anything either.

And, well, this sounds pretty amazing to a people who seem to think that losing is akin to basically just dying since apparently our stuff and stagnancy are the very epitome of what it means to live a life.

Yeah, surely we’re here for nothing more than having a bunch of junk and walking daily in the fear of losing any of it.

Even if said junk is rusted, ruined, refusing the very promise of life everlasting!

Again, we don’t care!

Why?

Because we’ve bought the lie that we can always make room for something new without ever having to get rid of anything to make the room. That we can always manage to squeeze into our lives, our eyes, our minds one more ideal or idol that we remain blind to believing could be so deadly as to become another god we have before the only One there is. No, surely we couldn’t have actually become so dumb as to equate God to stuff that we pile up all around us only to watch gather dust, start to rust and yet still house our every trust!

Except that we have.

Indeed, each and every life is filled with things that we not only could get rid of, could survive without, but in fact junk that we’d be immeasurably better, happier, more hopeful without.

We just can’t see it that way as life to us has become a numbers game.

Which is the exact issue that God offers to help us with within that promise that there is no other Name, there is no other Way.

It is truly His Way or the hellway. Problem is that the pathway to hell is paved with good intentions because the truth is that intention without the humility to undertake the effort to make the hope realized is truly nothing but a lack of life sought for said intention. Much the same as how faith without works is dead! Intentions are great, but friends, if we don’t do anything to make them happen then intentions they will stay and thus us too the same.

We’ll just stay.

And that wherever we are as whoever we are as is likely defined by only whatever we have. Because we’ve actually arrived at the frame of mind in which we think ourselves best defined by what we have and what we do rather than who we are and where we’re both struggling and striving to go.

Indeed, this life we know, this one we hold so tightly that we hate anyone who asks us to lay it down, hate them violently, it’s one in which we know not anymore anything of struggle or striving. Why? Because neither can be known in the intention to assume our intentions will invent their own efforts without any required of us.

And, again, in a life being lived without much in the way of struggle or strife, well, why get rid of that? Why trade what’s easy enough to continue repeating for that harder path of a continued repenting? Why rend ourselves of what we are in exchange for a life that’s hard as lived under the weight of a cross we too carry? Why welcome His doing of something new when it expressly demands the casting aside or burning away of what’s long been seen as maybe worth keeping?

It makes no sense to us.

But friends, hence the need for something new!

Because the truth will always be that if all we do is all we’ve done then we can only ever be what we’ve already become. And as I said yesterday, maybe with this you’re truly okay. Maybe you are good with your life as it is. Maybe you honestly have nothing you’d do any different. And if that is the case then by all means, enjoy your reward!

I just can’t see what’s so rewarding about what already is. Because everything that already is is already starting to fade into the fog of history. Everything we see is passing away.

Why hold so tightly to it? Why worry so much about trying to keep it? Why refuse to lose what we’re promised to lose?

Especially when our agreeing to lose it now finds for us the reward of that promise of eternal life waiting for those who lay down their lives in what is a show that they agree that there’s just got to be something better to see, something better to be?

Do you believe in better?

Enough to ask for it? To beg for it?

Enough to understand that better can only come if there’s room for it, room made by getting rid of what isn’t whatever better is?

Friends, He will lead us toward what better has always been, and died to prove that He will do whatever it takes to get us there. But be careful what you ask for as the answer might involve your dying too.

Or dying anyway when you don’t ask for the better that for whatever reason you choose to not believe in.

Either way, we’re all going to receive both life and death whether or not we ask. The hope of Heaven is that we do ask for life. But that’s a hope found only if we’ll welcome the loss of what life never was.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold