Day 3973 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Timothy 1:9 NIV

38

Our dance with time is a strange occurrence as it begins in what feels an innocence that we only realize we lost well after it gone into what’s by then a past to which we can’t return but yet somehow manages to come with us for the rest of this ride that is our life as is measured in time, both in its adding up and yet then running out. As kids we get so excited about days like today as they mark the meeting of presents and parties spent with friends and family and we count not the oddity of it all being but a measure of our stay and the coming worry as to how little of it we’ve left.

That’s rather the gift we get only as we get older.

And yet even then it’s one that we so often prove quite negligent in having been given as we seek for anything else but the heart of wisdom apparently waiting to be won within the audacity to number our days and find in their number that we’ve lived so many to waste what is then a number of them which we cannot redeem and spend any differently. Indeed, we’re anymore so distracted, and quite willingly so, from what is the general gravity of our having been given life.

So distracted these days that we don’t really even hear anyone talking about their search for the purpose, or meaning thereof, of our being here. Rather that’s something that seems now lost with the 37 that I’ve lived and left and must both let go and yet learn from if I’m to go toward where I know I’ve not been as measured there only against where all I have been, who all I’ve been. And yet, again, this seems anymore the one considering that we’ve become quite against considering.

Why?

Time.

It’s proving for each of us quite the fickle mistress in that it holds out always the wisdom we likely don’t know we need, sometimes wish we had, usually refuse to confess we know we haven’t had yet and, in that, find only reason to worry as to what all we might see, hear, learn, feel were we to draw near to where wisdom has always been waiting for us to realize her wait is worth more than her weight. Something we simply wish never to do in what’s become a life of fast-food drive-thrus and 8.25 second attention spans.

The latter a matter which matters to me in what’s become a growing oddity in that as the world’s willingness to pay attention has continued to shrink thanks to tic-tac videos and such social media dopamine drowning folks into an almost inability to ever dare read what are posts that seem to have grown into a daily 3,000 word essay unto the hope of our coming to know what the general lay of life says we simply don’t.

Indeed, looking around I don’t even know what life is anymore, at least not of that version being lived in such venom and diversion as that seen and shown in streets and screens seeking to steal our time away as we give it willingly but yet won’t dare lay it down. Because the world we’re in now is very little, and increasingly so, that world in which I grew and knew what life was back then supposed to be by now.

And, well, this ain’t it!

No, I think often of the differences I’ve felt and witnessed in my now 38 years. In fact this thought’s been rather heavy on me in the days and weeks leading to what is this birthday of mine. Which is a thought I’ve become rather confused by as this day, in which we celebrated those birthed, it’s literally the one in which those birthed had the least say in coming about or becoming whatever any of the others have become since.

If anything, I think our birthdays should be spent celebrating those three who actually played a part in our being here. They being our mom, dad and Father above.

But anyway, I digress. So let us get back to the point of this mess.

What mess?

This life and what we’ve made of it despite how much we’ve seen of it. That’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot of late. And it’s all left me with one baser considering that I just keep finding myself considering more:

Have you ever stopped to reflect on the amount of life seen by your eyes?

Depending upon your age, you’ve probably witnessed something of life for literally every single one of hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands of days. As for me personally, today is my 13,881st day in which I’ll have opened my eyes and there seen something of life. That’s a lot of days! That’s a lot of life! That’s a lot of mistakes and hopefully a little bit of getting it right.

Though it’s that last part that seems to often become the issue that causes us to leave unconsidered the curiosities of time and how it’s both running out and thus often being misspent upon what are things that simply aren’t worth it. All because we anymore so discount everything that we’re even all but indifferent to our very existence and it’s possible purpose.

Rather these days we all live as if to do things is all that matters. Truth be told it doesn’t even seem to matter what though. For indeed, every day seems to bring us a new thing to try, a novel message to meet, a potential lie to share. But even these we don’t seem to fear enough to weigh anymore. Instead we just wake up and repeat the day before’s finding us then not all that interested in upholding the general responsibility that all life owes.

A responsibility that seeks to implode our gross fascination with things filthy and forsaking.

Forsaking what?

Our meaning.

Our purpose. Our path. His plan. This reason for being being defined by all the above but mostly He who is above and that because His plans and paths are better than ours ever have been. Something we find a world struggling with increasingly as the days go by and most go nowhere. Which I contend is among the greatest measures of life. Not our age. Not some wage won in a job we hate. Not some proven ability to repeat the past, and that despite not being able to go back, but rather simply by our never moving on.

Indeed, I believe that life’s to be measured by whether we ever move forward and to what extent we either do or don’t.

And that because His plan for us was always to do good things that our pasts prove we’ve often only failed to do having chosen to do what we grow (hopefully) to see were mistakes made that (hopefully) are things we don’t rush to repeat, despite the glaring sense of ease waiting always to be found in doing so. Which is why so many welcome this modern world’s approach to novelty and newness. It’s because it’s endless now. We’re daily being so bombarded with information and indoctrination that our minds are a veritable minefield of the many fallacies and failures of a fallen and still falling mankind.

Yet we accept it simply because it’s what life’s become, and that so much that we’ve each become all but numb to it coming for us again and again and again for however long we venture to so wager our better upon what the world for only this moment thinks best.

We live anymore to only digest the decay and indifference of a world crumbling, perhaps due to age, but more likely because of our rage against time being the fight we find of more use and profit than that perhaps proven in our becoming friends again. Like back when we were those kids who didn’t know to dread birthdays because they marked either our time running thin or just our yearly reminder of how much time we’ve lost to what’s likely not added up to what we expected to find or feel as we got here to wherever we are on this timeline of a lifetime.

Indeed, I think this is the chief worry that’s so weighed us down that so many down here just don’t want to think of it anymore. It’s that we don’t know. Neither how many things we’ve gotten wrong, likely thinking many of them right, nor how much time we’ve left to do more right than we’ve perhaps been wrong about our having done. It’s all a great confusion discovered here inside a world of such delusion that again all of man is but indifferent to their own existence.

And I’ve been there. As I confessed a post or two ago, I distinctly remember a miscreant who spent years without any reflection upon God or Jesus or the Bible or prayer even. Don’t remember what if felt like. Don’t remember what I did with this time that I’ve spent nearing 11 years giving daily to trying to find some way of translating His hope into our doubt. Don’t remember what I was going for not realizing all that I was missing out.

Thankfully all of those unknowns have become for me mile markers that I do know that I do use to measure my own whether in regard to our call to move.

That is the call of the cross.

To move.

To come and find both ourselves enslaved by yet the things He died to take away so that we might walk away from what is there a death we’ve left behind, both His and ours, only to turn and return to what is then a life that we don’t know having not lived having been there, from Him, been given then the freedom from what’s often a past which feels more friend than foe. It’s that nostalgia we talked about not long ago. That feeling that we’ve already found or felt our life’s best. That we’ve nothing then of any good left to find or feel.

I’ve felt that way for years.

But mostly only because I was carrying with me what was killing me and yet calling it a life.

And I can say of this 13,881st day that I am free from what’s been the better part of 20-30 years spent in slavery to something that I still ask Him to help me hate more every single day. Why? Because it wasn’t a life that I was living but rather one that I was giving to what couldn’t give me life in return. And well, that’s just stupid! Because so much here does indeed as the devil desires in an ongoing stealing, killing, destroying of anything and everything that seeks anything of His everything.

The devil hates that, which is why so many are so lost giving untold hours, years, decades to doing things that have nothing to do with life. Things only increasing in number as our willingness to live according to God’s Word, upholding His will, seeking His glory and thereby giving up our hunt for our own only dying instead. Indeed, this world is becoming increasingly godless, and there is an undeniable lack of goodness being seen and shown all around us.

Question is though, what’s being shown from within us?

Again, this birthday of mine finds me having been given a gift yet again and that of a freedom for which I’d prayed and begged and all but bled to find for years in which I didn’t. Rather I continued only returning to the scene of the crimes seen upon screens showing things that no human should know. The hard part now is knowing that I’ve known what I shouldn’t have. The joy comes in knowing that He knew I’d let Him down in such a way for such a long time.

But that He’d not give up until I came to find a better way to give a life.

And that’s something that I glanced off of in yesterday’s post. There’s this distinct, and yet indefinably so, difference between giving life away and laying down a life. What’s odd to me is our vast tendency toward the former finding us in what is a life spent in which we all do things daily that take away our time and likely give us next to nothing in terms of a return upon such investment of what is something that we cannot get back because of our have so willingly given it away.

And yet if we lay it down, this life we often hold (too tightly as truth will tell), what we’d find is that we are given time back. Not the kind our mistakes so often seek for our to ask so as to go back and do differently what our unwilling growth in wisdom happens to help us come to see were things we got wrong. But rather the kind that is actually so full that it’s only promised us on the other side of forever where our Savior went to prepare our place, or rather a place for those prepared to uphold His purpose as opposed to their own.

For once.

This is the difference defined here in this verse from 2 Timothy. It’s that measured between the kind of life we’ve lived giving our lives away to what are to be proven things that wanted only to steal our time, blind our eyes, ruin our lives and savage our souls into our being a people who know better to rage against God than to humble ourselves before Him. And again, this is a difference I know full well as I’ve spent the better part of my now 38 in what seemed a life in which I hated life itself.

A verdict felt in all the shame that’s been attached to my name.

A shame which He’s always offered to take away from not only me but in fact everyone who dares lay down their life that has been spent giving life away to what can’t give life back.

That’s literally all that He asks. That we lay down, let go, walk away from what’s been a way in which we’ve been enslaved to all that here only seeks to inspire us to live as if we can stay where both time and tide say we can’t. Because both ebb and flow toward wherever the both intend to go as is intended not by their own intention but rather by He who created everything to work as it was supposed to long before we’d become so able to find all these ways in which nothing works at all.

At least not for our better.

Rather so much of life down here is lived for nothing more than our staying the same. And so, again as I mentioned above, this seems to have become the way in which we perhaps should measure our lives. Not in the time we’ve been given nor the worry as to the mistakes made within it nor even the uncertainty as to how much of it we’ve left. But rather in the amount of movement from who we’ve been, how we’ve lived, what we’ve loved and just how much love we’ve still to give.

Maybe more than anything what we give said love to.

Because, again, I’ve spent the majority of life living loving a bunch of stuff that only hated me as is proven in my years spent in captivity to such things as greed, gluttony, lust and idolatry. And yet here lately I feel that I finally find this freedom welling up inside, just like that well of living water that the Living One spoke of in John chapter 4. A kind of water that I somehow manage to feel as I’ve still plenty to offer in what is this work that He continues to wake me unto doing every single morning.

And that despite my having given Him so little reason to ever believe that I could ever be anything of any use.

Thankfully this faith stands upon the fact that it was never about what we know but rather what He knew because He’s always known those who were His and just how long it would take them to know the same for themselves. And indeed, such is His patience with us. It’s a matter measured yes in years but more so in movement. For that is His purpose: To move us. To improve us. To hold out before us the hope of eternity as is held unto all but sadly still accepted by entirely too few of our many.

Why?

Because it’s scary to find your flaws and faults, failures them all, and to bring them before the God from whom you’ve long tried to hide them having not been proud of them but also not found apparently in anything of a reverent fear of Him who defines them as things to not be proud of. It’s terrifying to be proven so wrong with so little you can do to make up for it thanks to our inability to go back and live life differently.

But again, as this verse says, it’s not about what we’ve done but rather what God did in sending His Son to come and save those who He knew were His, even when they didn’t.

And indeed, we’ve all spent a long time not knowing our Father nor thus living as if we might. And, yeah, this has led us to making so many mistakes that it takes us years if not decades to finally run out of places to try and hide them and reasons we still think we can. But thankfully it’s not about the time as God knew us before time began, says so right here. That His grace planned to overcome our defiance, our indifference, our depravities and thus denials of His majesty.

He planned all along to meet us where He knew we’d go in search for what He knew wouldn’t be enough to measure up to making a life worth living. All because He’s always known that sin brings only death. And, well, death just ain’t much of a living!

Can’t tell you how thankful I am that He’s waited so long for me to learn that, nor that He’s given me the ability, the opportunity to write about it for what will likely remain a world too busy and filled with doubt to read these things. That’s okay. And that’s because for once in my life I actually feel like I’m doing what I’m here to. Maybe I’m wrong. I worry every single day that I don’t do enough and that these posts aren’t up to snuff as they say.

But even if they aren’t, I will continue to pray that He be glorified and someone out there somewhere be helped. Not because I can, but because He has.

And I think that’s life.

Just us waiting to find whenever we break down and there finally realize that it was never about us but rather always about Him who’s given us this gift of this life that we get to measure in so many ways from time to trial, neither of which we should perhaps be so scared of as we’ve become.

Sad to say that it’s taken me the better part of 38 to learn that. But I’m today quite thankful that I’ve now no reason to worry anymore as it was never on me to find or prove because He’s already done the both. For His promise is already proven in that He found us.

Guess then this day is but another in which to stop and reflect upon time both in regard to where it’s gone but more so where it’s still to go. Because that’s what matters more than we might imagine:

Not where we’ve been but rather where we go from here.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold