Day 3994 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Peter 2:19 NIV

“Peace, peace” they say,

But make no mistake, there’s anymore not even a piece of peace to be seen around these parts. Rather it seems that such a prize as peace has always been has become but a figment of an often forlorn hope held in the fragile hearts of those who’ve agreed to come apart from a world doing the same. It’s but a dream inside this brain that says Christ has came and will come again, bringing with Him only then the only peace we’ll ever know, but that when He does, oh, we few will know His peace forever!

Not because we’ll have had our peace along the way, no. No but instead because He was our piece of what we grew to believe was the only puzzle worth our trying to put together.

And that puzzle is our faith.

And yet that it is puzzling is why so many do stray and wander only away from what is the only Way to the peace that rather this place dares pretend it already has within. Again friends, what peace? Truly, tell me please! What peace does this place have? For in all truth it should be something so easily found seeing as how all of us are trying to find it. After all, is not peace, rest, calm and tranquility the sort of things we all seek in life?

If that’s the case and they’re all things that we all seek, well then why are none finding them? And sure, there would be those who might contend that peace is best held within, and with them I would agree. But even then, should peace be this hard to hold? And why is it hard to hold if not because the world around us, which are they who do each day stand and proclaim that theirs is the way to peace, only instead exists in politics and protest?

Is that peace? Civil unrest and hedging our bets upon which rich person in a fancy suit will do the best job in regard to fixing what we all seem to agree is vastly broken? Only for them to always get the votes and then go to work doing at best only half of whatever they promised seeking to steal them?

Is peace a cup full of half-promises?

Is peace truly willing to ever accept only a half of itself? And if it isn’t, as it never should be seeing as how it makes no sense for anything to seek only half of it’s whole, why then do we seem still so willing to just blindly go with those who say they know the way to peace but only walk the very same streets that every other failed attempt to find the same took before?

Will we find anything different down paths and plans no different at all?

Isn’t that rather the very definition of insanity?

Are we to believe then that insanity is peace?

Well, actually, that one might not be far off. For you see, in this world those who are “in their right minds” are often those we find playing the game according to the mere human rules that mere humans have made in their searching to rule. Indeed, we each try so hard to make it up as we go, not so that we actually get anywhere, no, but rather so that it looks like we are. All because we wish anymore for only the assumption of progress as preferred still alongside that lack of change that our every complacency desires so.

This is why nothing in this world is new anymore. Granted, we’ve new stuff. New movies are being made. New songs are being sang. New books are being written by they who are indeed new authors too. But friends, are any of them saying anything new? Though the times and tides change in the season’s slide from one into the next, does anything else endure such promised progress?

Or is there rather truly nothing new under the sun?

Sure doesn’t seem to be. For rather than growth in and toward our every hope, no, instead we find a daily drive only the other way back into the now gone yesterday in which we too could have done something differently that could have today become our something better. But no. No instead we’ve become a culture leaving always every better for dead as we turn our heads to looking at those who again say they know the way to peace, a kind perfected in freedom in fact.

And indeed, that’s what we just talked about yesterday. It’s this maniacally misunderstood understanding of freedom in which we’re all both standing and yet somehow sinking. And that’s because this world’s take on freedom is nothing more than their doing whatever they want in the lone moment in which our every decision is made, never once caring to realize that leaning on only our eyes and our minds to see and know what we want leaves us then only slaves unto a selfishness that will always be ready to welcome us back to serving us.

Everyone wants that. Our ego longs for nothing more than more of our loving ourselves so very much that we seek in life only that which pleases us. We love the self-pleasure of serving self. Checks all the boxes and fills all the holes every time, does it not? But the question is does even this seem something that can prove peace? Or does it not demand unrest every single time that we happen to again look up and find that we want something more?

No, there is no peace even inside the welded-shut doors of our heart.

And that’s because we’ll welcome in nothing but whatever made it in before we began learning that life is a life of losses. And that’s because we came with nothing and will leave the same. And this itself has become a fear-spelling monstrosity in which we find we feel only this necessity of ignoring such inevitability because we’ve, somehow, come to love this life so much that we can’t imagine laying it down, letting it go, leaving it behind and learning to never even desire to look back upon what, where, who we’d become and thus been.

We like who we’ve become. Not sure how. But indeed, we all seem to love ourselves so very much that we don’t even hold ourselves accountable to our rapidly fading hopes of something better.

Is that peace?

Just this common determining to settle for whatever already is? Granted, it offers us an existence of immense ease as settling asks always that we do nothing more. And sure, there is an air of peace to that. For yeah, peace does promise rest as where there’s no war nor work there’s neither any need to do much of anything but simply enjoy whatever is.

In fact, that’s the entire allure that is peace!

It’s found in that hope of all work and war being forever finalized and finished, leaving us to simply bask in the bounty of the beauty that is that every better toward which we’d battled through what’s by then a battle eternally behind us.

Can we say we’re there yet?

I can’t. Not for myself and definitely not for the world myself finds himself in. Rather I look out these windows that are these eyes and see a world still running blind on hate and hardship insisted upon for what are reasons that make no sense anymore. Not that they ever did before, just that I didn’t know to pay so much attention back then. Instead life then was quite different than whatever it’s become in the decades since whenever then really was.

Ain’t that an odd thing too? That these ‘good ol’ days’ never have a specific date but rather just a desire for our to remember them as a lasting comparison to whatever these days are now?

Is that peace? Always looking behind us to see the best parts of our better memories of what our best memories tell us was so much better than whatever is now? Was the past better than the present? In some ways it was. Is the present better than the past? Seems a little harder to say that.

Doesn’t it?

And yet, why is that? For again, if we’re all still seeking for the very same peace, why then is it either still not found inside this place or, and even worse, often seemingly even harder to find?

I mean, I for one don’t really remember this revolving door that the protest culture has become in days now gone. Growing up the world seemed a lot calmer, careful, caring even. Just talking with my mom yesterday and it seems that so many are losing their ability to even care as to the existence of those around them. Instead many are retreating into screens that show them highlight reels of what aren’t real lives seeking to see inside the stream something of peace, hope, life to be seen.

Why are we looking always to photoshop and algorithms to placate our hope for peace, only to allow it then proven inside a constant flow of what it knows we’ll like to see?

Is that peace?

Always having to return to some app or other addiction to play again the willing unwitting victim of a constant course of whatever we’ve come to crave? Is that freedom? I asked that yesterday. For rather it seems to me that such an existence only keeps us in chains still chained to still images and honking horns telling us again the way to go and what not to do.

Is that not a mastery of sorts? This always letting someone else lead the way we only agree to follow? Is there to ever be peace found in following anything, anyone in and of this world? Again, does it seem like anyone or anything in this place knows anything of peace?

Seems to me that everything here, and just about everyone too, they’re all starting to lose even the ability to pretend that they care about peace anymore.

Guess that’s just because we’re bound to give up looking for all that we’re only failing to find.

Is that why?

Is it that peace just doesn’t exist? And yet, if that were the case, well then how could everyone on earth have the idea in their hearts? Indeed, how can something not exist if we’ve the word for it? Is peace to never be anything more than a word, an idea, some distant dream of something we’ve kind of halfway conceded is something we may never see?

Does not the lack of peace inside this place alongside the presence of it in our dreams only seem to say that maybe peace does exist, just not here?

I for one find that that’s the only thing that makes any sense. For I can imagine peace. I can at times even feel the outermost inklings of what the full might feel like. So I know it’s there, just don’t know where. And why is that? Why is it that we can know of peace, even feeling its ghost sometimes, but never actually manage to find it?

Is it not because it’s not here where we’ve come to tend to look for everything else?

Indeed, this world has become our treasure map, our every life a veritable proof of that promise that where your heart is your treasure must be too. Alas, rather than doing as called to, we’ve instead stored up for ourselves treasures on earth where everything it at constant risk of rust and ruin.

Can peace be ruined? Does it rust? And if it doesn’t, and we should never agree that it might, well then why look for it where it’s so clear that it isn’t?

Honestly, we can tell easily that peace is something that will never happen in this place. Sure, we might prove able to go for a while not killing other nations or burning down cities in our own. But again, is that peace? Just this every once in a while laying down of our weapons and words and not using either to wound another? Only to be again ticked off by something we don’t like and take them up once again?

No. No my friends, that’s nothing of peace. For there can be no peace so long as we’re all so concerned about either hearing the right things so as to escape offense or not saying the wrong things and being considered offending. And yet that’s all that life down here has become. It’s this constant worry won within the words we say. We’ve indeed become those who have clearly forgotten that sticks and stones are all that should hurt.

Alas we use our time and intention to prove that all the time too, don’t we?

Yeah, we’re in every way a warring world. We fight about everything. And yet those same ones who draw the lines that define the sides remain the same as they who claim that they know the way to peace and that it’s only found in our following their lead.

To where my friends?

Where are we going? What are we doing? Who are we becoming and is it something that our aversion to change will find us happy to never change later on?

Is that peace? Just becoming something and never doing anything any differently? Can we ever truly be at peace when all we do is all we’ve done when it still doesn’t ever manage to find the better that we can then never become?

I can’t. No, rather I find that all I can understand anymore is the enjoyment of sore muscles, aching joints, stinging eyes beating the sun to rise to chase down once more the better that I believe will always be there waiting for me in such things as reading His Word, writing these posts, taking time to exercise, working out both body and soul seeking to know that better that I believe is still out there for me to be.

And yet if better is something that I know I’m not yet, why then should I seek for peace wherever I am?

Much less when I am in what is a world that is as filled with unrest by those upset with what we all seem to understand is a life that isn’t going well in a world that doesn’t seem to care to get its act together?

And yet why is the world as a whole still falling apart when humans are the ones who basically call all the shots?

Could it maybe be that shooting one another and seeking to kill the hope of everything may not be the best way to find our way to peace?

Could it even be that we don’t have a way to call our own that does lead to peace? After all, how can those who’ve never found something ever prove the ones best fit to find it?

We’re not.

We who know violence, disappointment, disagreement, we cannot know what peace is as it is anymore then entire opposite of us. Peace is everything we’ve never become. Now the hope of all humble growth is that we can eventually become all that we’ve never been. It’s that we can in fact come to know what we’ve not ever known. But it asks again for the humility that sees everything we’re lacking as the things for which we need to start looking should we truly wish to find them.

Question then is whether or not we really want to find peace.

For make no mistake, it’s there. Again, we can all feel it sometimes and I do believe that all of us hope to feel it permanently someday. But friends, fact is that we’ll never find what we never move toward. And, well, it’s a daily fact that this world isn’t moving toward peace.

No, this place only talks about it as if it’s some ideal that we oddly enough know how to find as we’re of the mind that we can make it happen. If that’s the case then why haven’t we? If we can make peace out of nothing, then why still do we have nothing of peace?

Do we just not know what it is?

Or are we still just following the wrong people thinking they know better than us where to find it simply because they tell us they do?

My point is that this world will always be filled with those who proclaim peace, freedom, the very pathway to everything from love to life itself. But friends, what we need to understand about humans is that every single one of us is prone to letting ourselves be mastered by so many things that for us to even speak the word freedom is almost a self-condemnation of sorts.

No, we know nothing of freedom as rather we’ve each spent all our lives leaning on our eyes and listening to our minds trying to find in both the very meaning of our being here. And we’ve become slaves to so many things along the way that we’ve each just sort of broken down and given up and settled for whatever it is that we still think best, and that for often ourselves alone.

We’ve made this world our home and, as such, we’ve come to seek everything we want and all that we need in only our surroundings, these days often leaning on those who claim they’ve found it to help us find it too.

But friends, all this world really knows how to find is this lie that says we’ll not lose everything someday. And I contend that all this infighting within is only evidence of our all but accepting that peace is as impossible as most here still seem to assume eternal life to be too.

My question is why listen to them anymore? Why walk in step with those who live as if this world is their reward? Is this place and what we’ve caused it to become truly the very best we can ever hope to see, to be?

Again, not me. No, while this world may make all these claims in regard to their knowing peace and freedom and the very meaning of all life being lived and thus how best to live them friends, I can’t say that anything this world is doing or saying or elsewise living for is anything worth living for. Rather this world only shows me every single day everything I don’t ever want to be.

And that’s because this world is still enslaved to sin despite everything that Christ has done and is doing still. Indeed, this place is still flooded with those forsaking Him and refusing then to follow Him.

But He’s the only Way. To freedom. To peace. To life.

To everything.

And I won’t settle for anything less. Not anymore.

No, this world can go right ahead chasing after whatever they think will make them feel better about whatever they’ll come to become. I want something better. I want to be something better. I want better for all of forever. I want peace forever. I want hope forever. I want life forever!

And well, there’s only One that I know of that was willing to die for me to have all the above. The rest of us are just down here killing one another in this ongoing game in which we pretend that violence and unrest is somehow going to arrive us at something better.

Maybe it will. But if it hasn’t in the thousands of years that humans have been here, well, I think we’re about out of reasons to imagine it might.

For still there is no peace despite so many claiming they know the way.

And that because entirely too few do know the Way.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold