Day 4009 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

James 4:14 NIV

What is your life?

From the outset this seems just another question in what’s a long line of Biblical questioning that all combines to try and find the purpose, path and promise of this life. All of which are each themselves quite heavy at times and sometimes so heavy in fact that we walk back as we’re taken always aback by His daring to ask such weighty things in such worthy words. Worthy of what? Our consideration. Weighty why? Because we don’t wish to consider them.

Simply because our now instinctual answer is that our lives are our lives.

Or at least that’s what we’ve so vastly come to assume them as. Because that’s simply what we want them to be. We want these lives to be ours as, to us, that makes an immeasurable amount of sense. I mean, after all, we’re living them. We’re planning them. We’re plotting them. We’re creating both paths and problems and hopes of avoiding the latter as the prior’s the matter that means the most. Or again, at least that’s what we all seem to hope.

For truth be told, our life is often seen as just our time in which to find whatever it is that our hearts, our minds eventually lose their ability to imagine our doing without or going the same. And indeed, there exists in this place an untold number of things that we have both already come to crave and yet ever more that, having not seen before, we’ll only come to want before long as we live as if we’ll never leave.

That is our life.

Or least what we seem to see it seeming to be.

It’s just an endless journey both to what we want and yet that often taken through what we don’t. It’s a long line of our trying to find everything from all we want to some way to make it make sense so that we don’t feel so ashamed of having wanted so much of all we’ve had or hope still to have only to have had all we have had just to watch most of it go bad and us feel the same for our having been all but trained to waste a life this way.

What way?

Wanting things. Assuming things. Consuming things that oddly enough consumed us first. Living in this dire desire for always more only to get it and want more still. Always putting ourselves thus first and then never knowing what it might be like to live that life of one who has here only a hope of not being here much longer. Never knowing the longing of a soul that spends this life knowing there’s no belonging to or in what is a place in which everything rusts and everyone runs just as soon as it does.

Or maybe that’s just been my life.

But what is my life?

That’s seemingly become one of those questions that’s been itching for my to start asking myself, those ones which run under the radar of a heart that remains delighted in its own being deceived into thinking that my life is to be measured in the time that I need to undertake in order to uphold the many plans I have for it. Plans planned in pursuit of priorities placed a little differently today than they were yesterday.

Why?

Didn’t know I’d actually make it this far nor then what all I’d find and/or feel once I got here to where tomorrow says I might not stay.

Again, heavy things!

Which is why we don’t like to ask these questions of ourselves nor endure another daring ask them of us either. For if we’re not interested in even our own duty to consider them neither then are we likely to be found all that pleased or eased by them being asked of us by another. Why? Because, well, who are they? Who is someone else to so butt in and ask anything of us? Haven’t they their own lives to live? Don’t they have plenty of things they could be doing instead?

Don’t we all have plethoras of plans we’ve been making along these paths we’ve been taking toward wherever we hope tomorrow takes us?

Isn’t that life?

Plans and promises to make sure they’re fulfilled and proven as fun and fortuitous as our foolishness so loves to imagine they can be even though we’ve absolutely no possible way to prove the paths we’ve planned are even passible?

Are our plans even possible when the promises themselves both are and yet shouldn’t be?

What do I mean?

It’s that so many of the things we spend our lives planning and purchasing and elsewise personally pursuing are bound to keep on proving what all their cousins always have. And that’s nothing. For again, inside all our lives we’ve all lived to find or feel so many things that we in fact have both found and felt only to still feel as if we’re missing still that same something more that oddly enough this newfound more didn’t help us feel after all.

That’s our life.

It’s boiled down to basically just us down here wasting time trying to find some tangible way to fill an immeasurable hole that, oddly enough, we ourselves have both carved inside our hearts and still keep on digging out only deeper still.

After all, gotta have more room in there for all the things we’re well aware we’re still to come to crave down here.

Or again, at least that’s been my life.

It’s long been this line that I’ve walked trying to find what all my mind was just convinced it needed having considered the need just far enough to actually believe it so necessary as to be more needed than something else both could have been and probably was. Indeed, as I’ve discussed in plenty of prior posts, I think often of the life I haven’t lived thanks to my having lived the life I’ve often been quite far from proud of having led.

Why?

Because it turns out that I can only lead my life over the edge into what’s long been an insanity so selfish that I even became convinced that the unsanitary was necessary.

For indeed, just night before last I lost more sleep to some bad dreams of horrid things that my past proves I did pursue to the point in which my mind, my life got so tangled up in the trying to feel something that I ended up settling for shame as, well, at least it’s something to feel.

Is that life?

Just our trying to find and feel something else until we die?

Oops, not supposed to say that word when talking about life.

Why?

Because we think it the end of one. And for good reason I suppose. Because, well, it is. Death is the end of life. But could it be the start of one too? Having lived already that kind of life in which we live and learn and learn to lose, might losing that life help us to find a life that feels better and even perhaps that forever? And if it does, as He’s said it can, should we then be so afraid of losing this way that we remain all but adamant for our lives to go?

Again, what is your life?

Mine has been a wonderful blend of blessing and stressing as insisted upon by Him (the blessing) and me (the stressing). Why so much stress? Because my life’s often been quite a mess as I’ve made this maze of what’s been deemed “my way” in which there’s supposedly some highway that others are always welcomed to take with apparently one lane running alongside mine with two running away. I don’t know that I really understand the logic or layout.

I just know that, in baser terms, it has something to do with inviting others to “kick rocks” as they’re asked to basically leave us alone so that we can focus in and thus better hone what is our hope that whatever it is that we’re doing in, with, to, for this life is going to prove itself as being just as right as we’ve always hoped it might.

It all seems quite the selfish assurance from where I sit.

Which is, again, not where I once did.

Which is quite odd in truth. Because one of the general estimations of these lives we so love to call our own is that we often remain so stuck in place that we welcome no such movement at all. In fact we’ve all gotten to the point at times in the past, probably plenty of them, in which we were held so fast to either what we had or hoped to have that we refused even the offer of help! Nope, told Him to kick rocks too as we considered that we had better things to lose than His love.

Not sure what as, well, even though I once knew I still haven’t managed to find it.

That’s been my life and how I’ve lived it. It’s been something akin to this dark, dank and dirty basement of a moral debasement in which I demanded nothing but my having fun and friends, both of the worldly kind, in what was a mind that, again, thought it knew everything even to the point of how many tomorrows I’d have.

Yeah, that’s one idea that we all love!

It’s that one in which we’ve so much say and sway within this life lived always our way that we can even determine both how many tomorrows we’ll have and how well they’ll go. This is our most passionate penchant for making plans and paving paths toward them. We love to assume so much in life that we’ve even made a life of making plans for the things we assume will be both worth whatever we hope they are and too right there waiting for us to reach them inside one of the many tomorrows we’re always certain we still have left.

But how can we be sure?

Of what? Either that our desires are to prove as wonderful as we delight to imagine they might or that we’ll even have enough time left to reach them?

For the past has again proven that our way of life, or at least meager estimation of the purpose(s) thereof, has often only found us quite impressively mistaken. At least about their being wonderful. What then makes us think that we’re right in the other half, that in regard to how long here we still have?

Oddly enough, and I don’t know that I’ve ever told anyone this, but I’ve personally always imagined that I’d not be here all that much longer. Even as a kid I remember having that thought that caused me to wonder if I’d even ever see 40. Have no idea why. Maybe I just always had hidden inside that tiny voice telling me I had somewhere else to be, a voice I grew to learn to cover and hide behind all the things I did or wanted in my life. Maybe it was because I was supremely lazy as an adolescent, so lazy and upon it so insistent that I didn’t even want to make all that many plans or have too many hopes.

Don’t know.

Do know that I did have some of those normal hopes. Dating, marriage, kids, careers, things like that. Tried my hand at making them come true only find that, for me at least, none of them ever really did. And at this point I don’t really have it in me to imagine they might anymore.

Doesn’t seem that such things are meant to be a part of my life.

Thus proving that what I once wanted, hoped to find, planned to try and make come alive, none of it did in what’s then, as of now, a life that isn’t the life I thought I’d have.

And I have a whole list of things that have gone like that.

College is a good example in that I, like most, got convinced to chase down that idolized degree in which we were all told we could boast once inside the impressive careers that we thought we got once we’d graduate. Wanted to be a math teacher. Then when the math got hard I switched gears to PE as, well, that was always more fun anyway. Didn’t go anywhere either. Thought maybe sports, coaching or such. Nothing. Hate sports now. Literally have a minor in Sports Management and literally cannot stand the thought of it.

How did that happen?

That’s one that’s become another question that I find myself asking quite frequently in regard to, well, just about everything. And that’s because the same has become all that’s changed in what is my life. Indeed, I cannot begin to count the ways my life has changed over the years to find me here wanting nothing more than to write these posts in the hope that they help someone somehow, mow some grass, cook some food, workout sometimes.

Not in any way what I once thought I would find back when I spent my life making plans to not make plans for anything other than whatever the world says we should plan to be.

I don’t make plans anymore because, well, thanks to my recent past I’ve come to see just how little control I really have over anything. For I can’t fix any of the problems I see. I can’t do much to help those around me who are struggling in ways that I both know of and yet know little about. I can’t insist these posts come out as good as I want them to, often times feel only as if they’re increasingly far from it. I can’t convince anyone else to see the hope I have in Him, sometimes don’t even know why or how I do.

No, my life has turned out to be nothing of my own and that despite how hard I’ve tried to walk that line in this life in which this life is what we make it.

Turns out that life has nothing to do with what we plan to make it. Rather this life will continue to unfold in accord with His will within His time. Not mine. Not yours. Not the world’s. No, nobody here actually has all that much say in the way in which this all goes. Now that’s clearly not to say that we’ve not a say in making it unravel as that we see as daily we continue to see the very destruction of what civilization once poured itself into planning to pass down to its children.

Something else we don’t seem to worry about all that much anymore.

For that isn’t our life, or at least not the way in which many here seem intent to live it. In fact most here don’t seem at all willing nor interested in worrying about what we’ll behind. Rather it seems we’ve all but fully arrived upon the time in which we act as if everyone else is the ghost that all of us really are. Not that we’re able to see ourselves that way, least not yet. But we do indeed seem to treat others that way as if their life isn’t worth much.

Right up to the point in our just taking it should we ever so happen to feel like it.

That’s life here. It’s a matter disintegrating all but daily. Yet still so many are planning, promising, paving paths and purchasing priorities from those who wield the power and popularity that many here still seem to see and think worth whatever they consider their own lives to be. For truth be told that’s all that some want in or out of life. Just to be popular and feel powerful.

Not that either can or will ever accomplish or amount to much as I can assure you they won’t. Know that because I both sought and caught both. Only to find that they run out just as soon as you run low on reason to try to keep finding them in life.

Because they’re not life. Neither plans nor our promises made unto them nor the profit we love to imagine waiting within them nor the power we feel in trying to prove we can prove them to the roaring fans we’re sure to make should we make the way that is our own prove as popular as is the plan we’ve stolen it from.

For anymore we’re not only ghosts but even of those from whom we’ve gotten all our ideas thanks to their sharing their plans and platforms for all to see what they believe a life should be.

We all just want to be like someone else and yet live increasingly as if everyone else doesn’t matter all that much.

Makes you wonder what we think of us.

Well, I know what I think of me now and no, fan isn’t the word I’d use. Not at all a fan of myself in light of how I’ve lived this life. Done far too many foolish things to ever trust myself again. But I consider that a good thing now that I’ve begun to learn that I am but a whisper sent here to share His as was said when He bowed His head and whispered “It is finished.”

What?

Life.

Indeed, I am increasingly convinced that we’re all just here for what eternity will prove are but a few more days. How many? Not sure. But seeing as how in Him one is a thousand and a thousand are one, well, don’t know that it matters our measures anymore. Rather all that seems to matter is only the whisper that we both are and can leave behind.

What will it say?

What will your life say?

What message are you sending unto those who may happen to be interested in too looking for some way to make some sense of this thing we call life? What difference are you making in time that’s fading? What importance is there in the things you’re pursuing? What wealth can be won within whatever you want to become before you leave behind all you did in life?

To be sure there are a lot of things that seem to matter a lot in this place. Maybe they do. But friends, maybe we don’t until they don’t. And that simply because while we’re here now, none of us know how long that will be the case. And so I don’t think we’ve actually much time left to waste upon all this worry we’ve done over whatever it is that we want our lives here to become.

No, in truth we’re already home. Guess the only question then is where our home is.

Just know that if your answer to that is here then I pray you’ll reconsider because one day none of us will be.

Because, turns out, life isn’t defined by where we live it but rather what we live it for.

And so yeah, what is your life?

Or just as much where?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold