Day 4011 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 39:6 NIV

Ghosts already

Because something’s happened to life that I can’t understand no matter how hard I try. It’s as if, suddenly, perhaps even overnight, all of life as it once was lived is now something entirely different. There’s a hollowness to it, an emptiness about it, this general lack of what once was as was replaced by what now is but somehow isn’t still. Maybe that’s it, that it’s not still. That there’s no calm. No quiet. No time for contemplation and thus no opportunity for contentment.

For anymore it seems our every life’s content is merely nothing more than the many things we think and those we think we need as are but wants in masquerade.

Yes indeed, it does so seem as if all we see is just some scene of a life gone gray in regard to the way in which everyone lives it. It’s even to the point in which it might be better, we better off if it were all just death and taxes as at least that would give us something in common. At least that would offer us a sense of unison from which or in which we might find again a measure of union uniting what was once not quite so divided and dividing.

Alas that’s what life is anymore. It’s something that’s become a billion lines drawn by others, most of which we’re left to cross as we ourselves go off in chase of all we waste our every single day assuming we need more than peace, happiness, awareness even. Indeed, are we even aware of what’s going on? Have we any idea anymore what all has already happened? Do we not remember that history is to be repeated by those who don’t know but to forget it?

And too that some of us are destined to watch others repeat it having ourselves chosen to learn from it along the way to wherever it is that we’re still trying to go?

Because it sure ain’t here! No, this life we’re living now is by no means anything I in any way desire to keep. Rather it feels as if everything’s grown so skinny and sleek that none of us can even breathe anymore. Everyone is just so apparently sure about everything they’re doing and yet all that we’re collectively doing is amassing wealth and our versions of wisdom alongside the masses each doing the same in utterly different ways.

It’s a continual confusion this life stuck inside this delusion lost behind our decision to assume still that we know what we’re doing despite all that we’re doing only seemingly amounting to nothing more than life’s destroying. And both us of it and it of us. We’re anymore walking as if mortal enemies of life’s opportunities, combing daily through the offerings seeking for only those things that we seek to have or love to want whilst discounting and denying the many more of both we never do.

And there seems a growing list of both those things we want and the more we don’t.

Indeed, there’s come a great narrowing of our every existence in which each of us are shrinking into this time spent only ever thinking about what we’re sure we already know. All of us seem as if we’ve just sort of retreated into our own little corners of culture, hiding around us all we’ve sought to have before. We’ve become the lonely curators of an entire life’s curiosities and commendations. Each of us keeping all to ourselves whatever it is that we’re either afraid another might take or certain they all don’t deserve.

Each of us then acting as both jury and judge, somehow getting the sentencing over with before we’ve even heard the case.

All because it seems as though we’ve already heard enough to know enough to be quite sure that everyone else is again nothing more than an enemy out to steal our valuing of what life might be. All because it seems that we are always considered the best to know such things as life’s valuing. Granted, most of it will soon prove a vanity that’s come to cost us almost everything.

But when we’ve each stored up for ourselves in ourselves so much we wanted to win and since forgot we have, we’re all but guaranteed to have plenty left even should we be proven wrong about a couple of things here and there.

But friends, looking around and feeling within, I don’t think our wrongs can be numbered so few.

Rather, again, it seems as if we’ve all chosen to collectively lose what was once a life that felt vastly more alive. I feel truly blessed to have been given the chance to grow up when I did. Not that life was perfect back then as there is no such thing as perfection here in this place. But it was happier. It was simpler. It was quieter and cleaner and clearer, our minds then too. Indeed, I look back, which some would argue we’re not supposed to do, and see only everything that already isn’t anymore.

Looking back only because it seems to be that you need to see where you’ve been if you’re ever to determine both whether or not you want to stay and where you should head should your head decided you don’t.

And again, looking around at what life’s become, no, I don’t want to stay and so I seek inside of every single day all the things that need to change so that my life doesn’t stay the way it is.

Because, not to sound ungrateful, but I don’t like this.

Why?

Because I can’t understand it. Again, it’s seems that we’d be better off if it were all just death and taxes as we could then give the rest of our time and trials to trying to find things that fill in the gaps with perhaps a smile or laugh. But no. No instead we’ve become a people so cold, dark, numb to nearly everyone and everything that all the things that we do have nothing but a life to lose. And that’s because all we seem to care about anymore is still that same old heaping up as has been passed down.

Proving unequivocally that the past is certainly repeating!

For still we’re doing as society’s always done. Still we’re all living only always on the run after something else that’s still not new under the sun. Still we’re all but to the point of holding a gun in either hand or heart aiming at the same of those around us should they come too close to us and, in this, seem to threaten us with either the taking away of what we want or the giving of whatever we don’t. All because, again, we seem to have arrived inside this mind in which we’re so convinced that we know best that nobody else can know anything at all.

All because they’re not nearly as well off as we are. They don’t have all this stuff that we love so much. They’re not working the jobs that we enjoy hating for the bosses we suck up to and then talk bad about just as soon as they’re not looking. They’re not planning for the vacations we assume we’ll still be here five years from now to finally take once we can afford to. They’re not dreaming all these dreams that we can’t see for the nightmares they’re sure to be.

No, rather all we can see is that our lives are going well somehow.

And that in a world in which not much is going anywhere close to the same.

Something we apparently never find strange.

At least not enough to stop and wonder of. Probably because we’ve got things to do, people to see, stuff to want and the same to buy. For that is our life. It’s all routines and revenue. It’s this retinue of those chosen few who always know just what to say, thanks mostly to our telling them up front what we want to hear. Which is all but always only that we’re doing good, looking the same, winning the thing that is this game that we all call life and live in such separate ways that, again, every single day finds us all just lost in our corners protecting our collections.

Of what?

Who knows! For it’s always different stuff. For some it’s sports memorabilia, a favorite of mine for years. For others it’s antiques, more my dad’s lane. For some it’s toys and trinkets, tiny train sets that whistle and whine as they pass the time trying to find that one tree that would look nice in that one place that doesn’t have anything in it yet. For many it’s itineraries, mostly those of vacations they live in hopes of having both the time and funds to finally afford before too much longer. For others it’s job promotions and all the oceans of paperwork and red tape through which they’ve to swim to win the spot.

For a lot it’s religious thought given unto either faith or freedom or fitness or sometimes just fittin’ this one more bite behind a belt that’s already begging for mercy.

All things to which we all devote our decisions, directions, determinations, devotions, disciplines and discipleships. And that because, whether we like it or not, whether we even see it or not, truth is we’re all still learning in this life. Sadly most of what it seems most are learning is only about more stuff to want and reasons why they need it so. But still, every new day finds us in a new life that we’ve never lived before.

Problem is that we’re seemingly all but consistently insistent upon none of them looking any different.

Rather we’re on what seems this ever-rolling train that is life that has gone downhill basically ever since the very beginning of every version or variation thereof. For the truth is that we’ve all gotten a chance to have a say in the way this thing has gone. But friends, if that doesn’t prove our tendency to be wrong then I don’t know what will.

Again, just look around!

I mean, we don’t even have toy stores anymore!

You know it’s all falling apart when a kid would rather have a smart phone than a stick horse!!

But this is where we are. In the last couple of decades we’ve all seemingly determined that we’re so well versed in all but all of life that we can afford to spend our time lost inside these tiny technological worlds that always seem to cater to us in whatever way we may happen to want. Hungry? Got an app for that. Worried? Scroll through google until you’re not. Scared? Social media will help, friends made fast! Lonely? Dating app. Don’t know how to drive? Uber. Don’t know what to think? New York Times. Don’t know what to do?

You kidding?

We all always know what to do, don’t we?

Indeed, we are seemingly the most self-assured society that history has ever seen. And yet, again, why then are things getting worse? What then of all this emptiness in what are lives so filled with all we could ever hope to have? Why does everything feel cheaper now that everyone’s making more money? Why does everyone seem lonelier even though we’re carrying around friends in our pockets? Why do so many look homelier when we have so many drugs and pills and procedures that apparently produce perfection in minutes?

Why does everyone seem homesick for a place in which hope is if hope is truly nothing more than our having something more?

For that’s what it seems that all of every life has become all but certain of.

That hope is a means to an end which ends only when we’ve finally found whatever we’d hoped to have. Hope is anymore nothing more than our wanting something more. Don’t even care what it is. We just want it. Because someone else has it or some celebrity said we need it or we just like the shine of it.

Again, skinny and sleek.

Such is this way of life we live in the streets of what is already a ghost town. Not that’s the world’s emptied out as there are seemingly more people here than ever before. No, rather simply because it seems that all of us have nothing to do with anyone else. Just yesterday I saw a clip of a guy talking about ordering a coffee I think it was using some screened machine as the workers of the joint just stood behind it waiting to fill the orders.

No conversations. No communication. No interaction.

Just here, take your drink and go.

It’s all we know.

Because all of life has become about this idea that we’re better off left alone so that we can each give all we have unto a life of plans and phones and phone plans proving then our best friends as they have all the calendars and reminders and conversations and pictures that we’ve taken to prove we were here with something still we have to do.

Rushing about heaping up is in every truth everything we know to do.

Problem is that it ain’t even wealth anymore. Again, we don’t even seem to care what it is, we just want more of it. We go to the store just because we’re bored and end up buying things that our already packed pantry cannot possibly contend with trying to contain. We hop online and fill our carts with all our hearts have come to crave, find some coupons to help us save and set the shipping to arrive the very next day. We buy our food through only drive-thrus, scurrying past the windows with nothing more than a thank you (on a good day).

We reach out to loved ones only when we need something.

Treat God only the same if not even worse.

Because we think it works. We think this works. We think this way of life is working out plenty alright just because our own personal plenty continues swelling unto the point in which we can’t see anyone else anymore as our only thoughts always go to making sure we bought that thing that we had in our cart before the price increased because the sale went off.

We’re a people of stuff. Again, don’t even really seem to ever care what but just know we need it because we want it and can’t anymore seem to keep the two separate. Much like how we’ve all managed to come upon this common approach to all of life in which all there is is separate. Didn’t use to be like this. Wasn’t much of anything like whatever this is.

Again, not that the past was much better but at least we were happier back before phones became our friends and food became so hard to afford. Back before our every thought was already bought by whoever we happened to have bought a belief in being right about how we should live, simply because they have an app and an impressive following. Back before all we cared to follow was some side of some political divide that will one day only prove the two different wings of the very same bird (a dodo most likely).

Indeed, it’s become sad to watch the world turn as it just doesn’t anymore. Everything’s gone still since nothing stays quiet. Rather every single day we’re surrounded by such noise and nonsense that nothing can make sense because it’s all dollars and cents that we continue to spend on things we don’t need, thus giving to Caesar what is God’s and to God as little as we can. Because His way seems weird what with all the losing and laying down and not looking back but only above waiting for clouds to part and peace to start at the trumpet’s sound.

Doesn’t make any sense to a world that’s drown inside this endless sea of common desire.

For what?

Again, doesn’t even matter.

We just need something more, something else, something new to turn our hearts away from the news for a minute as all they keep on telling is how someone else is always to blame for the choices we make to spend our lives going along as if they’re the ones best able to lead. Never once seeming to see that those blinded by every worldly unbelief can only ever get us where we already are.

Which is again no place I want to stay.

Because, and again, I’m not an ingrate, but this world we’re in now is neither anything like the better now behind nor the ever better still up ahead. A better that so many here will never care to find simply because they’ve amassed enough of good enough that better itself is hard for them to believe in. For indeed, we’ve become a world lost in quantity and the very quality of our every life continues to suffer for it.

Problem is we’ve all seemingly learned to enjoy our afflictions as they continue to come in the inflection of what sure sounds like a life going well thanks to the bigger houses we have and the raise we just got at work that will help us buy the more stuff we want to fill the bigger house we can’t really afford since that self-driving car ended up being a bit more expensive than we bargained for as was planned on some car-buying phone app that didn’t take into account all the hidden fees and coming recalls when the doors won’t unlock and you’re stuck inside wasting a life in so much technology and excess that you don’t even remember recess or fresh air or other such apparent make believes.

Indeed, we don’t believe in anything anymore except the next thing we’ll come to want.

What then? Where does it all go when all of this ends? Who will get all we’ve fought to have? Who will remember us for more than just our stuff? Who even knows us now when we spend our every waking hour slaves to the power of lust and rust?

Don’t we see that we’re already ghosts who’ve lost both most of the friends we may have once had having not found the time to talk to them in years and even more of our time having not talked to anyone in a while? Indeed, when’s the last time you got into a deep conversation with your family? When’s the last time you went an hour with someone without a phone in your hand? When’s the last time you sat down to eat your dinner without thinking about buying something you think you need?

When’s the last time that life felt free to just be lived?

Personally, I don’t really recall. For years it’s been about some lawsuit, a settlement, an apartment surrounded with neighbors who are apparently allergic to quiet, a loss of hope as we looked for a house we could afford, a hope found when we finally found one, a house I’ve since spent entirely too much time stuck inside my little room trying to find some way to make fit all the stuff I have whilst my family had conversations and made memories and lived life without me.

Am I being too hard on myself? Maybe.

Doesn’t mean I don’t agree I need to do it differently.

Because I woke up this morning lost in the futility of it all. We’re so worried about so much that doesn’t matter that we’re missing out on making life count for something. Nobody’s happy. Nobody is content. None are at peace. Granted, there is no peace here, but hopefully we haven’t so misplaced that piece of it He left in our hearts.

Or have we?

Have we lost it behind our need to find something else to have in a life already filled with so much we don’t need at all?

It’s truly strange the emptiness, the hollowness that life here has come to have since every life being lived is more filled with more stuff than ever before. But I think that’s the problem and the point. It’s that we’ve gotten lost serving all that’s lifeless and our lives have then become the same.

And that’s why things have to change.

It’s because if they don’t then neither will we. We’ll just continue to go on being deceived into thinking that life consists in an abundance of possessions which have not life themselves. Rather our every possession is but a ghost already that we’ll one day be forced to leave behind.

Guess the question’s become how much of our life will we leave with it when we do.

And too how much of life we’ll have left to find whenever we go wherever we will.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold