Day 4012 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Luke 12:20 NIV

Here tomorrow

Will we be? It’s a question we each go out of our way to keep from asking because in truth we cannot possibly know the answer. And it’s questions like that which have answers we can’t give that accomplish the greatest humblings in life as they seem to insist that we’re not of the conscious consist that we so consistently seem to assume. For down here all but all of life anymore is nothing but a people lost inside this store of thoughts thought about beliefs bought as paid for in the presumptions that we know what life is and how it’ll go and where it’ll end.

Living most often as if it won’t.

Because we don’t want it to. Because we like living, and rightly so. I mean this journey, though sometimes jading and often jagged, it’s one in which we get daily to fathom the fuller fullness of all the tomorrows we so delight to imagine still lain out before us. We each know so well how to give these lives to our perfecting estimations of their perfecting too in regard to everything from what we see to the less and less we apparently feel the need to do in order to make said dreams come true.

Problem to be proved in that dreams aren’t always for things that we desire for ourselves alone. And that’s because our desires, as incredible as they so often seem and we thus feel justified inside our ongoing assuming them always to be, they’re anymore usually hindered by what we can see. For we each have given this life to living through eyes that just insist they know the way to go to get us where and whatever we hope.

But we can only see so far and even that always here.

Is here the best place for hope to live? Is here the best place for love to grow? Is this life as lived here the only life we’ll ever know? Are we truly sure, absolutely certain, that whatever we are living is even a life at all?

Or might we be but merely alive?

And that with, again, who knows how little time we have to continue saying the same?

Indeed, I’ve of late been looking back upon my recent past, last decade or so, and trying to find the hope as was held inside the harvest for which I’d planned and worked and wanted to have of all that I’ve sown. And yet recently I’ve found the hope and meaning harder to find, quite heavy to carry. Maybe it’s because of my age turning one older just last month, a well-experienced happening having happened 37 times before. Maybe this one just hit me weirder than any of the others so far.

I don’t know that I can know for sure right now as it sure seems that I don’t. I just know that something feels off, I feel somewhat lost here inside what is a today in which yesterday seem so close but somehow tomorrow further away. And I think that’s because I’ve become quite fond of such continuance as always repeating pasts in this present I have. And yet as here I sit I see only all the things that have long been so familiar fading into something the substance of a stranger as I struggle to find any reason to care much anymore.

Because what’ll come of it if tomorrow doesn’t?

What will it amount to when my account here is closed for good? What will it have accomplished, all the time, effort, interest I’ve for so long given unto the getting of all I’ve only left to give away when I go away to wherever I will? Should it thus remain my will to want more of what I might when I’ve already far more than plenty as I plunge closer to my share of our goodnight? Is not having here more only a more to which we’ll have to say goodbye someday?

And aren’t goodbyes the hardest part?

Indeed, for many of us they’re so hard in fact that we just don’t say them. Rather we often opt for the often more apt ‘catch you later’ or ‘see you around’. Because we don’t want to dabble inside that wonder as to whether or not we will. We’d rather not dance with that unknown chance that seeing someone later on is a chance that just won’t come. We don’t want to be worried with that weight of our lives having to wait no longer in what is this place in which they linger but only as our share of this air grows thinner.

Rather we wish to imagine that life will continue to unfold as we’ve all long fathomed in what is a form, function and fullness that seems always best to each of us.

But the reality is that we none of us know the day, the hour, the minute or meekness in which we’ll leave this world as this world leaves us.

And yet therein we find what feels a fragment of hope itself in that perhaps we can at least somewhat choose at least one of the above. Not the part as to when we leave nor even how but maybe we can choose when this world leaves us. In fact, this is the general premise of what is one of my personal favorites of Paul’s many considerings found in Galatians 6:14.

“May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

A message shared unto the very point and purpose of boasting’s promise, just turned ever so slightly so that said boasting is made about where we’re going as opposed to where, what, who we’re leaving behind as we do. But yet therein lies the issue. It’s that of all life’s boastings we seem still those still knowing of only those held high here for all those too here to see whilst we all are. Indeed, life here remains this seeking for crowns that fade and kingdoms the same.

Ain’t no wonder then why so many are sad whenever the topic’s breached of our heading for the beach and boarding that boat aimed finally for home.

It’s because we’ve all come to imagine that home is here as is built of all our hopes and paneled in all our plans and painted with so many pretty priorities that seem always so perfectly placed that we can’t anymore bear imagine leaving this place. For this life as we’ve come to live it is indeed something of our kingdom as has been made upon our making a life out of all that hasn’t actually any life to give.

For life still doesn’t consist inside an abundance of possessions.

Rather we’re the ones who’ve become possessed by our possessions as we, in what’s soon to prove a most tragic turn of events, we spend our lives giving our lives unto them. We exist to keep dusted our treasures as they, without legs or honors, they cannot move and thus gather the gloom that is an existence sat quietly in a room we visit only ever so often so as to see them, enjoy them, marvel once more at the life we’ve made inside all the things that we think make life.

Do they?

Can our possessions create life? Granted, they do so often seem to make it feel quite fuller and usually more fun. But is fun life? Had life no fullness of its own that it needs all this other stuff to make it whatever it then isn’t? Can we truly ever honestly really know what life is so long as all life is nothing more than our wanting more that only distracts us from what life might be?

I mean honestly, how can we know what life is or what that means so long as so much means so much in life that we spend our lives looking only to have more in them, thus never knowing of them? It’s something like a cup holding a bunch of pens. Often times the cup itself is easily forgotten as we go to it not in search of drink to quench a thirst in need of the same but rather for the pens we know we’ve placed within.

Our focus is usually on what we’ve put inside something, not the something we put it in.

And that’s the problem.

It’s that life here has become what it’s long been. It’s a time in which idolatry thrives whilst life itself is left to merely survive upon the slivers of time in which we seldom give to thought. Indeed, this reality hit me just the other day as I again sat inside my room trying to figure out what to do with all this stuff that I’ve for so long loved so much. I worried as the ideas evaded me, a reality leaving me realizing that I’ve lately lost my ability to think.

For I, like you, we’ve all become quite used to others doing such working for us. We call them cell phones, celebrities, social media feeds and google searches. We are in every way still becoming willing victims of that same tree giving us that same fruit that the same enemy tells us the same lies about.

We even mock the obviousness inside a tiny apple seen on the backside of those cell phones.

Even has a little bite taken out.

And indeed, all these things have become for us a veritable window to what is a world that is working itself to death trying to design all these ways for all our dreams for all these things that we live to desire to in fact come to life inside this fire that is our fervor that is our fury as is fought trying to find a little more with which to fill this life.

All because all there is is never enough.

No, we can all find always a way to want more and make some room for the same. Granted, we’ve not actually the ability to enlarge a heart already engorged upon a life having been given for decades unto a gluttony for desire and deceit. Rather we can only push things out of the way that suddenly mean less in light of this more’s meaning more than they do anymore. And we’ve all gotten quite used to doing this. It’s in fact why ebay exists.

It’s because we know deep down that we’ve only so much room inside our homes, our hearts, their hopes. And so sometimes some things just need to go so that we can make some room to store the more that we continue finding ways to assume we need. And that’s fine when we finally find the willingness to let another win our previous wants in some online auction.

But again, problem is that we’re betting more than a bottom line in this way of life in which we daily manage to find something else with which to fill what’s now been pushed so far away into the shadows of our very self that we remember not that life itself has a worth, a meaning, a purpose so worth living that it never needed anything else to do so.

We’ve all just been so overwhelmed for so very long with so much stuff that we’ve no ability to ever really recall what the very call of life may have been. Because the phone keeps ringing while we’re busy bidding upon some new-to-us bundle of dust that, before long, won’t matter all that much to us anymore either.

We’re each but these conveyor belts of a world’s beliefs of what matters most. Stuff comes and the same goes and we don’t know where it goes nor from where it comes. We just like that it comes and that it ends up usually going away so easily that we again needn’t be worried about goodbyes and such. Rather we just got used to packing up all our prior favorite stuff and sending it all off in boxes to whomever happened to be the lucky winner as the highest bidder.

But friends, at what price shall we start the auction for this life?

A few dollars? A few more desires? A couple more dreams for a couple more things? Perhaps a few plans made for a more perfect version of perfect that our past, despite all it had, didn’t have the ability to provide? Will tomorrow prove better able in that regard if indeed it does come along holding finally all we’d hoped to have? Will having more ever make our lives feel more worth living?

Or will not having more only leave us more that we’ll be leaving whenever He says it’s time?

Or is that not why we spend this life giving all but all our time to all that we still hope to buy? Because we again don’t want to wallow inside that worry as to how much longer we don’t have to wait? Why is it that we’re all in such a hurry to hope that we get to wait to leave as opposed to wishing we didn’t have to anymore? Again if not because we’ve become quite well convinced that what we have here where we are is what both hope and home are meant to be?

Leaving then Heaven the perpetual mystery as is made of all we can’t see and thus won’t know until we do go wherever it is which, looking around, probably isn’t here.

Or is it?

Sadly a great and growing many seem to assume it is. And indeed, even inside of Scripture we read that the same many will have had their reward within this life lived within this world. And sure, the same many do indeed seem to be enjoying their journey here. So many here are living lives that have so many others lost in continued envy that has them scrolling daily through even such mundanity as seeing whatever another is eating for dinner.

As if that matters.

It doesn’t and yet to many it does. Why? Because it’s their estimation of a reward. It’s their idea of a dream. It’s the kind of life they too wish they could lead. It’s their understanding of the very best of where we’re standing and how this place has that very best to give. Indeed, it’s their estimation as to what is the very best of this current location in which, yeah, it does seem as though life is being lived.

But is it?

And truly, even if it is, even if this is life, what then will be left when it’s all over?

Because, like it or not, that day’s coming. And He who came to warn of it nearing did so by telling us that it would come as if a thief in the night. It’ll take many by surprise as they look up and all at once find they’ve just lost their lives and all they’d lived them for, filled them with, given them to.

That’s the question we need to find the courage to peruse, to in fact pursue.

What are we filling our lives with? And furthermore, is there any life in any of it that we can truly lean on to help us go on living when this world proves the one place we can’t stay?

Indeed, that’s what we talked about just yesterday. It was about how we all tend to go on being deceived into believing that life consists in an abundance of possessions which have not life themselves and how rather our every possession is but a ghost already that we’ll one day leave behind, leaving us all living a life as if but a ghost already ourselves as we fill our lives with things that have no life to give. A message trying to help us understand the need to start letting go of all that can’t go with us.

And we ended yesterday’s discussion with a wonder as to how much life we'll find wherever we go whenever we do.

Sadly the answer for most here is not much. Why? Because God is kind enough to give unto each of us whatever it is that we love. His Word tells us again and again all about how He will give us the desires of our hearts, even giving us over to minds depraved thanks to hearts that desire those things which are themselves lost in depravity. That’s in fact why He calls us to store up for ourselves treasures in Heaven.

It’s because, should we be among the few who do leave here to make it inside there, we’ll find that nothing is missing of all we could only barely imagine could be waiting for us.

Because there no thief can steal and no moth destroy as all such present manner of things will have by then passed away leaving only peace and the promise of it being permanent.

That’s a promise this world can’t make, or at least make good on.

No, for while this world does continue to promise us such things as peace where there is none and joy amongst those who have none and hope as is held so easily as holding something that someone else is, it’s all transient. It’s temporary. Everything in this place is passing away, again, His Word not mine.

And yet here we find that so many continue trying to find what is this evermore with which to fill a life that is thus measured as apparently empty enough to have them believing that they’re still needing all this stuff to make this life feel more alive. I don’t know, maybe it does. I just know that I have as much as I ever have had and yet happiness and joy and contentment and peace and life itself seem at an all-time low.

And I just don’t think that’s how this is supposed to go.

Because His Word also tells us that there’s nothing better for us while we’re here than to find joy in our works and happiness in our lot. But friends, what can we ever know of joy or happiness when all we know in life itself is to assume we need something else? For all of us have had already so much of what’s here, but has any of it brought us anything that managed to last?

Or hasn’t all the happiness and hope now passed, perhaps even onto someone else who bought whatever we once got having tried so hard to get what we now may have only come to all but forget?

Is that how life is supposed to go? Just us getting a bunch of stuff that either gets sold or thrown away or left behind?

Indeed, what will we find when we ourselves reach this here time in which our lives themselves are demanded of us? Do we really think that Heaven needs our help with the decorating? And if not, well then why spend any more time worried about any more stuff that’s already deteriorating?

For everything that is here will still be here tomorrow.

Will we?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold