Day 4016 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ecclesiastes 2:17 NIV

A life wasted

And that upon so much that exists only under the sun that someday, when the sun’s sat, we’ll all look up from all for which we’d toiled and tried only to find that it was all just a lie. For our every life and our every understanding standing presently inside the same is nothing but a confusion designed inside a delusion that continues to demand the very dilution of any and every devotion to anything that isn’t as devoid of meaning as everything is that we’re still here seeing as having so much worth that we still assume that we can buy for our life a meaning.

Because the world sells it on shelves now.

And we buy it, both all the junk and all the lies that have convinced us we need it. We give our lives and all that is within them, all for which we could use them, all for which we were created to use them to so many other things instead of anything for which they were made. Because surely we don’t truly believe as strongly as it sure seems we might in the value of all for which we agree to endure any plight that we hope will help us hold that which we hopefully know we don’t really need.

Or do we?

Not the need part as there is nothing here outside of water, air and a bit of food that we truly need. No, but the believe part. We don’t really believe that we need more than that, do we? Do we truly believe that we need houses never big enough to house all our stuff? Do we truly believe we need more stress at work all to help us afford all the junk we buy that eventually causes that idea in mind that convinces us that we need bigger houses to house it all? Do we need faster cars to get us to the same grocery stores?

Do we need stores at all?

Alas, anymore it seems that indeed we do as we don’t really have any remembrance of those many ways in which God created us to exist. Blown entirely too far past it. Indeed, there is no more room for any such simplicity as a man in garden simply toiling away at taking care of the provisions provided. Not because we’d not some us like an easier life, a simpler life. In fact, that’s been a prayer of mine for months, years at this point. I want a simple life, one in which all that’s done under the sun has some kind of meaning.

Why?

Because what else is any of this for if all we continue to live for is just measured in some kind of prideful presumption as to the purpose of our existence?

That’s why we hate simplicity anymore. It’s not because we don’t like the idea of it as it would tremendously alter our lives for the better to have fewer things over which we worry and thus for which we feel the need to work ourselves so weary as we all are anymore. No, it’s because we’d rather be weary and worried than rested and watered because there’s no pride to be proven if we’re not the ones doing whatever it is that is making our lives unfold as we like.

We have to be always the only ones who prove ourselves via the standard measurements of profit and production as produced for us by a system that wants only for all of us to become victims who smile our way through a life laden with shame until they just chuck us in a hole and move on to their next target. I mean we’ve even let it get to the point in which you need life insurance because nobody can afford to die!

Why?

Because someone else takes pride in our living in debts that we can’t pay off before we take off and another takes pride in running the most elaborate funeral home in the area in which we live and another takes pride in the suits/dresses they make that we’re all interested in being buried in (because it seems that we kind of understand the overall formality of leaving here only to meet our Father [for what may be the very first time for some]) and still another has long taken pride in their eloquent eulogies in which they strive to encompass the highlights of a life that’s now over.

Hopefully not having to lie too much, so long as the dearly departed was an ardent parishioner of their building in which they too take pride in their job as a shepherd over a flock who spend 6 days of the 7 we have each week lost in the pasture that is this world in which we work for so much stuff that we can’t take with us and even those we leave behind probably can’t keep because there is no such thing as life insurance.

Because insurance exists to make whole whatever is lost, broken, stolen or elsewise ruined.

But we can’t get back life once we’ve lost it.

Which is a problem because, well, we’ve all seemingly lost it. We’ve lost the purpose of it. We’ve lost the usefulness for it. We’ve even come so far inside all of our proverbial progressions that some of us are even beginning to rapidly lose our interest in other people keeping it.

Because they say mean things or speak a truth that we don’t want to hear or just look kind of weird and it sort of freaks us out to be still found amongst those we all easily deem freaks because they don’t look like us and we’re the ones who have it all figured out simply because we have the biggest house on the block, the most money in the bank and a life insurance plan that will help the family we’re too busy to talk to or spend time with afford to send us off in a coffin far fancier than any car we managed to afford while we were here.

It’s all a farce. Because, in truth, it’s all forced. I cannot count the times throughout my life in which I found that I knew only to feel as if I were a loser simply because my life wasn’t unfolding just like that of those this place deems important or special or powerful or impressive. Indeed, there was a running joke around the college that I went to (one of my top 3 mistakes of all time, going to college) that was referred to as “Ring by Spring” because so many people were getting hitched that they probably should have started a matrimonial office and offered up the chapel for wedding services.

All while everyone there had also been brought up to believe that they needed this $75,000 piece of paper to prove they were worth anything to the industries in which they thought they wanted a career that you simply have to have if you’re to have a decent life able to afford to have a family as kids ain’t cheap ever since diapers became a one-and-done kind of deal.

It’s all just insanity. If you’re not well into your career by your late 20’s then nobody who could potentially serve as a loving spouse will be interested in even dating you as nobody’s good with a bite to eat and a discount movie anymore. And if you can’t find a mate by 38 then you’re basically done and so too the dreams of a family as, well, far too many others who are by then far more impressive as measured by a world that all of the sudden seems to think that a million dollars isn’t worth all that much since minimum wage is closing in on $20 an hour.

Again, it’s just insanity.

And yet it’s working. Truly, our adversary knows so well what he’s doing. In fact, he doesn’t even have to do much anymore as we all continue to prove that we’re more than willing to be the ones doing all the working all so that we have something to offer up as an answer should ever anyone ask us what we do for a living.

Get that?

What do you do for a living is one of the very first questions that nearly everyone resorts to asking just as soon as they meet someone. Why? Because we live here to work. Because our way of life is one that revolves around our occupations as they’re what pay us. And, well, we’ve all settled for what is now a longstanding reliance upon such institutions as banking systems and credit bureaus, which just love to tell us how we measure up to in society thanks to their many incredibly nuanced financial and fiscal estimations and enumerations of everyone else.

It’s like we’re all fighting for positioning upon some pride-based hierarchy of self-imposed importance.

And yet none of us ever then know anything of peace or contentment as being content with life and the endless undue blessings you have within it is among the surest ways to find yourself cast aside with the other losers who are losers simply because they stopped playing the game a while back.

But friends, how can you lose what you don’t partake in?

How can you fail something when you find no sense in seeking to uphold it? I don’t understand that. And yet, looking around, it seems like everyone else does as it seems like everyone else continues to do things in accordance with this assumption that what we’re doing matters and thus gives our lives meaning simply because it’s helping us make a living.

What about living though?

Where did that pursuit go? Not that poured into making a living seeking then a living wage but rather living in such a way in which life was the profit and peace the proof? Indeed, when’s the last time you felt anything of peace in this place? Know why there is none? Because everyone has become willfully convinced that they need to prove their lives via the contents seen and shown inside.

As if God’s going to meet us at the gates of Heaven, us wearing our newly purchased fancy suits that we literally got to wear only once and that when we weren’t even here anymore, and be so impressed with everything from how well we’re dressed to how many people showed up at our funeral to how much stuff we’d left behind to be scattered amongst the crowd that He’s just going to hand us a crown and say well done.

All because, in this life the way we’ve come to live it, those things are considered doing good. And indeed, Scripture itself talks about the importance of providing for one’s family (1 Timothy 5:8) and leaving an inheritance to their children (Proverbs 13:22). But still, what if providing for our families has to do with more than a massive house and plenty of food? And too, what if leaving something behind means a little more than just a bit of money in some bank account?

What if He’s pointing us rather to living a way of life that leaves behind an example that we strove to leave in a life spent following His? What if our best way to provide for our families is to the lead them into an ever-deepening understanding of Christ? What if our very best inheritance is helping those around us realize that God sent Christ to adopt us all as children?

What if it has nothing to do with money, with possessions, with anything else such as these things in which so many here take so much pride?

Again, do we truly think that God’s going to measure the worthiness of our lives via only all the things we had inside them? Do we think He’s to be pleased with us for our having given ourselves to only looking unto the world around us to help us understand what we’re here to do, who we’re supposed to be? Is He to be impressed should we have lived our lives losing our minds so lost inside so much stress coming from the expectations of the world around us that we never had any time to even try and find His?

Friends, the long and short of it is that God knows those who are His, but that those who are His are those who seek to be holy, but to be holy is to be set apart for special use.

What is so stinking special about our being used as if puppets in some staged production in which all that we seek is the roar of the crowd when we show off our cardboard crowns?

There is nothing special about anything of what this world’s become. No, we all left special in the Garden as even there we got it in our minds that we needed more than God had given us. Had an entire Garden created of God’s own goodness and we just couldn’t help but crave the fruit of that one single tree that He said we didn’t need.

And why didn’t we need it?

Because as soon as we took that bite it opened our eyes to seeing the difference between good and evil and that set us on the course to become the ones who prove ourselves to be always the best as is measured by anymore only us as only we can move the lines inside our lives in order to find that we have indeed measured up to our estimation of what matters most as has been given us by those who insist still that they know better.

These days we call them everything from politicians to influencers. But regardless of their platform or purpose, their insistence is that they know what’s best for us. And as a people who are anymore so worn out and weary having run every worldly race we could enter, we don’t even have the ability or interest in thinking for ourselves. So yeah, let them do it!

After all, they’re the ones with the fame and fortune that we’d all love.

Because it would sure help us buy that bigger house we need without having to get a promotion at work that we don’t really want because we accidentally let ourselves get happy doing what we’re doing.

Yeah, can’t have that!

Simply because should anyone here ever become reminded of the little we need in life to be happy, to be content, to feel joy in our purpose and the hope of where His path has us going, well, just might cause others to realize that they don’t need anything they’ve been told for so long that they just have to have if they’re ever to have anything even remotely resembling a decent life.

Friends, decent and descent and dissent are all so close for a reason!

And that’s because the only thing that we could ever do that could amount to our living a decent life would be to descend out of the limelight and live out our lives inside a dissent that is just adamant that we’re going to live according His Word as written of His will for His expectations of our being His people rather than people who only exist to belong inside a world that we’re all leaving.

No matter how much life insurance we can or can’t afford.

Problem is that dissent causes problems both for those who manage the system and for those who dare go against it. And this fact is seen no place better than in the story of Christ. Because Jesus came to live a kind of life that proved those in power as having only pride and too that the very best thing anyone can ever do with a life is lay it down in what is a show of the kind of faith that truly believes that He who created us can raise us up once more.

And well, it’s easy to see then why nobody’s all that interested.

It’s because we are a people of pride who estimate it still as our superpower in what are lives going so close to well that all we need is a raise at work and a slightly larger house and we’ll have made it.

To what?

To having more stuff to leave behind when we leave.

None of us know to look toward that day as there’s just too much stuff in the way on our way to the nowhere we’re getting instead. But again, we can’t bear to see it like that as rather we’ve all become so spiritually numb that all we seem to care about is credit scores and social report cards.

We’re living for praise from people assuming that God will just understand it.

Cross says He won’t as thereupon hung in agony He whom the Father had said previously that He loved and was well pleased with. And yet Christ hung there too being berated and refused by those who considered Him then as most of us still consider Him now:

Afflicted and worthy of being forgotten!

All because we’ve all become so well convinced that a successful life wouldn’t end like His that we pay Him no attention but rather continue pouring our intentions upon every worldly invention and inclination and institution that we can invent or imagine we need to.

But in reality all we really need to do is stop playing a game that we can only lose. Because, in truth, life isn’t a game at all, and even if it were, those who didn’t create it then too couldn’t be the ones who determine the scores nor how to win. We’re rather just those who are now promised to lose everything as we brought nothing into this world and we’ll be taking nothing out of it when we leave.

Question is what will we leave when we do?

A life that impressed a bunch of people? A house filled with a bunch of stuff? An account at a bank overstuffed with a bunch of money?

Or will we have rather left behind a life lived in accordance to what truly matters?

Because the truth is that there are things in life and of life that mean more than the many mundanities that humanity is still surpassingly impressed with. And that’s because God’s never been one to be at all pleased with our fallen estimations or measurements of anything. Rather what we’re told of David, a man described as being after God’s own heart, in Psalm 51:17 that, “my sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”

Why?

Because he sought to live his life in such a way that would echo an obvious understanding of what we find written in Isaiah 57:15.

“For this is what the high and exalted One says— he who lives forever, whose name is holy: ‘I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.’”

It’s all because God wants to be our Father. Not our banker. Not our landlord. Not our mortgage company. Not our car salesman or the boss we work for. No. He wants to be our Father and thus us to be His children.

That’s why His Son told us that “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Because Heaven isn’t a retirement villa only afforded by those of affluence and influence. Rather Heaven is the hope of those who have no lasting city here.

But friends, how can we say we share that hope if we’re still so busy still clearly building what will only stand to prove that we’ve indeed wasted a life giving credence to what a fallen culture considered to matter?

No, what this world thinks matters is meaningless. And the sooner we come to understand this, the sooner too we finally do find what meaning is.

And, well, it ain’t us.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold