Day 4022 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Timothy 6:9 NIV

Wandering wealth

Because that’s what wealth wants and thus what wanting it does to we who are but a people who are here but for a moment that’s both worth far more than wealth and yet so often lost to the lust of a treasured trust placed in a trust of treasure to provide everything from security to pleasure. All simply because inside this world wealth wins whatever we want. Being rich can afford for us any kind of affluence we may find ourselves feeling influenced to assume we need.

And this opportunity at such things as recognition and renown are found to form a crown that the crowd just can’t help but be enamored with.

Thus a life we can’t help but be measured by.

And indeed, this is life, or at least our meager measure of one as far as how to live it. It’s all something won within our winning of whatever more we can always find a way to want so badly that we eventually just believe it a necessity. Truly, I cannot count the amount of things offered by the wealth of this world that I’ve come to want so fervently that I lived so feverishly to find them that, having found them, only brought with them an end entirely contrary to that which I’d assumed would come.

For so often our assumptions are waiting only to be proven entirely false and us thus entirely wrong. Why? Because of a symptom called short-sight. It’s this most pitiable perspective from which we can only see the present in this preference for it to house our every hope, hold our every happiness, hoist our ever haughtiness and hinge upon our having of whatever then adds any measure of any of those many things that have come to matter along the way unto this day in which so much means so much that nothing means anything anymore.

Because how can it?

How can anything mean anything whenever everything means something? How can something be worth anything when everything else is worth something too? Indeed, how can we measure wealth if not for the presence of poverty? How can we understand prosperity without having endured adversity? What can we know of certainty in regard to the assurance that we all sadly find waiting within wealth without having felt the chaos that is catastrophe?

And yet the heavier side of these things we never seek. And sure, that makes sense. For after all, who in their right mind would choose to endure a life in which endurance were asked? Who would opt for the opportunity to suffer through misery when the world is always standing there offering plenty? Indeed, who would deny themselves anything this world offers so freely, and that unto all, when all this world offers is found so easily as it seems everyone else is finding it?

But does not that reality only dilute the true meaning of worth? Can something be worth all that much if everyone else has their best version of it too? Can value be something we can prove within our proving only that our lives have stored inside all the same things that everyone else has? Are we worth more should we hold whatever everyone else is holding too?

I understand our world is all about equity and equality and thus ensuring that everyone feels as though their lives are full of whatever it is that they may wish to fill them. But friends, if the grand outcome of life is our all living the same life for the same things as are only found in our doing the same things the same way, well then we’d be better off to be the mindless robots this world wishes for us to become because only those who cannot think can think that that would make any sense.

For what sense is there in our wanting whatever it is that everyone wants? Can we not step back and see that so much of what this world wants, though much of it painted gold and all shiny and such, it’s all just idolatry waiting to rust just as soon as they who hold it high have come to die and there left behind all they thought mattered as much as the life they lost to get it?

What’s the point in it?

Every ounce of worldly wealth is just that, worldly. And, well, anything that is in this world, of this world will stay just that, of this world and in this world. And while that might be fine as we all do have a great deal of time in which we find that we are alive in this world, we’re not of this world. True, our bodies are as they were fashioned from the soil upon which we’re walking and within which so many toil trying to find more of the foil and oil that is worth untold wealth.

But are we only bodies? Is life nothing more than clothing, jewelry and other such vanity? Are we here to do nothing more than decorate ourselves and their surroundings with the many shiny things, rare things, valuable things that this world continues to agree are so worth finding that the lives we live time losing unto getting them are thus of equal importance?

Is life measured by the ounce? Might our existence prove one of such substance as something which can be weighed upon a scale of want or wish? Are we truly nothing more than just bodies in search of something to make them seem worth something?

Have we lost our understanding of how amazing it is that we’re even here, let alone with that solemn hope of there being someplace even better?

Indeed, it sadly seems as though we have. And I can say with certainty that because, well, just look around at the common way of life being lived. People everywhere are working themselves to death and worrying themselves toward the same inside this ongoing sense of shame that society has insisted upon those who haven’t as much as another has. We are living this life as if it’s nothing more than some glorified treasure map upon which we’re meant only to find our share of this world’s wealth while we’re alive.

And our each understanding that we won’t be here forever has so many in such this hurry that has them hoping to have all they still hope to hold before they begin the slip into being cold and alone in what is a room fit for one without any view whatsoever in what remains that one place that so many wish only to avoid for however long they can all so they can have here a little more of only then, again, whatever is only here.

Which we even get that wrong more often that we might dare realize.

Indeed, I read something a while back that said that, as far as science can tell, this planet is the only one upon which wood exists. That makes thus wood one of the rarest materials in the universe. And yet we use this supreme rarity for such things as holding our popsicles so our hands don’t get sticky and picking food from between our teeth. And so we don’t even care to appreciate true rarity as rather we’re a people who know better to use what’s common as if it’s worth nothing.

Same being said of how we even seem to see one another anymore.

This is something that ought to grind every single one of us every single day. Why? Because, again, looking around at the common way of life being lived here by most, society is losing its appreciation for the sanctity of life itself. Truly, we’re becoming more and more willing to do basically whatever we have to unto those around us so long as the doing thereof accomplishes unto us the growth in wealth and/or power that most here have come to seek.

Our country, and much of the rest of the world as well, is rather up in arms of late thanks to a release of a bunch of files regarding some people who seem to have maybe had more money than morals.

And indeed, if any of it is true, which it seems like a great deal of it is, then yeah, those who’ve sought to become rich and successfully made the trip have indeed fallen into a trap in which they’ve found what became a way of life spent plunged into all sorts of sordid and harmful desires that in fact has now come unto the ruination of so many involved that it’s a true tragedy both for those who’ve been victims of the inhumanity and also the lack of justice here that can ever be anywhere near enough to account for what was done unto them endured by those who did it.

And this is just one example.

History offers us thousands of others in which the search to be rich has caused people to do untold things as their hearts became blinded by the belief that their having more somehow justified their doing of things that should have never even existed as a thought inside a human mind.

Take the Holocaust for example. It’s a well-known fact that part of Hitler’s approach to securing more power was the basic pillaging of everywhere he could of whatever he could unto the tale of caves being filled with trains laden down with priceless artworks and cultural relics stolen from the people he sanctioned the very butchering of all so that he could rule the proverbial world in whatever wicked way he may have had planned had his plans come to the fruition that his amassing of a veritable fortune could have easily accomplished!

And again, that’s just one example.

We could talk about slavery or go into the gladiatorial games or Nero using Christians as torches to light the elaborate gardens that he’d all but gone broke trying to build to make his existence more lavish, a problem that caused so many problems that he had to find someone to blame and, well, Christians have always been a decent enough target whenever anyone should need someone to blame for their bad choices that they made because they didn’t have the courage to come apart from the world and stop seeking for what continues to prove the root of so many evils that it’s amazing God continues to put up with us!

Oddly enough, that’s one thought I found myself thinking in light of all this horrific stuff that happened on that island.

It’s that I cannot seem to even begin to imagine the degree of His mercy as is still being met in His immense patience with us. Because He sees all the evils being done in this world and thus would be entirely justified in His just doing any of what He’s already done, such things as floods or famines, plagues or prophets promising the destruction of our cities and incivilities with fire and brimstone.

And yet He relents. He remains patient. He withholds His entirely justified justice in order give us just a little more time, perhaps a few more days, in which the rest of the few who are to be found along the Narrow Way are found unto the Narrow Way by He who is the One who continues to watch the horror of what’s happening here.

All so that some of us might still be saved.

All to watch many of those few who will be saved continue to waste so much time worrying about so many things that just don’t matter. Things such as wealth and power and this common search unto the accrual thereof. Sure, those things mean something here. Having here money and/or fame is the name of the game that all of us have signed up to play thinking that life would be better, mean more should we come to have all we’ve hoped to have and have probably had.

Did it?

Have any of us ever met enough when it comes to having more? Has there ever been a glutton who got tired of glutting themselves? Has greed ever known an end to its need for excess? Or has not all but every life ever lived only proved the truth written in Ecclesiastes 5:10? That being that, “whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.”

And haven’t we all felt at times past the very end of that verse as has been met in our having had all we’d hoped to house all we’d hoped to hold? That, “this too is meaningless”?

Indeed, what meaning is there to meet inside anything anymore? For again around here all that seems to matter anymore to anyone is still just wealth. We even have a fancy new “gospel” in which it’s promised that if you’ll only figure out how to say the right prayer the right way, always with a dude in a fancy suit standing there teaching you exactly what to say, you’ll find untold health and wealth and every other worldliness happiness coming your way.

And indeed, just as Paul promised in 2 Corinthians 11:4, we’ve indeed arrived upon the time in which “if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.” In fact folks eat it up as the gluttonous greeds we’ve become!

Because both gluttony and greed know nothing of enough. Which itself proves that verse from Ecclesiastes true. Because, well, no, those who love wealth are never satisfied. Those who love money never have enough of it. Those who collect collectibles will never finish their collections. Trust me, I may have never had all that much money, but that’s thanks in large part to my having long been a collector of things that I now don’t care about at all!

Because it was all false! It’s literally all naught but paper and plastic painted up and hung in place for us to look at for what then stands as only a reminder of what matters enough to us to hang up so we can look at it. What else does it do? All the money people make, what does it accomplish sitting in a bank? Sure, we use it to do such things as buy food and pay for our homes and the cars we use to get back and forth to work. And sure, those things are reasonable.

But friends, where do we draw the line that is contentment? Even more, what happens if we never even dare to imagine it?

What is the best that can ever come from a life given entirely away to the gaining of things that are only here? Or, as another far wiser than I once pondered, “what good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”

Or have we honestly just forgotten that, though truly close in spelling, soul and soil are not supposed to be seen as being worth as much as one another?

For indeed, down here our greed for gold and green have again caused us to do things that have had us living like dirt and treating others the same. Is it worth it? Is all the wealth within this world worth doing what some have to get it? Friends, what can we do with it when this world and its wealth are no longer ours to hold or hope to have?

Do we not understand that what we have isn’t what defines who we are but that rather what we do tells God above who we are as is proven through our doing of the things that the heart inspires us to do?

No, it is not our possessions that prove our worth but rather our actions which testify to either the wealth of God found inside our hearts or rather the continued lack thereof.

For the mouth speaks whatever the heart is full of and, well, actions speak louder than words.

But friends, what all have people said or done in order to obtain wealth? What all have you done to get something you didn’t really need? And no, I’m not even talking about anything necessarily nefarious. For honestly, even something so mundane as working overtime could theoretically be a sin should we be doing it only to have more money that we intend to use only to buy something else that we don’t have to have. Because, honestly, wasting our lives trying to become wealthy in either money or other such material worth, it’s just that.

It’s wasted.

And, well, God sure went to a lot of trouble to design these lives in this place He designed for us to have done far better in, with, by than we ever have in life.

He created man in a Garden to simply care for the same which continued to provide all they could have ever needed.

Still wasn’t enough.

Because enough is never enough is it? The plenty we have is never equal to the plenty more we still would like have. We can always find some way to want something else. But, well, so too will we probably find ourselves having to do something else in order to get it. Question should be what and whether or not it’s worth it but sadly, no, no rather we just stay focused on what we want and pay no mind to whatever we have to do to find it in our lives.

And thus folks continue to be tripped up by the many temptations that have all but overtaken every single life being lived in this place. And thus this place continues to fall headlong into ruin and destruction and toward then a promised damnation awaiting all who continue to live as if God is gold and Christ nothing more than an image carved of some worldly material treasured by collectors for its widely agreed upon rarity.

As if God could be contained inside that which He himself had made or Christ equal only to the value of ivory or marble or whatever other immoral article that humans have long loved to look at simply because it sparkles and shines.

Can we truly be so blind after all this time to continue living our lives as if they’re only worth whatever wealth we manage to fit inside?

For if it can’t squeeze through the eye of a needle then why do we think we need it?

Friends, as the song says, “forget your lust for the rich man’s gold, all that you need is in your soul.” Because the truth is that we don’t need anything this world continues to measure as wealth. In fact, we’d be in far better spiritual health should we stop wearing ourselves out to get rich or become famous or find whatever other treasure so many are still sadly assuming is treasure.

No, the only treasure worth trying to find is the hope given us in Jesus Christ. And that’s because His is the only Way that will never lead us unto the doing of things that bring us shame or guilt or regret. For His is the Narrow Way which leads unto streets of gold through gates of pearl into a peace this place cannot offer nor ever take away.

So don’t continue to be carried away by the wanting of anything in this place where both He isn’t welcome and thus will never be found by most. No, the only thing most here will find is only a life that’s worth a lot of all that’s worthless as is found by wandering away from what actually matters.

Sounds like a wasted opportunity if you ask me.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold