Day 4043 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Colossians 1:13 NIV

The rupture

Don’t know if it’s something that comes for us all, albeit at different times due to our different walks through a world diverging from what each of us may have once hoped life here could have been but so severely hasn’t become, or if it’s something that only a few of us ever manage to meet and muddle through. Shoot, for all I know it’s something that’s already dawned upon most and I’m just late to the game as is played by our walking away from what is the place that it still seems as if most haven’t so determined to leave.

Either way, it feels as if there’s a coming day, or a day that already came, in which our minds finally find that we don’t feel as if we belong here anymore.

Again, that may just be me and something that’s been on my heart for a while now in this life lived in a world that’s falling apart. It might just be that I might just be tired or frustrated or afraid even. I don’t really know how to explain it or much less when it began but the fact’s become that every day just finds me done before it even starts. And I think that’s because I can’t help but see that so too is eternity.

Indeed, I do believe that eternity is already well underway thanks to our every single day deciding for ourselves wherever it is that we plan to spend it as is proven in the things we’re doing and why. And, well, it’s easy to start seeing this growing discrepancy between those who believe they’ve somewhere else to be and those many who live as if life is lived only here.

It’s actually becoming so very clear that it’s almost hard to get through a day without shedding tear!

Why?

Because it turns out that what’s being lived here isn’t life. It’s distraction. It’s distortion. It’s a dissention so very deep that all of us have at times come to think that somehow all that matters is all that’s here simply because so too are we and, well, it seems to make sense then for our to settle in and make ourselves at home and seek further the comfort that such an outlook is always supposed to offer.

Problem is that we’ve filled our coffers with only chaos and confusion as are now commonplace amongst the delusion of this place as is itself proven in the overall dilution of any devotion given to anything other than everything that is itself devoid of life.

Indeed, we’ve all come to live this certain way of life in which we seek to fill our lives with all that’s neither alive nor then able to give life. For that which isn’t something cannot then give what it has not itself. This is the problem with such idols as all these that we’ve made and watch others pouring still inside what is a world in which we work to have something to hold that we love to assume also holds hope. But friends, the issue then is that a hope seen is no hope at all.

For why so limit something so hopeful as hope to the outermost expectations of the place we’re already standing?

No, I personally, and this might sound weird, but I seriously want a hope that I can’t find.

Why?

Because it’ll keep me going. It will get me up every morning. It will provide me with something to prove, something to lose, something to look at only to realize that whatever ‘it’ is isn’t what I thought it would be as still I seem to see the expectation of something more as I personally contend that there are no finish lines in life but that our many such concessions are only believed for so that we can retire from trying for the more that would ask that we work for it.

Simply because we’ve become a people who just want everything handed to us. This world is rife with this revolting selfishness in which all of us have come upon a way of life in which we live to just have stuff. Doesn’t even seem to matter what anymore. We just want it. We want it because it’s here and that makes it easier to find and thus less likely to fail. We want it because someone else has it and we just can’t bear to imagine their having a more full life than we have.

We want it because the world says we should, tells us all about how good it is and how much it does and how we’ll be so much better off should we have it too.

Never once mentioning what all we’ll have to lose to get it. And that probably because would they did then nobody would want it as it’s simply not worth the cost. For indeed, what will it profit a man to gain the entire world at the expense of his soul? Further, yeah, what could a man give in exchange for his soul? What could we ever gain here that could help us get back what we have to give away to get it once we realize that that which we’ve gained isn’t worth as much as we’d given away?

Are we there yet?

In truth I’ve been there and back at least a hundred times in life. I’ve gone so hard to get something that I just knew I had to have only to have what I then had and feel not only bad about having it but even more so because of all I had to do to get it. Mostly because of what I chose to give to get it. Most of which was either time or effort or interest or attention.

You know, the things of which this world has us convinced we’ve always plenty?

Do we?

Do we really have time to waste upon the chasing of things that only lead us away from the direction we’re meant to go? Do we really have energy to give unto that which knows only to take and gives nothing equal to that which is taken? Have we truly an endless supply of intention or attention upon which to rely that we can spend so much of them upon the falsehoods and fakeries of this life?

Have we really lost our ability, set it aside, to see the lies surrounding us in what is the one place in which most everything is nothing but that?

Indeed, how did life here get so bad that all we seem to collectively care about are such mediocrities as politics and celebrities? Not talking about the people themselves as we’re called to love even those who hate us, as many of those in such positions do. No, I’m talking instead about the platforms, the pedestals, the performances that are put on constantly to make us think that they know of a better way to live this life as is lived, by them, in mansions and millions, both in the bank and of followers too.

True, why do we follow so many people who are, in the end, only people? Do we need their help? Can they help? How could they help when so many here seem to still be refusing His help?

Oh yeah, we’ve lost sight of that too!

That truth that tells us that there is no other Name under Heaven given unto man by which the same must be saved.

No, rather we seem to still be watching, if not actively participating in, what remains a world pretending that nobody here needs any saving. Instead we’re all doing great! We’re nailing it down and living it up and have so much stuff that we can, and are always more than happy to, point at as proof of how much we can’t see we stand to lose when it turns out that life does not actually consist of an abundance of possessions. Or opinions. Or preferences. Or politics. Or this glaring lack of common sense as is seen hopefully by now from what is a spot outside the world.

Why?

Because that’s why He died.

Wasn’t to give us some hope for only when we leave this place. It was rather to make leaving this place our hope. It was to help us see just how rotten life’s become here. It was to open our eyes to the ways in which we’d died trying to live in what remains still a world in which sin sells and sinners buy the lies that tell them that they’re doing nothing wrong so long as their lives feel good.

We’re not supposed to feel good here in a place where dark is put for light and wrong considered right and right and light then deemed unbecoming of what this place has so clearly become.

No, it’s just that we’ve all become so numb to what life was meant to be that anymore we can’t really seem to see the trouble we’re in as we remain so focused upon a world drifting only further from Him. We can’t anymore seem to feel the heartbreak held inside the things we hold as if gods meant to save us from what we then can’t realize we’ve become. We can’t hear the lies for what they are because this world’s helped us forget what the truth sounds like.

We don’t have any idea what to do with life as, well, we all stopped living one round about, oh, 20 years ago or so.

As much as it hurts to say, and might even be wrong to have said, I just feel that I need to say it anyway:

This world’s best is behind it.

And yeah, I know that such places as that passage in Ecclesiastes teaches us that it’s not wise to ask why the past was better than today as, well, we’re not going back and so what would it matter anyway? But the simple fact is that not much here seems to be improving as rather most everyone here just seems content to just go on losing their lives unto their idea as to the best contents therein.

As if, again, life just might prove to consist of an abundance of possessions or preferences or pretenses.

Yet anymore all that most lives seem to consist of is only this perfect tension that has so many so bound up that they’re all but ready to explode at even the mention of single word they don’t want to hear.

Yes, we’ve most certainly arrived upon the forewarned time in which “people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” For indeed, many here have turned “their ears away from the truth and turn(ed) aside to myths.”

And truly, we’ve got so many myths and manmade mysteries that you can’t even keep up with them. Just get on youtube and you’ll see what I mean!

Does all of that stuff really matter?

Or do we just hope it does so that we don’t become known as failures thanks to having given our lives to consuming the most mindless drivel ever known to man?

Because surely God’s not as worried about us getting to the bottom of the Epstein files as many here have become.

And no, I’m not saying that such things don’t matter as, well, seeking justice for those who have been taken advantage of or hurt in some way is a good thing. But the issue becomes that eventually we become so consumed with worldly things that this world itself becomes our sole focus. And, well, just where can that leave us but right back to being as of the world as we were before, if not even more?

Is that who He created us to be or now calls us to become? Did He send His Son only to encourage us to lose more of ourselves to knowing more of this world that the empty tomb said Son stormed into only seems to prove that we too can and should leave behind?

Is that not literally what He calls us to do in Christ?

To take up our crosses and follow Him? Follow Him where? Well, outside the city where lie the tombs in which the dead were buried. Indeed, doesn’t Paul posit this as his personal priority over in Galatians 6:14 in which we read, “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”?

Friends, I honestly don’t think it can be any clearer. And that being that no, we don’t belong here. Because honestly, looking at what this place has become and what that has so many around us doing, why would we want to belong? And yeah, I know that the majority here have most of us convinced that we’re not supposed to stand in judgement.

But folks, if we don’t differentiate between good and evil, right and wrong, dark and light, well then how can we know where we stand? Indeed, how can we stand for anything if we’ll not stand against anything?

Where can we go when everything goes?

No, such is the now general estimation of a life’s instigation: that we’re here to do only whatever we want. And sure, it does seem as if there are many around us who are doing just that and finding an almost offense level of success and happiness as they do.

But they’re not telling anyone what they’ve had to lose to have what they do. They’re not talking about the time they don’t spend with their families. Don’t talk about the fact that they don’t have families because their careers and promotions have become their main priorities. They don’t talk about their relationship with Christ because, well, they don’t have one.

That’s something that should prove enough to inspire in us an urgency to flee from this world!

That, as far as the Bible estimates it, wide is the road that leads unto destruction and many there be which walketh upon it.

And again, it’s not at all hard to see it anymore. Rather this world is all but raining the fire and brimstone upon themselves as this point! So many names being called and stones being thrown and thrones being grown by they who look like grown adults but act like the worst of spoiled brats. Indeed, this place is filled with rats and wolves and liars and thieves and lust and greed and all the things that none of us should want to be.

So please someone tell me why it is that we’re supposed to want to stay here and have anything to do with this place!

No, the only thing this world now is is but evidence of all we shouldn’t remain.

Again though, maybe I’m the only one who sees it that way. And granted, I’m growing pretty accustomed to being the lone weirdo who seems to be the only one who sees things the way I do and so there is an at least decent chance that I’m the one who’s lost my mind as I for one choose no longer to waste my life looking to a warped and wicked world to tell me what I should be doing.

Because I already did that.

I’ve done been there. I know perfectly well what all awaits at the end of that path doing as the world does so as to have what the world has. Indeed, I’ve had it. The money, the jobs, the friends, all of it. Then I got challenged by a friend, who assumed I was a Christian because of the college I was attending, to post a Bible verse every day for 7 days.

From a Bible I hadn’t ever read before then.

And along the way throughout these now 4043 days of trying still to fulfill that challenge, which I haven’t yet as far as I’m concerned, I’ve lost everything else. The money’s gone. Haven’t worked a normal job in I don’t know how long. Ain’t got one friend that I talk to on a regular basis, not even one that I’ve talked to in years at this point. No, it’s literally all gone as I myself have gone on to try my best to unbecome all that I had become.

All because I never liked it. In fact I’ve spent the entirety of my adult life hating myself for who I was.

Still not the best of friends but at least I can look myself in the mirror now!

And that’s only because when I do I don’t see the old me as much anymore. And so I don’t see so much of the world anymore. I don’t see some of the things that I’ve done to have those friends who I’ve since learned were just strangers in waiting, waiting for me to decide upon a road that travelled a different direction than they’d chosen. I don’t see the thief who used to steal things that I sold to have more money that I only spent on other junk that I don’t have anymore either.

I don’t see the darkness that I’ve lived in, at least not as much as I used to.

No, I see someone now who’s trying, not always successfully mind you, but still. And that’s because this world inspires me every single day with one more thing that I may have become that I can no longer stomach the idea of being simply because it’s entirely too worldly.

This world has become a second measuring rod, second to Christ, by which I seek to determine how I’m doing along this walk aimed away from the world as is the one we’re all now called to take by He who came to pay our debt and ransom our souls and help us then to go unto that way of life in which we can begin to grow in He who is the Way, who is the Life and that by living according to the truth that all of us have sinned and fallen thus short of the glory of God but that no, contrary to the world’s increasingly obvious stance on the matter, we don’t have to stay there.

We can be made new. We can be made right. We can be made whole.

But not so long as we remain of the world which denies the great hole right through middle of it where every heart and soul once was found.

No, it’s truly tragic the things that are missing in this place. Love, mercy, kindness, compassion, even common sense are all but things of the past. Thankfully though there is hope in there being one more thing missing here, and that hopefully before long:

Us.

Both because we have in Jesus now the promise of there being another place, a better place, and thus the opportunity for our to come upon an urgency to shake every speck of this world’s dust off our lives, out of our lungs so that we’re constantly ready to leave just as soon as He says we can.

And friends, I for the life of me don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to go wherever He’s said we can someday because, honestly, this world is no place we should want to stay.

Rather He has died to ransom us from this dominion of darkness so that we can begin today walking in the freedom that we have now in Christ Jesus!

Why continue to settle for a version of life, of love, of freedom and hope that only know to only go where this world has determined to stay?

Friends, there’s no more life to be found that way.

There’s now only life to be found in He who is the Way. And yeah, He came to lead us away from the world and our having lived as if we belonged to it. But looking around, well, I just don’t see that we’ve much to lose anymore other than all the hatred and violence and profanity and other filth that defines this place.

No, there hopefully comes a time for each of us in which we finally delight to bid the world goodbye. Not because it’ll be easy at first but simply because this bubble’s about to burst and many will leave shocked to find that He wasn’t joking when He asked us to come out from this world and be separate if we’re to be found acceptable.

Because nothing here is acceptable. So why then should anything here be still accepted by us?

No, it’s time to distance ourselves from the darkness that this world won’t.

Let then begin the rupture.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold