Day 4049 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ezekiel 36:27 NIV

The retracing

Of every step we’ve lived taking here atop what’s been an almost nonstop path paved between fun and frustration as was never meant to be the one taken as we were actually never meant to have fallen so far both in love with all that Love isn’t nor then away from He who love is and who is love too as He came to prove in His giving His life to help us see that the way it is isn’t the way it has to be. Rather there’s another way spent toward a brighter day walking in a certain sway that finds a heart happy to leave all it learns was never life.

And yeah, that’s a hard idea at first as it first demands we agree we’re lost and thus have only everything the same to lose.

But just beyond the shattering of a self we’re sure to find this appreciation of time itself as won within our trading wants for promises and our wishes for wondering only why we didn’t see His violent simplicity before. And then comes the rude realization that reminds us that we did at times feel His trying to lead us off of the edge that we’ve made a career out of careening over. And that brings with it a whole host of what is a single truth we come to know along a path that seems both fast and slow as it both brings us higher but only by helping us see just how low we were.

It’s a truly incredible experience, the fulfillment of this promise aimed at the better He always wanted for us. Incredible because it’s both amazing we’ve missed it for so long as we have and yet that He has still a patient willingness that proves Him still wanting us to become the more we’ve both never been but that He’s never given up on our becoming.

We know this patience as ‘today’.

Unfortunately here inside our taking everything for granted thanks to foolishness and fakery we’ve too learned so many ways to not see it that way. Rather to us each and every day is usually nothing more than our doing of the same old things that we’ve been doing which were probably passed down to us from those who did them before. And it’s this cycle of chaos and confusion that’s trickled down throughout our generations that’s caused us to too become caustic in this attempt to prove that we know what’s best.

Always without anything to show for it outside of a few fond memories and all the winding miles we took to make them through what we couldn’t see then as sin because, well, none of us ever really delight in admitting we’re not doing right. In fact that fact pretty much perfectly undermines this common consideration that we both know what we’re doing and that we’re always so very good at it that making mistakes is always something that only other people do.

Kind of reckon that that alone seems to prove that we don’t know everything.

But then again I guess you have to have some semblance of humility to see it that way.

And alas humility is perhaps the rarest thing amongst this falling humanity. That and holiness. And honesty. And even happiness. Indeed, we sure seem to have lost a whole lot of words that start with the letter H here along this highway paved in hardship and hatred and the haughtiness that we can never seem to realize is what ties the both together, and that by these hands of ours.

No, rather we’ve all spent hours, years of them in fact doing so much so bad that we’ve somehow come back around and managed to catch our tail as is told in this tale we tell of how well we’re doing just about everything we do and don’t. Indeed, we’ve always a reason for our doing something or far more common refusal to. It’s usually that we’ve managed to yet again estimate that we’ve something to lose that we just can’t bear the thought of the loss in our life.

Much less then His call for all to lose their lives.

Granted He requested just such a for now suggestion at what remains the preceding promise of a new life promised unto all who do. But still, no, no we’ve still too much to lose to lose our lives. Never mind that the graveyards filling up all around us are trying to tell us that we’re going to anyway. No, that worry will wait for another day, preferably one that we have no idea is coming. Truly, it seems as if our greatest hope is to just die in a hurry, hopefully when we’re sleeping all so that we’re not awake to feel the slipping away of all we’ve spent a life walking toward and worrying about.

Makes it easier that way.

Somehow.

I guess it’s because passing away in your sleep helps you to not see what all you’re leaving behind. But so too then I suppose that such is also why we can only dream when we’re asleep at night.

None of those pesky preferences or opinions as are almost always built upon our many possessions to get in the way.

Yeah, I can’t tell you how often I’ve been thankful for the dreams God’s helped me to live through over the years. Images of a life I didn’t get to live thanks to my stubbornly having refused to turn off the path I’d chosen for myself. Stories of love and marriage and family, all things that I don’t have much of or in fact at all thanks to all the life I’ve wasted not willing to wait for the real deals that I dealt away night and day to a hand that was played perfectly against me.

Devil always there offering exactly what we want to see, hear, feel, find.

Telling us too that the sum of our desires can and will design a rather fine life.

Never telling us what the fine will be nor then that it’s one that we literally cannot manage to afford and live at the same time as it turns out that the fine for all we’ve found in our twisted version of life is life. Yes, the wages of sin are death, and well, we’ve then all died thousands of times. And yet we’re all somehow still so unaware of it that we remain rather unwilling to try it.

His way this time.

No, no His way is the one that we’ve both never taken and thus have no interest now in taking. Again, too much to lose as has been apparently won within our walking our way toward whatever, wherever, whoever it is that we are today. And yet there’s that word again, today. The one that has always defined far more than the minutes and mistakes we’ve long estimated them each to be. Rather today has again always been at least partly defined by His being so patient with us to have given us both however many todays we’ve all already had and, as of today, at least one more.

What shall we do with it? Where shall we go with it?

Or rather does today still have to come with us?

Indeed, what could today do with us? Where could today take us if we dared go with it? Who might we be if we could only agree to see that today is God’s patience with us giving us another portion of time in which to change our minds, change our lives and turn our tries back toward His?

Hard to do when we’ve spent all this time learning to lose the ability to see that He is still trying.

What?

To help us. To heal us. To teach us what hope is and why it’s not then waiting to be found in all those worldly places in which we’ve tried to stubbornly place it. To remind us of another place in which He’s been all this time both getting us a place ready but sadly having to then wait on us to come to the understanding that we have no place where we’re standing.

A realization that’s hard for us to realize thanks to all the treasure (junk) we’ve stored inside these lives.

Every piece bought with and in this belief that has long held us both captive and convinced that we’re not. Impressive how good our adversary is. For the devil sells us damnation disguised as delight and despair wrapped in desire and destruction painted in the tones of delicacy. And we’ve all bought every bit we could ever afford from the funds we secured from agreeing to never once worry as to whether or not our souls were.

Secured.

And truth is that we don’t care. Not anymore. Rather our only real cares are those causes over which we continue to be so confused as to be certain that we know what we’re doing because we ourselves have each managed to figure out what matters most. Granted, our plans and pursuits and priorities and opinions always look different from everybody else’s. But yet we’re all somehow the ones who are right.

Not sure how that works other than it doesn’t.

And I am sure that it doesn’t because, well, just look at what it’s done. Look around at what’s become of both this world and the life we’ve all lived within it, mostly thanks to the life we’ve lived within it. Indeed, this place is but a shell, a ghost, a lie of what it was meant to be. I mean God created man in a Garden and yet every man has only spent his life growing both among the weeds and sadly as the same. Truly, I cannot tell you how much of His will and Word the weeds have choked out of our existence because, well, there is no way for us to know seeing as how we haven’t been who we never were. We didn’t take the path that He’d asked we take. We’ve not done all the things He asked we do. We didn’t abide by the truth that came to lose His life so that we’d stop giving ours away.

Instead we gave ours away to so many lies that we ended up only living a life that has increasingly less to do with God and all He’s done for us.

Again, just look around.

Is this really the life any of us wanted? Are our goals closer now than they were back when we just wanted to be alive and enjoy the opportunity? Are we in fact enjoying this life we still have today the opportunity to live?

Or are we not all increasingly frustrated, disappointed, heartbroken and all the above because we’ve all managed to become so bent toward hardship and hatred that we don’t really know what else to do with ourselves but to continue seeking and serving the both?

I suppose there’s always room for discussion and perhaps even debate but I just can’t see any argument being made that we really like it this way. Maybe that’s just because I don’t and, I know, we all have our biases and they always form for us the basis of what becomes our belief, and, once poured, it’s a path that seems to us so perfect that we eventually just lose our ability to even consider any other.

Much less the One that’s so narrow that we ourselves can’t even manage to fit on it.

But still, looking around at what the world’s become and knowing how I feel personally about the odds of my having a hand in tearing it all down, I must say that even then I can’t quite seem to see near as much to lose as I’m pretty sure I once thought I did.

Because, again, everything that is is nothing that makes any sense. Everything here seems backwards and upside down and so heartbreaking and life taking that I don’t understand why we continue to agree to never changing anything, never losing anything, never letting go anything we keep going for.

Will more of what we’ve come to become help us become more of what we’re not?

And, well, what aren’t we?

Happy. Holy. Honest. Humble. Hopeful.

What have we become instead?

Hateful. Haughty. Unholy. Ungrateful. Unloving. Unkind. Uncaring.

Unalive.

Can’t see it though can we? And why is that? Well, it’s because our way to us is perfect, and we then too at walking it out. Indeed, we’ve become of this opinion that we can do no wrong despite not much in life ever going right anymore. Truly, someone help this make sense to me! This world is filled with people who make no mistakes and yet everything is falling apart. Nobody gets anything wrong and yet nothing is getting better. We all know exactly what to do but it seems that all that’s ever done anymore is only done unto the wronging of someone else.

Everything we do is offensive to someone.

And yet we can’t see how we might be offending God so very much that He sent His Son to die for us so that we’d stop killing both ourselves and one other? Ourselves done in anger, resentment, despair and denial that we feel any of all the above. Others because, again, we can’t be the ones in the wrong and so someone else must pay for the way our lives have gone so wonderfully astray from what we’d intended for them to be.

Indeed, there’s always someone else to blame in a world in which there is no more shame.

And no, it seems as if nobody knows anything about shame anymore as rather folks just keep doing whatever it is that we’ve all been doing that we’ve been doing for so long now that we literally cannot imagine how to live without doing it.

This is why we continue to deny God’s will. This is what we continue to refuse God’s Word.

This is why, when He came just to try to help us see what all we’ve become, we cheered as we killed God’s Way!

It’s because, as He told us Himself, His ways aren’t our way. Rather as the heavens are higher than the earth so too are His ways higher than ours.

Proven in Christ’s being lifted up as if a sinner nailed to a cross that we still seem to assume both He deserved and we do not.

Proving then that we do not have any idea as to what we’re doing.

Which is something else He said as He hung in our place on our cross to pay for our loss of what is the life that we have not lived because we’ve lived the one we have that we now have to lose if we’re ever to even hope of living a life again.

Friends, that’s why the grave was left empty. It wasn’t because the grave was finished doing what the grave does.

No, it was to leave room for us to do as He’s called us to and follow Him.

And that’s what His Spirit is given to help us do.

It’s to lose everything we’ve come to think we know of life in what’s been a life in which we’ve lived only way outside of His decrees and as far from His commands as we could get. Each of us have spent our lives running from Him after everything that offered to distract us from who He is and what He did and what that means that we’re supposed to do in response.

Rather here we stand inside what is a life in which our only response is no. Thanks anyway. Appreciate you dying but I’m still alive and kicking so please do kick rocks and don’t let the door hit you on your way out of my way, out of my life, out of wasting my time worrying my mind about all the thoughts that I don’t want to think about all that I’ve lived to mistake, to break, to forsake.

Christ not only at the top of that list but pretty much the only thing on the list.

Proven in how little of Him is seen inside of us and how we’ve lived our lives.

Indeed, we read in Galatians 5:22-23 that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” A short passage ending in a reminding that “against such things there is no law.”

Because He who died to our way of life is all of those things.

Problem then proven in that, well, we aren’t.

No, of all that we’ve become such things as loving, peaceful, peaceable, forbearing, forgiving, kind, caring, faithful, good, gentle, self-controlled, no, none of those things can describe us in any way whatsoever!

Problem then furthered in that He who is all those things is the same as He who is called the Life.

Seems then that we’ve all been living something other than life as there’s not much of these fruits of the Spirit seen inside whatever it is that we have been living.

Which is why His turning us toward what becomes a life spent retracing all the steps we’ve taken in this worst of all possible directions that’s left us both dead and yet in denial of it. We are truly dead men walking and yet we just keep walking in and toward the very same deaths!

Because we just keep walking away from His law, outside of His commands, further and further from the love of the Father as was sent in the Son who our world as a whole still continues to pretend never existed as, well, if we’re not sinners then a Savior isn’t needed.

And we just don’t want a Savior to be needed because that would then mean that we need saving and, well, we just can’t see it that way from where we stand.

Friends, that’s the problem!

It’s that we stand in a world in which the Spirit of God isn’t welcome. His Word is still roundly rejected. His will is in no way anything popular. Rather the vast majority here still live as if He doesn’t!

Why keep walking with that mindset?

Can we not see where it’s already gotten us?

Again, may just be me but where we are, who we’ve become, it’s nothing I want to be, nowhere I want to stay.

Rather I want to be happy. I want to feel whole.

I want to go home!

But the only path there runs in the opposite direction of the one I’ve been taking for all my life. And so yes, I have a lot to lose, an entire life in fact. I have to sort through, sift through, sit through all the reminders and still to come understandings of all I’ve gotten wrong and still get mistaken. And yeah, it sucks! I hate having to see all the mistakes I’ve spent my life making.

But friends, there’s no other way to Heaven than losing all we’ve become at the hands of a spirit that told us the same lie he told Adam and Eve.

“You won’t surely die.”

Oh, yes we will! We will all surely die!

The only question is will we get to live life again after we do?

And, well, if the life we’d lived up until we do is one lived without the One who died to save our lives being allowed to save our lives, then why would He give us another one to screw up?

That makes no sense!

Neither then does our continuing to reject His leading, to refuse His help, to deny His healing.

Friends, we all need as much as we can get of whatever He’s still willing to give, be it days or disasters.

Not because they’re fun or always go our way but because they help us see that our way is what needs to change while we’ve still the time to try.

All He’s doing is trying to lead us away from our chosen destructions back to the promise of Heaven that He died for us to have.

And if Heaven is the promise, the goal, the outcome, then who cares how we get there?

Let it be as hard and miserable and lonely and scary as it needs to be! Because the point should always be where we’re going not what we have to go through to get there.

That worry is what got us here.

And again, here isn’t where I want to stay.

You may not say the same, and that’s your call. Just wanted to let you know where to find me if you need me.

I’ll be out here retracing my many missteps back toward where this fall started in the hopes that He’s still willing to let me start over again.

Because it turns out I need to!

#LeaveNoSoulUntold