Day 4054 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Galatians 5:17 NIV

The war within

Seems it’s one won every once in a while and yet lost more times than we might imagine all while being completely ignored most often and worried about perhaps even less. And I suppose that’s just because we’ve become rather numb to the reality of it all. For anymore it seems that our society’s chosen to simply succumb to the downfall in which we all just do whatever feels good, looks right, sounds okay and hopefully then goes the same.

We are truly a people who hope always for the best, and while this is a good thing I guess, truth is starting to show that hoping for better whilst not giving our best creates only a deepened contest between who we are and what more we may not even believe we can still be.

For indeed, there’s this sad reality that’s befallen all of our humanity that’s found for us this general floundering, this flailing, this failing to find, force, fight or feel as if we even care to try. Rather here inside every day of this collective life we just join hands and wait to die as if every life is best to live looking for what we alone think is best all while, again, very few of us seem willing at all to give anything anything anymore.

Takes too much work. Means too much worry. We’re all already weary, worn, tired of waiting for the many hopes and dreams that just don’t seem all that willing to meet us where we are which is usually where we hope to stay.

Why?

To be honest I don’t know anymore. I truly have no idea. And that despite my having tried to better my life, to take better care of myself, to better focus upon my faith and give whatever I can to the few things that matter most. Even they seem anymore to blur inside what is this war that I feel more victim of than victor. Indeed, it seems as if I can’t get anything right as even these posts that I write seem usually to come out wrong, perhaps too long, entirely confused and sometimes only leave a thread so loose that it feels all they can do is unravel.

But I suppose that such is the battle.

It’s one fought within where’s been allowed to this live this life that’s not a life and thus shouldn’t be so alive as it so often seems it is. And it does seem alive because it has been the life that we have known to live. And we’ve chosen to live it because it’s had plenty of benefit. It’s been successful and fun and thus seems to have won what most here consider the overall goals in life.

Yes, around here all that folks are looking for is fun and friendship, a little bit of funds in the bank account and a few lavish nights out on the town that we paint red apparently.

Why red?

Because blue’s considered the color of sadness I suppose. Then again, who knows? Who knows what colors are best, those better than the rest in what is a world in which everything seems to have gone gray and plain and black and white and wrong and right and nothing’s right because everyone else is always wrong inside a mind that tells us that we can’t be because we’re the ones who see how to fix everything except our own lives that we live in shadows and ashes.

Always the cure but never the victim.

At least not of our own maniacal lack of mercy or goodness or honesty. No. No rather we all seem always to think that we’re the example that everyone else should follow, always expecting ourselves in others and disappointed when we find they again didn’t get the memo. This is indeed something that I struggle with all the time! This concept in mind in which I feel so assured of my life, how I don’t know, that I expect everyone else to see things the way I see them.

Because that would both sure make things easy and too give me more than a little validation that I’m as right, good and decent as I’ve long determined myself to be.

Expect on those days when I’m not anywhere close to anything even remotely resembling any of the above.

Which, to be honest is most days.

For there’s something about my way that spells this highway to this sort of hollow unhappiness that I can’t seem to find my way out of anymore. Granted, I didn’t know how to get out of it before either but then again back then I was happier altogether. I was calmer. I was more content. I was perhaps even joyful.

Or maybe that’s just the side I want to remember as it’s the one I still long to be the winner.

And I guess that makes sense as none of us seek out misery in life. None of us want to feel sad or ashamed. None of us wish to do those things that bring us down and beat us up, those choices that leave us broken and bloody upon the cold floor of a confusion as to why we continue doing what we don’t want to do whilst then not doing the better things we know we ought to do instead.

Rather we just continue to chase the dead inside a life so filled with sin that we just focus on fun, fame, friendships and the fortune found in only all the above.

Leaving the poor and meek to forever seem those who lost this war that is this life that is still lived as if what we have matters just as much as who we are. A line we allow to blur more all the time. Why? Distraction mostly. Indeed, it seems that what we have matters so much only because it helps us to not spend time looking at who we are for whatever it is that we’ve become in what have been for so long now lives battered and broken that all we really seem to know is betrayal of our betters.

Indeed, I’ve spent the better part of a decade trying to get better, feel better, do better and yet no matter what I seem to try anymore it all just winds up in tatters here upon what is a bedroom floor upon which I sit every single morn hammering away at this laptop perched atop a shoebox surrounded by stacks of stuff that, even a year in now, still proves I have no idea what to do with this room I dreamed of for the decade prior that was spent in a shared apartment with more noise than room.

Do I just like the gloom, the glum, this gluing forever my every chosen dumb to a life that’s gone so numb that nothing feels right anymore?

Or is that maybe the place we’re meant to go seeking for? That place where everything’s confused, unsettled, unfinished and unraveling? After all, is not the best place to see the pieces we have left of whatever this life’s meant to be the same one from which we see the many lives we’ve tried to build before lying broken and shattered upon the floor of an imagination barely alive but still willing to try once more?

For what?

Life.

For that’s the reward of this war fought inside. It’s life. It’s purpose. It’s meaning. It’s a time walked in a freedom that finally feels the very breath of Heaven breathing down our necks as if God has our backs now that we’ve finally learned to stop turning ours to Him.

That is the war within.

It’s the skirmish between the flesh and the Spirit as is being still daily fought over who we are, what that means, what then needs to change so that we might mean even more than we have before back when we lived for nothing but whatever felt best and looked the same. Indeed, for all our lives we’ve all lived and died here inside this incessant worry spent over glory and gloating as is still won within vanity and vitriol. Seeking always to add our venom to those still convinced that devouring one another is the best thing to not only do to our sisters and brothers but even more often ourselves as well.

All of it done in the name of love.

Indeed, we love ourselves so very much that we deny ourselves nothing we love, like, like to look at or would love to look like. And we offer the same expectations to those around us, telling our neighbors all the time how much better might be their lives if only they’d do the things we do and see the things we see the way we seem to see them. Asking then the entire world to share always our perspectives as are scattered between here and there, home and hell.

Usually not all that sure as to how to distinguish the difference.

Probably because there honestly isn’t one anymore.

Rather every life as is being lived here is one both lost within this war and yet spent as if we’re winning it. But friends, how can that be the case? Not the lost/losing part as our many mistakes and misunderstandings prove we’re pretty good at that. No, how can we still think we’re winning whenever all it seems we feel is anger and sorrow and sadness and this amazing lack of shame felt despite how bad life feels anymore?

I mean honestly, is anyone out there truly happy with how everything seems to be going in what seems so clearly a world growing darker and a society stuffed with those who seem to only then know how to grow colder?

Is that winning?

Maybe the better question is how can we win a war that we know only to ignore?

And, well, how can we dare contend that we don’t ignore it when it’s so blatantly obvious that the flesh remains our favorite focus?

Because it sure ain’t faith!

No, this is a race I seem to know only how to lose as it feels as if most of my time is spent lost thinking about so much other stuff than the little I believe Jesus asks of me. In fact it anymore feels as if I’m so turned around that I don’t know which way is right and which way is down. Because I always just feel down. Always unhappy. Always angry. Always hollow and incomplete and wholly inadequate.

And it seems the longer I go into whatever remains of this life I only find more ways to make more mistakes despite having gone through a stretch or two there in which it seemed as if happiness and hope were easier to find and safer to hold.

That world’s gone now. And so now the only life that really remains is the one in which we need to reconsider our ways and seek inside them for something of some sensibility before the Son comes to save us from what should have been a war we were meant to be fighting rather than ignoring.

It’s just that the ignoring is made so easy because the flesh will always freely take whatever time, effort, attention, intention we’re willing to give it. And that will always remain the easiest choice to make because it’s the very one we’ve made millions of times already. It is human nature to cater to the flesh, focusing every day on how we look, how we feel, what we want, who, what, where we want to be and why we think we’re always right.

Are we?

Or is our correctness always at best but 50-50?

In truth, I don’t even think we’re right 50% of the time.

I know I’m not as rather I feel all the time that I’ve done went and somehow managed to get something wrong, say something I shouldn’t have, not said something I should have. In fact, I can literally pinpoint one single moment in the span of the last decade in which I finally said something that my mind begged me not to say because I was scared and wanted to just walk away.

September 5th of last year.

First time in a long time that I said what I wanted to say without letting my usual fear get in the way.

Did anything much come out of it? Well, not quite what we’d all usually imagine but it changed my life and hopefully brightened her day.

And I think that’s why this is the war we’re called to wage. It’s because we’ve all become entirely too willing to walk away whenever life gets hard or feels scary. We’ve learned to let go, give up, accept defeat whenever we find our feet afraid to walk in the Way. We have this now innate fear of trying that’s only accomplished a way of life in which we don’t.

And I absolutely hate it!

I hate it so much that 9-10 years ago I changed everything and have along the way reached for such extremes that I came quite close to ruining myself on what is another day that I can pinpoint.

August 10th, 2022

That’s the day that my war came the closest it ever has to being over. The day that I realized I not only needed to do better but that I wanted to, and not just for me anymore but those around me. And yet as I sit here some 3+ years later, well, better isn’t what I’d call what I’ve done. Rather I’m unhappier than ever and losing more than I wish I could admit this war that’s waged within. For all these recent days I’ve spent doing things thinking of my flesh first and trying to make it look better and do better so that I could feel better about who I am.

And yet somewhere along the way I seem to have lost sight of who I am, who I wanted to be, the better that I had become and only hoped to continue being.

I lost the war because I let the flesh win again in what’s piled up to prove a way that I know is going to take a great deal of change if I’m ever to deal with it.

So be it.

Because I don’t like what I’ve become in this way of life spent letting the flesh win all the time. I’m tired of trying to focus so much on such things as fitness that I can’t manage to fit anything else in anymore. I’m sick of spending so much time focusing on me that I literally get bothered whenever my family asks me something or just wants to include me in their lives.

I despise what I’ve done to my life.

For while it started out with good intentions, and I do believe there to be some good left within it, the fact is that the flesh became the focus and it has absolutely hollowed me out as I again don’t know much in the way of happiness or hopefulness anymore.

And I don’t think that’s the way that this life is supposed to go.

No, for even Scripture tells that there’s nothing better for a man than to enjoy his lot in life.

Which is why I think we all hate losing so much.

It’s because we were created to be sons and daughters created of the Father who sent the Son who won the victory over the death of sin that we’ve all walked within. And while our walks have all differed from one another, the simple fact is that we’ve even managed to misunderstand enjoyment as rather than something met inside a simple appreciation for God’s many blessings, no, we’ve instead turned it into something in which the flesh is pleased.

I’m sick of living to make sure my flesh is impressed.

Because I’ve done just that for so long now that I know that if something doesn’t change then I am going to die this way:

Alone, angry, tired, torn apart seeking for some kind of something to show for how it is that I thought this would go good, this life spent looking to the flesh to reap something other than death.

No friends, the flesh has nothing else to offer because the flesh knows only to ask for all that the Spirit is trying to save us from.

And I’m just tired of living as if I don’t understand the difference.

Because we all do.

All of us know the difference between pleasing the flesh and serving the Spirit. Doesn’t mean we’re very good at getting it right, wouldn’t be called a fight if we were! But you see, that’s kind of the point. It’s that Jesus came to do what was hard to help us see that our choosing always to only do what comes easy is the very epitome of death itself.

That’s also why He calls us to take up our crosses and follow Him.

It because He who died for us clearly knows then that we have things in our lives that are causing us to lose this fight. He knows that we’re all prone to pleasing the flesh and seeking always our every reward from the same. He knows that we’ve in fact lived that way for so long now that it will takes us some time to find that better way of life that He died for us to live.

Thankfully He’s patient with us, not wanting any to perish but for all of us to come unto repentance wherein we finally turn away from what has been a life we’ve all lived seeking to satisfy the flesh to a life in which the flesh is finally what’s put to death.

This is the call to deny ourselves, to put an end to the desires of the flesh, to stop craving only what our feelings know to want.

Why?

Because the past has proven we know far better how to lose this war than to win it.

But He’s now proven that there’s no life to be found in losing it.

No, eternal life is the promise given unto those who deny themselves, who refuse themselves, who remove from themselves this incessant desire to do only that which pleases the flesh so that we can finally seek out that way of life spent trying to honor the Father.

For the two cannot be done at once as nobody can serve two masters.

Rather we’ll only love the one while hating the other. And, well, it’s pretty obvious that we’ve spent more than enough time loving the flesh and hating the Father.

Time to do something different if we truly hope to find, feel, become something better.

Indeed, it’s amazing that we can any of us even still imagine something better anymore. But that we can only proves that He’s not yet willing to let us lose this war. No, rather we’ve all been given today to once again wage what is this war that we’ve ignored too many times before.

The time for pretending that that’s okay is over. Because the simple fact is that we’re getting closer and closer to leaving this place.

Seems then that it would be far smarter to begin ridding ourselves of the flesh that’s promised to stay behind while we’ve still the time to do so. Because one day we won’t have that chance anymore. And no, that doesn’t mean that this battle will be easy.

But friends, the promise of Heaven wouldn’t be so amazing if it was.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold