Day 4061 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 1:3 NIV

A living hope

And that it’s novel too as is seen through the promise being stated that says it comes from a new birth which hints always toward a new life as is ever defined as one not lived as of yet, well, this seems then to mean that perhaps what we had been living wasn’t a life as it had for us to find no hope that was itself alive as instead maybe we had all died already back when we walked inside what was not a life but rather a time in which it sure seemed as though there were times in which we thought hope we did find.

But even then, if that hope wasn’t alive then, well, what was it then that we had found?

This is something of a question that exists as something of that thorn in Paul’s side as so too do I ride this train of thought seeking for what I’ve lost in what I truly thought was a life. Indeed, just last night it hit me yet again as I brushed my teeth preparing for bed. I realized that somewhere across the space and time that has been my life over the last 10 years I lost something. And in all truth I’ve felt this loss for quite a while now just haven’t been able to even venture near wrapping my mind around it.

For how can you seek for something that you: 1. Don’t realize you’ve lost. 2. Don’t then know where to look. 3. Can’t possibly imagine how you managed to lose whatever you did wherever you did. And 4. Haven’t the first idea as to how to retrace the many steps you may or may not have taken both toward but more often away along the way to wherever, whatever, whyever it is that you are whatever, wherever, whoever you’ve become.

Indeed, I’ve felt this amazing worry inside for so long now that it’s almost as if I’m now afraid to lose it. I’ve gotten used to it. It’s somehow like I’ve convinced my mind to remind my heart that perhaps life is supposed to be so hard in all these ways that I’ve made it in what’s always been, as it always is, a life we all have lived looking always for hope.

After all, why look for anything else whenever anything other than hope is but everything less?

Problem is that we’ve all somehow managed to allow hope itself to die a million deaths inside what have become a million choices made to imagine it as something less than it is. All of them made because we wanted a hope close enough to hold. We wanted a hope we could know sooner rather than later. We wanted a hope that became somewhat this laser that leads us through whatever it is that we are willing to lose so long as it does mean that we can have, can hold, can accomplish this thing in which we’ve allowed our hope to settle.

But you see, that’s just it!

We’ve allowed our hope to settle. And in doing so, we’ve also allowed our hope to die.

Not that such is ever anything anyone wants to do in life, let alone as often as all of us have. But the issue seems to be that we’ve just become so bad at hoping in what hope really is that all we know of hope is everything that it isn’t. I mean, just stop for a second and consider some of the many hopes you’ve had, some of those you still have. What is it that you’re hoping for? What is said hope moving toward? Does your newest hope even have you moving at all?

Or is it actually somehow a hope that’s perhaps a bit too willing to let you stay mostly wherever you already are?

Indeed, speaking personally as I always do as it’s all I can do, it seems that many of my hopes have become like those that this world has which revolve around nothing changing all too much. Rather for years it seems that my hopes have been those that expected for me to do so little of everything new, anything different that I’ve become so confused, so complacent that anymore it feels as if any step I dare to take is only one taken in a wrong direction toward my life to break.

Truly, I’m terrified of risking the loss of whatever this is that I feel I’ve found.

And yet what I so often feel is quite unhappy, uncertain, under attack and mostly from me at that.

What sense am I supposed to make of that? Especially considering how much I thought I enjoyed the ride in? Because I have! I’ve enjoyed, appreciated, prayed every single day thanking God as much as I remembered to for all the things He’s helped me do in what has become a life entirely better than whatever, wherever I was some 10 years ago.

And yet somehow the joy has faded and the gratitude has too. Not that I’m not thankful for the bad habits He’s helped me to lose nor the better which have thankfully taken their place. There’s indeed scarcely a day in which I don’t yearn to thank Him for all He’s helped me to do, to change, to fix, to lose.

But then there are anymore these rapidly increasing number of days in which these things that I’ve come to enjoy have become something I fear, something I worry over, something I can’t seem to figure out anymore.

Indeed, my life has become quite the confusion as, honestly, nothing makes sense anymore. And yet I feel so often as if I’m trying so hard to figure it all out all over again that I’m just standing in place allowing wheels to spin that I both didn’t know I had and truly wish I didn’t.

For all of life has become something of a divot driven into a ground so solidly soft that it hurts like hell but also feels somehow so comfortable that I reach always for the shovel that only digs me deeper into whatever this is that I’ve become but never the one that He’s given to help dig me out.

Because I don’t know that I can tell the difference anymore.

Instead it feels so often as if my very head is imploding thanks to all these thoughts that I think that I think will help but really never do. For even my own thoughts only seem to help me lose track of both where I am, how I got here, why I started the journey and where else it was that I’m pretty sure I was once excited to try and go.

I don’t seem able to remember any of it anymore.

Rather I spend most days so lost inside myself trying so hard to find some help but always afraid to ask because I’ve spent so much of the recent past trying to make it look as if I knew what I was doing that I refused to allow anyone else to even pretend they could help.

Because we never think we need any, do we?

No, we’ve always got things all figured out. We always know what to say, those just-right things to do in order to continue leading us to whatever it is that we alone think is best as thought about by us alone because, again, we never invite anyone else to come along for the ride as there’d be no glory to gain in allowing passersby upon this train.

And then we wonder why life so often feels so plain, so boring, so bland in our ignoring of the better than another could help us find, inspire us to be.

All because all we see here inside ourselves is just the sum of every lie that always tells this same story about how much gain and glory we stand to receive so long as we seek for a better everything but expect to find it by changing nothing.

It’s truly a strange existence we’ve settled for. It’s something that’s always moving but getting nowhere. We’re all always so busy but never seem to accomplish that one something that we’re trying so hard to hope for. Indeed, the world around us is spinning a million miles a minute and so too every single person alive within it and yet our every single hope, millions of them as are equal to the number of us here if even we have each but one, they’re all so easy to find that we seem as if we see no point in looking anymore.

Because I think we’ve forgotten what hope is really for.

Because it seems that we always see it inside something so near that we needn’t do much, change much, be challenged much at all in order to find it. We’ve arrived at this place in time and mind in which we mind not the time as it takes us none to find whatever it is that we hope to stay. For this is the only hope we seem to have found this way in which we live what honestly isn’t a life.

For if it was why would He suggest we be born again into what’s waiting there as a living hope?

If not because our hopes are presently as dead as we’ve all long been inside all these sins that we likely still can’t see we’re sinking in?

Mine has been vanity, something itself of a novelty that I’ve also felt for all of my story. I’ve always tried to be the one who looked good, who seemed strong, who lived up to this world’s many suggestions as to how best to fit the mold and hold the road that we’re all apparently supposed to walk. And I’ve given a lot of time and torment to making as much of as many of those expectations realized as I felt I could in life. Even accomplishing a few things that I always hoped I could but never dreamed I would.

Did the college, lost the weight, lived the life and yet here I sit just as lost as I’ve ever been.

For even the things that I’ve enjoyed along the way, those I always hoped I could as I knew the improvements that they would make in my life, even those are as of this time only matters of question in my mind.

Because nothing makes sense anymore except this thought to throw everything into the air, see what of it blows away as compared to the very little I expect to land, a little that I’ll figure out what to do with whenever it does.

Indeed, it seems as if I’ve finally begun to arrive at this place in life in which I’ve finally found that my trying to hold it all together and that so that I could figure it out and make sure it works, it just ain’t working anymore. Rather lately it seems as though nearly everything I try either amounts to nothing or just nothing that I thought it would.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

Thankfully Jesus tells us what to do with a life in which all we do doesn’t accomplish anything of all it’s supposed to, expected to. It’s why He calls us to take up our own crosses and carry them with us throughout every day that we’ve left within this place in which we know only it seems to waste as much of every opportunity that we either don’t see or can’t understand as we seem to understand as being the right choice to continue making.

How is that supposed to help us find a hope that feels alive?

What hope is there in that life in which we always manage to find only some excuse to not do what we feel we need to as instead we continue to do everything we know we need to do no longer as it’s just not working anymore?

Friends, I dare say that we’re all so confused that even our confusion is so confusing that we think it all makes sense.

But I fear I’m quickly running out of ways to make my way make sense, seem right, feel alive even.

Rather all I feel anymore is just anger, frustration, disappointment and this growing dejection that even just barely leaves me alone long enough to write these posts that themselves barely ever seem to come out anywhere near decent anymore.

No, it feels as if nothing I do is working these days because all it continues to help me find is a hope that’s so unalive that I always find myself marveling at how sure I was that it would work.

Because nothing I do anymore seems to work, probably because I don’t do much anymore and that because I’m scared to death of losing what I’ve gained in what’s suddenly a way of life in which all I’ve gained seems to have left me so lost that I barely have any memory of who I was or hoped to be.

Rather I worry my hopes have died.

Only I wonder now which of them were ever alive.

I gotta tell you, I’m so tired of how hard we make all this on ourselves that I could scream if I wasn’t always worried about not making a sound. I’m sick of how scared we are to hope in more than we dare to. I’m terrified that all we stand to find in this way of life in which hope is held mostly in only whatever we hope to hold is nothing but a bunch of stuff that fits in our hands and that our hearts will only fit here. I’m worried that the weight I’ve lost, both physically and that of the way of life I used to live, has only left me with a life in which I don’t live anymore but rather just worry all the time that I’m going to lose everything I’ve come to find.

Indeed, I’m so tired of worrying and wanting and working only to always stay in place.

Because the place we so often decide to stay is inside the grave that He came to leave behind in order to show that we could and should too.

But that’s one message from the Easter story that always gets lost pretty quickly in our hurry to get back to holding out hope for only all this world holds out for us to hope in. Such things as riches and fame and feeling good but always looking better. Again, I’m finally starting to realize that for years now my hope in life has been confined inside how I look, even more than how I feel. And I’ve gone to such extremes to make so many things finally change that I just now, after almost a decade, I just now realized I’ve lost something.

And I don’t know where as I don’t yet know what.

But it seems like it might be my life, my mind, my joy, my gratitude, my hope.

Yeah, I think I’ve lost my hope, or at least my understanding as to what hope is meant to hope for.

Because for so long now my hope has been held inside things to hang on a wall or the image of a person who’s become a stranger looking back at me in the mirror. It’s been found in my fighting to feel better and working out all the time to try and make it happen only to feel bad about not working out and only frustrated whenever I do. It’s been cooked in a kitchen in which I’ve learned to make my own meals, meals I completely enjoy, only nowadays served with a side of concern that I’m missing something or not doing what I should.

It’s been even felt in doing something I enjoy doing only to feel as if these things only ever accomplish some varied degree of disappointment.

All because my every hope has become entirely too reliant upon me. And, well, all any of us really know how to do is to overcomplicate everything to the point in which it eventually just becomes best to move on so that we can once again start over.

Which is exactly what He offers inside His gift of Himself as given in our place upon that cross that we just yesterday celebrated His having overcome to the very tune of His leaving the grave empty. He offers us such the new life, a shiny new identity! And all He asks is that we just lay down the old as we instead seek to hold what is His hand as is still reaching down to help us up and out of what is a way of life in which, if we were to be honest, not much has felt right for quite a long time.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? That He’s offering to help a people still convinced that there’s no hope in help?

And why is that?

Because our greatest hope has long been our doing this all by ourselves so that we get all the glory and ensure nobody else comes along and makes a mistake.

Yeah, I’ve become quite the jerk in recent years, but more on that in another post perhaps.

The point for this one is that we’ve but this one life to live here and no matter what we do, what little try, the many hopes we have nor the few of them actually worth hoping for, it’s for entirely too long revolved only around us. But friends, last I checked we’re all still scheduled to die here. Why then do we continue ahead in what remains a life in which our every hope is for something here in this one place in which we’re all destined to leave?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m running out of ways to make what this world’s taught us about hope seem all that hopeful. For everything here has this obviously dwindling return on investment that should inspire us to start investing our hopes elsewhere.

Which seems exactly what He asked us to do when He asks that we store our treasures in Heaven.

For indeed, such a gift as the promise of that home is a hope that is alive as so too is now the Christ who has overcome our every death as has long been lived for here inside a way of life in which all we live for are hopes that ask so little of us that we can’t fail to find them on our own.

But friends, we’ll not find that home by ourselves.

Jesus wouldn’t have died if we could.

But until He becomes our hope and Heaven our goal, well, all we stand to find is everything here where it sadly seems most still agree to lose their hopes to the things we can gain before we leave.

Indeed, I’ve been lost in a world that speaks in gain for so long as I can remember. It’s all about making gains and the little things that keep us from them.

What if we allowed ourselves to imagine the more we stood to find in agreeing to lose everything that’s here?

Might we find hope if we stopped hoping we could find it here?

Not sure as I don’t know that I’ve ever really tried. But you’ve gotta admit, there’s something about this idea of a new life found in a new birth toward a living hope that sure sounds a lot better than whatever this is that we keep finding in all that we keep doing as is all done only our way.

Almost so exciting that it’s got me thinking.

About what, well, I don’t know that I know. But then again I suppose that such is the point of something so new.

It’s meant to help us lose all that is so that it can be replaced by the better that whatever is isn’t.

Isn’t it?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold