Day 4062 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 1:4 NIV

Treasure in Heaven

For simply Heaven is the treasure. And this matters as much as ever because despite whatever we might feel we have found or could find within this world, we’ve all known every ounce of it to spoil, to fade, to perish, to rust, to ruin, to be removed unto our being forced to realize that it was our eyes, our ears, our minds that made ourselves believe that this thing that we’ve had but have no more is evidence sure of the lack of assurance given unto everything here.

Almost makes you start to wonder why it is that still we look.

And that because, well, we do. All of us do. All of us do this every single day in fact. This life is one that has us living as if all that matters is the little we’re seeing and the less we’re hearing and the less of both that we’re anymore understanding because of such things as all these lies of Ai’s and closed minds and ears that can hear but just choose to not listen to anything they simply don’t want to. Indeed, all of us have long believed that it was us alone who could see, who could know, who could go wherever we wanted and there find whatever we imagined would make the trip worth taking.

It’s just that nowadays we’ve all these things that cater to this consideration of our being the only ones best entrusted with this ensuring that our lives turn out the way we want them to. Things such as algorithms which learn our interests and which of them we like most amongst the rest and social medias that make our minds for us in regard to what society seems to assume matters most and politics which play into our incessant need for drama, debate, division and this odd sense of superiority that we seem to assume found within the lot.

Indeed, there are a lot of things in this world which exist solely to ensure we’re always only pleased, soothed, comforted and commended for however it is that we’ve chosen to live as then whoever it is that we’re likely to remain.

After all, why change when our way of life has found us alive in what is basically a perfect existence in which we needn’t do much of anything we don’t want to do as we’re rather more than wealthy enough to pay someone else to take care of the stuff that we don’t enjoy so much?

Here lately I’ve been seeing all these new facts and stats about reading and how a growing portion of our population simply can’t do it. Our society is rapidly losing its proficiency in reading to the point in which a good percentage of people either can’t, don’t or just won’t. Why? Because we don’t really need to anymore. Rather there’s always a video to watch about whatever the subject might be. There’s a program that can give us the gist of the story. There’s someone we can pay to write a book report for us so that we needn’t even do our homework anymore.

And we love this because, well, all of us have experienced that loathsome undertaking that is our own learning and growth. And we all hated it then because we’d have been far happier and better entertained should we have been allowed to spend the day playing video games or playing outside or watching tv or literally doing anything at all other than math or some science project or reading assignment.

Indeed, it seems that we’ve all but vilified the very word!

For to assign is to press up another something in the form or function of what is veritable work meant to accomplish a necessary task that is considered necessary either for the growth and/or proper operation of whatever operation has felt it best to bestow said load upon those now tasked with carrying it out to whatever measure of proper completion one might be able to offer.

But that’s just it. It’s a problem found in that we don’t wish to offer anything to anything anymore. Because to us offering something of us is losing something of us. It’s our wasting our time reading some book we don’t care about. It’s our spending our night working on math problems that we’re convinced we’ll never need when we grow up. It’s our giving our effort, our energy to the completing of something that we can’t see as being worth whatever it is that we’d just as soon be giving these things to.

Which pretty much explains why the world’s become what this world is today.

It’s become a place in which 60+% of Gen Z can’t cook and only 36% of people in America cook at home on a daily basis. And why is this? Because we’ve become disinterested in doing something that’s all but become societally antiquated in what is a culture in which we can whip out our phones, put in an order to one of favorite restaurants, of the dozens we enjoy, and literally have some dude that’s working three jobs run through the drive thru so that we don’t have to and bring the food right to our door.

We don’t even need to leave the house anymore!

And, well, this works out perfect for us because our homes have long been our castles and we the kings and queens thereof. A fact proven in the plethora of stuff that we’ve amassed inside them and the plans we make for the many other things that we still plan to buy because still we want so very much of all that’s here where our every hope and their every intention has sadly chosen to remain standing, or sitting, or laying on what is the latest in technology’s advancement in the study of sleep science and why we need to have numbers attached.

As if we wouldn’t use math!

The problem is that we do use things but always for nothing more than our complacency. That’s both how and why all these algorithms exist. They’re literally the form and function of a bunch of mathematic and social science jargon that functions to ensure that we are indeed always entertained so that we keep coming back to these platforms that are getting richer and richer thanks to all the information that they’re gleaning from our giving them pretty much all of our time and attention.

That and the ad revenue they rake in thanks to corporations knowing that many will see their advertisement for this newfound technological advancement and suddenly be convinced that their bed is a piece of junk because it doesn’t allow them to pick their perfect comfort number nor lift on one end so that your significant other can stop snoring so that you can finally get some sleep for the rough day you have ahead of doing nothing more than making more plans for more junk you feel the need to buy because we’ve become perpetually convinced that we’re somehow best to be always unhappy in life.

An unhappiness that’s always fixed just as easily as our buying the newest smart phone that takes better pictures!

Friends, these are our treasures.

We’ve truly become a people who cherish literally anything with a price tag attached. Doesn’t even matter what it is. Seriously, if we even see, or honestly just assume that someone else may want whatever it is, then we want it too. Why? Because again, we’re kings and queens of castles that always have a little more room for a little more stuff that shines brighter than the other stuff we already have. And, well, kings and queens don’t lose but rather have all they wish to have and hold and hope to keep for however long it is that we honestly think we’re going to be here.

Which for most of us is either forever or at least for long enough to squeeze every drop of enjoyment out of all this stuff that become an idol in a life of ideals giving us ideas as to what best to do with our time, our effort, our interest, our attention.

Not sure how watching tickchat viral challenges is supposed to help us in any way whatsoever.

But here we are!

Where?

I’ve no idea.

But every single day I’m reminded in more ways than I can count of the very fact that this world is less the home that I too once lived as if it might have been. For I too have done all these things that I’ve lampooned here today. I’ve spent a life’s savings upon the substance of stuff long since sold off in a garage sale. I’ve spent hours, more of them than I want to imagine, of my life watching the most mindless drivel to have ever gone viral. I’ve spent so much effort and energy to do the work that made the money that bought the things that this world wanted me to have so that none of us would have to feel bad about our going without.

I’ve spent a life living as if my life was a kingdom meant to be filled with all the world.

And I’ve bought into so many worldly ideals that daily I find one more that I feel only the need to rid myself of before it steals any more time or attention from what I truly know really matters most.

And no, what matters most isn’t here.

Rather this past weekend some of us celebrated the fact that He’s done left.

Why?

Because His doing so was done as He overcame our death in His leaving behind the veritable grave that both is this place and therefore awaits every life lived herein. That and He went on ahead to Heaven to continue doing all that He’d promised to do unto what’s long been the hope of our being welcomed home to a hope in which He’s made us a place, so long as we follow Him walking His way and upholding His will as we go.

Where?

Home.

And yes, those of us who believe in Christ want to go home. And yeah, that’s a feeling that grows only deeper and ever more desperate pretty much every single day.

Why?

Because every single day this stinking place only continues to drift further and further away from everything that He created both it and us to be. This world was once where the Garden of Eden was, a Garden those first us took so for granted that it led them to taking fruit from the one tree from which they didn’t need fruit from, a choice so dumb that now all of us know far more than we ever needed too because, yeah, knowledge is power but power clearly corrupts and that’s because while we may all know the knowledge of good and evil, none of us have ever really proven to use it appropriately.

For there’s rarely any money to be made in our doing things appropriately as those things which are considered appropriate are the same as are widely considered boring, bland, mundane, entirely too plain to ever go viral and thus not at all capable of making us famous. Which is still what so many here want to be in what’s become a world in which an influencer is literally among the very pinnacle of dream jobs held by kids.

Not astronauts or firefighters or symphony conductors.

No, 57% of kids today want to be social media stars.

We ain’t even aiming for hollywood anymore.

But then again, why should we when we can buy a camera on amazon and be our own directors therefore taking no direction from anyone other than the entirety of society which determines for us all every single day all that we’re supposed to care about and what’s considered best to say about it?

We are in every way reflections of this place, right down to wanting for ourselves pretty much only all the things found in this place.

Storing up for ourselves treasures of leaven, with always the hope then of never leaving any of it behind.

Which is why so many still live as if they’ll not die, some even spending their money researching ways to overturn the outcome should it ever come to that.

Which is itself something oddly enough already offered to us without the need of cryogenics or cloning.

Yeah, I really hate it down here!

Why?

Because we’ve become the gods and our estimation of Heaven is a multi-million dollar mansion filled past full with as much stuff as we can possibly afford. Indeed, it seems as though for some their greatest hope is an amazon shopping spree, chosen specifically because even their logo says they’ve everything from a to z and they’ll literally bring any of it right to your door as quick as the very same day!

We don’t even have to wait to have the stuff we’ve come to want.

And, well, being these patients of impatience that we’ve all become thanks to pride telling us all the time that we shouldn’t have to miss any time enjoying whatever it is that we’re so easily convinced we might as much we want to believe we would, this again works out perfect!

Also proves why such ideas as Jesus and Heaven and repentance don’t.

It’s because those things don’t hurry. In fact Heaven and He who walked out the only way there did so proved it found only in a kind of agony that our common weaknesses and worries cannot even begin to fathom for what was hours culminating in days spent in the grave. We can barely go 60 seconds without getting bored and swiping to the next dopamine hit.

We don’t have it in us to wait anymore as rather this world has configured itself in just such a way that we don’t have to wait anymore. We don’t have to listen anymore. We don’t have to write anymore. Many of us can’t read anymore.

And, well, that’s because laziness has long been our greatest treasure as we’ve never wanted to have to do anything we didn’t want to see a reason to.

Such as waiting or learning or leaving our sins behind in search of a better life that’s truly so easily found as our just not doing stupid stuff anymore.

But we love our stupid stuff!

Love it so much that we’re allowing it to love us right back and that only to death.

And that because this world has long been allowed to house our every estimation as to what is supposed to be considered rewarding. And indeed, the Bible tells us that many will have had their reward within the way of life they’d chosen in which they chose for themselves every single day to both walk away from Jesus and His always asking us to deny ourselves whilst waiting in eager anticipation for the clouds to start parting and that walking away always aimed toward whatever reward we could find closer, sooner, more comfortably and of literally any possible meaning.

But friends, such is my worry!

What does anything mean here anymore? What’s here that’s of such importance that it’s preventing us from exporting our hope to a place where it can’t be stolen or torn or tarnished? What treasure has this world that we want so badly that we slap away the hand daily that’s still reaching out to pull toward eternity?

Why are we so unwilling to wait for forever?

Instead we’ve just become in this constant hurry to get nowhere to have nothing that offers us anything better than whatever this is that we’ve come to become.

What are we?

Where are we?

And, perhaps most importantly, why are we so adamant to stay either?

Friends, do we not yet understand that better is never where we are already? That our best isn’t ever to be proven in whoever it is that we’ve always been? That such hope as our growth in hope toward hope can’t grow unless we agree to go toward wherever it is that is hope?

Why hope for anything here when everyone here is promised to leave it all behind?

Can’t we see the waste of life that is our life so long as we continue to live and love all that isn’t alive?

I just don’t understand why it is that we allow so much room for so much doubt in regard to everything that is anything other than whatever it is that we can see. Sure, I do understand the simplicity in agreeing to believe in all that we can see. I understand the comfort proven in our hearing that all we’re doing is all we should. I get the idea of our wanting to always be rewarded, pleased, satisfied, treated to whatever it is that we consider to be a treat worthy of kings and queens like we.

But I hate the word treat. I hate the word.

Why?

Because who are we to be so pleased and impressed with ourselves as we are in what are lives in which we live to so love ourselves that we’re literally loving ourselves to death here inside all this laziness that this life is?

Friends, we’re comforting ourselves into condemnation.

All because we’re all convinced that it’s always best for us to find our treasures as fast as possible so that we needn’t wait to be able to enjoy them.

Even if it means we’ll only eventually lose them, misplace them, have them stolen or sell them off in a garage sale to someone else who thinks our trash could be their treasure.

We are given the chance to be coheirs with Christ of the gift of the promise of eternal life.

And yet we live our lives looking only to fill this side of that line separating that which is for now from that which is forever.

All because we can see all that’s for now but we can’t seem to see that all that we can see is only temporary.

We just want it because it’s closer.

Because we don’t realize just how close we are to leaving.

Friends, where will you go? What’s to come of your home? Is it the sum of everything you’re living to leave behind? Is it rather the hope of leaving behind all that was no longer seen as home because it hasn’t felt like one for a really long time?

I know we’re terrified of that kind of difference in life. But if we could just get past the fear of losing everything we think we have we could finally find that what He has in store means so much more than everything else ever could.

Because what He promises cannot perish, will not pass away, can’t be stolen, sold, ripped or torn apart.

Heaven is forever, and thus our hope can be too.

But Heaven doesn’t hold anything we can lose.

Why then do we?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold