Day 4069 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Corinthians 5:7 NIV

The way unknown

This is the only way by which we might ever go toward all that isn’t yet which is all that is better still than everything that already was and is as we speak. For to find something better demands a belief in something different. But to find something different asks that we do something new. And to do something new refuses always the existence of any efforts previously tried because all that we’ve already tried has already achieved the way of life that we’ve already known.

And indeed, perhaps all that you know already is all you care to see, to be. And if that is the case then good for you and congratulations are in order for your having arrived at your final destination.

Only problem is that this isn’t our final destination. Rather this world is but the proverbial jumping off point from which the rest of forever will be determined and that by one entirely simple matter: The presence or absence of faith. Truly, there is nothing else that really matters at all as we’re all promised to be judged by the presence of the Christ in us or rather the obviously more common lack thereof. What’s nice is that God’s made this extremely clear ahead of such time in which we shall be judged so as to give us all the time in the world to find He who’s found us.

A promise which makes this process called faith even easier as we needn’t even look as we’re rather the sheep who were lost, perhaps still are, but who all have been found by the Shepherd who left all those He’d already brought back into the fold that is that surpassing hope of that home that is Heaven. No, His having come for us relieves us of our having to figure out some way by which we might find Him who we cannot see and have clearly never known as is shown in how we’ve each lived our lives running violently away from all that Heaven is and why it is that way.

And Heaven is what it is because He is there who both created us and then continued to go on loving us both until such a time that we proved unable, unwilling to love Him in return, a point in time in which He returned to this that is His creation so as to save some of His children, as many as will agree unto their needing of said salvation, from their then longstanding and now still ongoing vocation that is sin that still wins what was the wage that He’s since taken in our place.

Paying in full the punishment we deserved via His doing what’s already been done, thereby again relieving us of the need to do anything beyond simply believe.

In what?

The fact that He has done all His Word says He has, which is sadly right where this whole thing seems to not only start unraveling but in fact all but falls flat as all it asks is simple faith but all a simple faith asks is everything.

Because His Word recounts all He’s done in what are rather simple terms in which He’s told us that He’d come to do a new thing the likes of which was compared to making a way through the wilderness and streams winding within the desert, both of which He’d already done before back when He made the way through those wild places through which those fleeing Egypt travelled upon their way to their promised land, a journey within which He too made water where there elsewise was none.

Indeed, He’s long been known easily as a Father of supreme generosity. A fact proven simply in His both setting captives free from their lives of captivity, like that lived by those who were lost from home as they lived as slaves in Egypt, and that unto a life of freedom they’d not known as was found not in anything they’d done but rather by what was done by He who sought to save those He could from what only a rare few would ever come to understand they needed saving from.

And the rarity is defined by the presence of humility as is seen inside a life that sees things for what they are rather than the sum of all we want them to be.

This was the problem for those leaving behind their lives of slavery in Egypt. For indeed, all along the way through that wilderness in which God went before them to clear the path and walked too behind so as to protect as they went along it, the people had there every chance to walk by faith with the benefit of sight helping them to see all the ways in which God was there helping them, making sure their journey was all it needed to be and too filled with all they would need to make it where He was leading them.

I mean we’re talking pillars of fire by night and cloud by day kind of thing. He was witnessed within manna from Heaven falling softly unto this ground that was given to sustain them. He made water flow from rocks and even sent bird when the bread wasn’t considered enough.

But you see, that’s the problem that we too continue to find in what are still those same kinds of lives in which we allow still our eyes to define for us what we want life to look like.

For just as they did then, so too do we do now. We’ve continued what’s remained then a life spent arguing with Him over pretty much anything that ever goes in any way contrary to the ways in which we think this life should go. And, well, wouldn’t you know but our ideas and their ideals are still often defined by what life looks like!

Because we’ve all managed to always allow in our minds this image of a perfect life that we could live in which there was never struggle, no hunger, a void of worry, an avoidance of the pain and misery which so often leave us imagining ways and whys in which to worry when we honestly needn’t welcome such weights. For honestly, our lives are vastly better than any of us could ever deserve.

Not that we see it that way.

But then again, such might be the point of our needing to walk by faith instead.

Why?

Because sight always holds in mind that same ideal of a life spent easy, safe, protected from the sum of everything we don’t like and provided with an even larger measure of all that we do enjoy. This is why the people then begged for meat as they grew tired of seeing only bread. They argued with Moses when the water ran out until God told him to strike that rock and water rushed out. They mentioned time and again how better it was for them back when they were still in chains in Egypt.

For at least there they had what sure looked like a better life than this one spent on the run through desert places in which trial and hardship were both equal but different.

That’s why we struggle with all things new.

It’s because in this life we’ve always believed that it was always best to only see to leave unchanged that which already is because whatever’s already is something that we already know how to face, how to carry, how to deal with. This is why our fascination with routines and plans remains the chains it’s always been. It’s because we’re a people vastly willing to always resort to remaining who we are as has long been defined by where we are as will always be more than happy to tell us what all we should and shouldn’t be doing.

And honestly, we just love for it the simplicity. For in reality it asks nothing of us to do nothing different. All of us can always do whatever it is that we’re already doing. That’s nothing. And because it asks nothing, we then never have to give anything more than whatever we already are. In fact, as our routines grow more practiced and in this known and understood, we may even manage to get by with doing less and less over time.

This is in fact something that I’m finding myself starting to struggle with in terms of exercising.

For when I started trying to get healthier years ago I was able to do so many things that just worked in such a remarkable way that all of them have remained things that I continue to do. I found this way to work out that worked well and brought with it both amazing results and also this ongoing enjoyment of all this variety of movement and angle and depth and degree. Again, I could do just about anything and it would work, it would help.

And I’ve in fact seen those results in every mirror since.

But what’s started to become rather odd to me is this feeling that continuing to do as I’ve always done is only accomplishing for me less and less as times goes on. Because while variety remains the spice of life, turns out that less remains far more adamant upon being more than my mind does on being spiced.

Indeed, there’s this general concept in fitness in which as the adaptations are made, the things needed to retain them become fewer and fewer. It eventually shifts away from this idea of gaining and gaining to simply a desire to more so maintain what you’ve already gained as the efforts become harder and the progress wanes slower and the overall concept just changes as so too do our bodies and their physical abilities.

It’s life.

We slow down. We get busy. We have families and start business and find ourselves with far less time and energy than we had when we were 20.

Doesn’t mean we give up, just that we perhaps do things differently.

And yeah, that’s incredibly scary as, again, we and our patterns always so easily become friends as it’ll forever be entirely simple to continue doing as we’ve always done. As we just talked about yesterday, this is in fact something that we all know almost instinctively to seek for in life and all we do within it. Because it bring with it less and less risk as we come to know more and more about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, where it all has us going and what the overall hope is that we’ve held in that place for which we’re headed.

Problem remains that we remain a people who seek to see everything before we’ll believe anything.

And, well, faith simply can’t work like that as, again as discussed yesterday, faith itself is an assurance of things unseen.

Simply because you needn’t embrace any measure of trust in that which you have seen as you can then know that it is what it is.

Faith rather continues to go only toward everything we’ve never known and all we’ve never been along the way. And this is indeed just as hard a thing as it’s ever been, perhaps even harder in all honesty. And that’s because this world we walk through today is one decidedly different from that met by those on their way to freedom from lives lived as slaves in Egypt. Rather today we’re slaves to our jobs, to our phones, to our plans and how they’re always known to have this hope of going just right.

Yes, we continue to confine this life to the sum of our sight, seeking always for what we want to see as is determined often via only all that we can.

But friends, can we not yet see the problem this approach can cause?

It’s one proven in that if all we’re doing in or with our lives is seeking for them all that is within them already, well then all we can ever find is all we’ve already found. And granted, we don’t really know to see it that way as we rather exist to mainly desire what another has or hopes to find for themselves. And so we seem to know what is a life in which we are seeking for new things as defined by things we don’t have or haven’t heard or have never known before.

But still, the sum of everything most everyone seeks after in this life is but that which is alive in this world.

Leaving us all then seeking at best to gain all the world at whatever expense we become willing to give to get it.

Problem then becomes that we cannot possibly begin to understand what the cost really is as every choice is made in the consequence of something we’ll never know. Indeed, this truth haunts me almost daily as I find myself often wondering as to the life I haven’t known thanks to the choices I know I made instead. And that’s because I know that I, at least for a time, lived choosing always the easiest of options before me. For we all seek almost naturally that highly held path of least resistance.

Never caring to imagine that so too might it prove the path of least substance.

Something we never see because, well, we can see the ease. We can feel the simplicity. We can taste the comfort wash over us as we awake to give the day now before us unto our willingness to do nothing with it than whatever we’ve done with all those todays that’ve now become yesterdays.

No, we scarcely do anything new because, well, it’s again just easier to do whatever it is that we know how to.

A fact proven in just how lonely remains the path spent behind He who came to save us from a life lived seeking for mostly only all that we can see.

For indeed, His path is one quite different in every possible way. Inside every single day he does truly a new thing that often asks we do something new too. And yet that something new often has something to do with our ceasing to do something we always have. This is why so many may try His way only to find soon that day in which the worries of this life, as we’ve all lived it within this world in which we’ve all long thought all of life was meant to be lived, come in again and again to choke out the Word planted in we who are soil that’s but skin deep.

Chosen because it’s what we can see.

But friends, what of everything we can’t?

What of everywhere we’ve never been? Is it not there? How can we know for sure? Or how about who we’ve never been known to be? Are they nothing we want to be? Are we already everything we care to become? Or maybe the hopes we don’t yet know that we could come to have. Are they hopes bad simply because we know them not? Or might they be immeasurably better than every hope we have as is so often had something where we are?

Is this really all there is to all of this?

And if it is, as so many seem to so sternly assume, then of what point can anything have?

For if all of life is only all there is in what’s always been inside the version of it that we’ve already lived, well then why go on? Why are we still here if all there is for us find or feel or be or become is but the sum of all we’ve already seen, heard, felt, figured out or failed?

Indeed, what all are we failing to see simply because we continue to insist upon we being the only ones to look, and that always only wherever we dare to?

Friends, my point for today is that life as we’ve known it is something of an ongoing victim of fear inspiring us to lean so heavily upon our sense of sight that we’ve only come to find this fear of life being more than we’ve ever known to assume it can be. Again, we probably don’t see it that way, but again, that pretty much proves the point. For while what we already have, where we already are, whoever it is that we’ve already become, while all that may be pretty good in fact, is pretty good really good enough to inspire us to conspire against everything we’ve not yet seen or heard or known how to do?

I get it, life as we know it brings with it this simplicity of it always remaining pretty much all it’s always been. Now sure, things change and society progresses and technology advances and many of these things do in fact make life here even easier, safer, better then perhaps.

But part of me just can’t help but wonder what all there is to all that we haven’t seen, to all that we can’t see. Because there exists inside each of us this daring audacity to do this thing called imagining. In fact it’s something we all do all the time.

Question is for what?

Are we just imagining what we already know but it ever so slightly shifted until it’s just a little bit better than whatever it already was? Or might we be so bold as to hold the sum of life up to that light we can’t see as can only be done inside that belief that continuing to allow our eyes to look for the best of our lives only limits them to what we can find by ourselves and on our own?

I just know that I have this hope in what is a place that I’ve never been where is lived a life I haven’t known that is spent in a peace I cannot find inside this life that I have known where I have been seeking for such a thing for as long as I’ve been where I am.

Indeed, God’s placed eternity inside every human heart as He knows that such a hope is a great place for a faith to start. Problem is that so long as our eyes try to see it before our minds are willing to believe it, we’ll continue to agree with that song that contends that Heaven is a place on earth.

Maybe it is and it’s just that none of us have found it yet.

But I do know that such things as peace and hope and joy and meaning, well, they’re all things rapidly fleeting where we stand. Perhaps we’re just supposed to let them go and allow life to become whatever it’ll be without them.

It’s just that we can already see what life is becoming without them, and well, I personally don’t much care for what I see anymore around here.

No, rather here is quickly becoming the very backdrop that allows me to believe easier in everything better. Why? Because most things here are only getting worse. And well, what is there to hope for in what’s so clearly a place in which good enough is itself becoming a bygone ideal?

Friends, we’re all welcome to seek for what we can find inside this life. And many will. But I just can’t find any reason to spend my life hoping for only all that I can see.

Because I just can’t shake this feeling that my eyes know nothing of all that’s possible.

I could be wrong, and perhaps I am. But I’d rather spend my life trying to find what I can’t than settling again for only what I can.

For again, we can all consider the idea of eternity for some sort of reason.

Maybe one day we’ll find out why.

But not so long as we continue to imagine that we can know everything there is to know about life and why we have it and where it’s going.

Because there simply has to be more to this than everything we think it is.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold