Day 4083 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Job 7:17-18 NIV

What is opportunity?

Is it really something always afforded better by the affluent? Is it the chance to experience that which is only exciting? Is it even always an excitement? Is it rather something we sometimes avoid because in fact it is not always void of the fear found in something we consider unexciting but rather frightening? Is it a feeling only felt by those who’ve found a choice they hoped to be able to choose? Is it something lost by those who elsewise lose out on the ability to see life inside life’s ongoing difficulty? Is it perhaps even an affliction which seeks to first make us its victim so that we can then better understand the eventual victory?

What is affliction?

What is victory?

Are not both an opportunity? Haven’t both something to offer? Do not both give us something we’d otherwise have failed to gain without the strain put in place by that place to which we go seeking to find out what more we might know about who we are, what that means, where that goes and what we’ll see? Don’t both affliction and victory offer us something of a scene seen inside a sea of both uncertainty and yet that with the courage to face it?

Is opportunity then courageous?

Is courage contagious? Are all contagions not curious as to the outcomes toward which they can lead us? Are all bouts with illness truly only for always our misery? Might they sometimes make us better? What can we know of better without the weather we so often seek only to blame as the rain insists upon raining upon our parade? Is not a rained out parade but itself something of an opportunity to live for a moment without the safeguard of plans made?

Can you plan opportunity?

Does opportunity always go according to plan?

Is every opportunity supposed to carry always in hand only all we ourselves wish to hold or hope to lose? If never we take the opportunity to embrace the losing of something how then might we appreciate that which we gain in its place? Do not we need to at first feel the emptiness if we’re ever to understand the beauty that is the blessing that eventually fills it?

Is this not what opportunity gives us?

A chance to change, to choose, to chase, to chase change through choosing to daringly risk losing all we have, comfort most often, in the hope for something that we have then the bettered ability to believe will in fact be better and leave us the same?

Indeed, how can we change if we never see the opportunity it offers us presented at first in the courage to lose that which is present, even comfort, as is chosen to endure because we believe that there’s a reason which aims into the heart of a reward that will prove, no matter how soon, to be even the result of a better life entirely?

So then is opportunity not often disguised as difficulty?

Tell me, how can ever we improve if not first by becoming willing to lose? And too, how can we ever imagine a need to lose as what are a people so insistent upon gain that again we fear the thunder and curse the rain despite their ability to makes things grow and help us know that God’s in control and we thus not? And yet, is God in control in what is a world in which we know so many who have opportunities without seeming to deserve them whereas others seem only to have fewer chances?

Is it that fair?

What is fairness?

That’s kind of where this most recent journey through His Word really began. It was something I felt needed to be discussed because, unto us, yes, it does seem as if there are those here who do have it better than others. In fact, most of our lives have thus far been defined by a mind that’s learned that so often in life we don’t get what we feel we deserve, and too, that others get what we’re fairly certain they don’t deserve either. And yet in our measure we’ve long been the ones who come up short in regard to blessing and benefit and decidedly longer on hardship and horror.

Are we?

Have our lives always been as bad as we’ve often made them out to be?

Are the lives of those whom we feel don’t deserve the “better” opportunities they seem to have had truly always as good as we’ve often made them seem or assumed they were?

Is life really unfair?

Yeah.

But perhaps not in the way in which our selfishness may think.

Because honestly, sure, it sometimes seems as if good people experience bad things. And yeah, this seeming discrepancy brings with it an uncertainty, a confusion if you will as it seems that God’s will is supposedly for our good. I mean, He literally told us so inside that one verse that we all know!

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

It’s just that we always seem to almost willfully miss the tying there together of hope and a future.

Is not hope always something proven only later? For again, as within His Word we read that “hope that is seen is no hope at all.” For indeed, “who hopes for what they already have?” Rather, “if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”

All of this from Romans 8:24-25, a passage which goes on to talk about the help provided by the Spirit which helps in our weakness as is witnessed because we face things in life that leave us speechless, helpless and often afraid, so much so and indeed so many such things that He exists to intercede for us in prayers unspoken in words we can’t find but rather through the guttural groans we so often feel when found face down having once more been trampled by trial, torment or tempest.

Or even temptation.

The passage continues talking about predestination and how it’s an ongoing process through which “those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.” And too that “those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”

As He did with the Son in whose image we’ve now the opportunity to be confirmed once we’ve unto the same been conformed.

And what is the image that we see of the Son?

Indeed, what all opportunities did Christ Jesus experience here?

Were all of them fair?

Were any fair at all?

For is Christ not the One who took our fall having carried our cross? Is it not He who died on that tree, suffering in an unimaginable agony for you and me who still often live as if our lives are unfair because we still measure that sometimes bad things happen to good people?

Is this the question we should be asking?

Or might we get further in asking why good things happen to bad people?

For such all of us are.

And yet you see that so often in life we seem so adamant upon protecting our perspective that it ends up costing us the ability to see further than our faith’s fragility is willing to go, and that because this faith is known to hold hardship as a reward given unto those who are meant to be bettered by it.

After all, is this not the very message painted in the pain met on Calvary?

Us bettered by helping us see what we’d become?

Is that not an opportunity?

Does not then opportunity come at a cost sometimes?

A cost such as seeing those parts of His Word that exist outside those cherry-picked for their ability to make us feel better? Verses such as those surrounding 29:11 in Jeremiah that nobody really seems to know about?

Indeed, Jeremiah 29:10 says that (Lord speaking) “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.”

Back to this place?

Going on…

29:12-14 says “then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”

Ah yes, back to the place they were now being forced to leave as they were facing down the barrel of what was a promised 70 years of exile!

Making then 29:11 far deeper in meaning than we’ve sought to so selfishly make is seem.

For 29:11 was given to a people going into exile, leaving everything they’ve ever known, losing everything they’d ever owned. Life was being turned on its head, many of them so old that they’d be dead before they’d ever have the chance to see their homes again. After all 70 years is a long time.

Even today for many it’s a lifetime.

And yet God gave them that promise that once their exile was over, their punishment completed, He would bring them back.

Not all of them would make it.

Because the opportunity in front of them was given unto their improvement in holiness by thrusting them into basic enslavement, much like their ancestors had known in Egypt. Much like we still know today inside such things as addiction and fear and worry and vanity and pride and the ego which swells inside and tells us lies such as how it’s always everyone else who has better lives.

Do they?

Maybe.

But friends, how many of our life’s difficulties, dangers, disasters are designed inside our unwillingness to be either humble or humbled?

This is something I’ve struggled through all weekend having been faced with something that, in 38 years, has never once happened to me.

It’s left me so confused that I truly have no idea what to say, what to do, what to think.

For it’s an opportunity I think, but yet one that I only remember having wanted once but long since retired from trying to keep alive. And that because for years I’ve lived in the death of addiction to what’s proven a substance of the seen and felt but never the truth, never anything real, never anything right.

Indeed, my life has changed in a matter of days and it has me questioning, second guessing all sorts of things.

Why?

Because I’m terrified. Because I’ve grown so used to my life that I know only to balk at any suggestion of anything different, even anything better perhaps. Because I’ve grown content with who I am, where I am, the hope of where I’m going. But yet so too have I been known to spend a life thus far knowing contentment as complacency.

And complacency knows only to deny, reject, doubt every single opportunity given it.

Why?

Because opportunity asks always that we risk whatever is for whatever can still be. Because opportunity asks that we embrace what becomes a journey through which we endure trial and triumph over them, also though facing some and falling or failing to make it through them. Because opportunity is the greatest blessing of all as it’s God asking us to take part in the plans and purposes He has for us, plans that are indeed for our good, hope and a future kind of thing.

Plans that bring things that cause us to learn what hope really is and that it really is often a long way off.

Yet is this not why we scoff at any suggestion unto the investigation into, unto a new life? Could it be better? Sure as, well, again we’ve often measured our lives as rather lacking in regard to what those around us have. But could it take forever to get there to that better, a forever thus spent inside a weather that’s not so good as the better we’re only helped to believe in further by the very weather that makes the journey home hard?

Also yes.

And indeed, as is plain to see this life is often hard, heavy, scary at times. Problem is that our eyes seem always unable to find the opportunity hidden inside that which is so clearly hard, so very heavy, so often scary. We can’t see it because, again, we’ve become so complacent that we’re only ever content with that which brings us comfort.

But friends, comfort knows nothing of opportunity as it knows only to stay comfy. And that always demands that we do only whatever it is that we’re already doing.

But if all we ever do is all we’ve already done, then all we can ever hope to be is whoever it is that we’ve already become.

And how can that be better than whatever we know it to be?

It can’t. Because, again, who hopes for what they already have? How can we hope in better if we never have any intention of moving toward whatever, wherever, whoever is the better that we can be? And indeed, there are sadly those who so clearly seem to always assume that they are already the best they can be. Maybe they are, and if so, good for them.

But friends, what more of all that life is and everything better we’re still able to be can we ever become if we continue to think that all that’s good is only all that is?

Is life as we’ve known it truly the best it can be?

And if it isn’t, then how on earth can we continue denying the many opportunities that God sends our way? How much longer can we ignore the Word speaking to our hearts asking us there to start in what becomes an overhaul of everything we are and hope to be? How much longer will we fail to see that we need the rain more than days spent in pride and parade? How many more days will we agree to waste, along then with the growth meant inside them, because we’re afraid of the pains that all growth is known for?

What are we so afraid for, afraid of?

It’s clearly not the destination which is promised to be better, an improvement obvious to see is fully possible considering the presence of so much chaos and confusion where we are today. Must then be the journey there as, yeah, it is a road paved in pain and flooded with rain and asking us always to endure the strain but only so that we’ve something to rest from once we get to wherever it is that He has us going.

Never manage to realize or understand that part either, do we?

That rest is something known only having worked prior? That peace is something only able to be appreciated best by those who’ve had little if any? That joy is only more joyous having endured mourning and misery? That happiness, hope, healing and holiness are rewards given best and experienced most by those who’ve grown the most because of them and all the hardship, hassle, horror and hurt that made them into what they can’t be without them.

For the truth is that something even as priceless and hopeful as holiness is, it can’t be anything to anyone who refuses to come apart from wherever they are living as whoever they are doing whatever they are.

For to be holy is to be set apart.

Which is all that God seeks for us as He knows the plans He has for this world too.

And no, they are not plans for hope nor a future.

At least not a future that anyone will have hoped for.

This is why He pays us so much attentions as is, yes, oftentimes met in affliction and pain and misery. It’s to help us to see that we don’t belong here in what is a place in which we meet all of these things and their like so often in life. He sends us through trial and torments us with reminders of all the times we’ve either tried and failed or more often just failed to try.

Why?

To help us learn how not to.

It’s to strengthen us, harden us, help us toward a hope that is hard to get to and asks more strength than we have to hold out for sometimes.

But friends, that’s just it!

We cannot learn to hold out hope if never we need to endure those things that ask us to hold hope for what is it, which is all that isn’t yet.

Don’t we get that?

That every hope is for something that isn’t yet? Again, who hopes for what they already have?

And yeah, we do already have a life. But friends, is it the life we hoped it would be? Did we ever hope it would be this hard or become this scary? Or is not our life here so scary and hard because our experiencing those things now only serve to help us believe in a place in which nothing scary exists and we’ve rather truly entered our rest having retired from the fighting that we waged within this war that is this life that we live in this place in which, yeah, things are unfair and sometimes don’t make sense and rarely add up to even anything rational at all.

This world and our lives herein, it’s meant to be the closest thing to hell that we ever have to see.

And that so that we can learn more about what all Heaven must be!

That’s why He pays us so much attention. It’s because Heaven is worth these lives of affliction, of torment, of misery and every moment we could ever hope to meet of them along the way.

It’s to help us get the suffering out of the way by leading us into the way that He who is the Way walked. And again, it wasn’t in comfort or affluence or even influence. Most people hated Jesus!

For some reason many here still do.

What then makes us think that our journey here should be anything but rude, hard, literally everything we never want it to be?

All so that it can become everything better than everything it’s been.

If only we had the courage to welcome the testing and stand boldly unafraid of the rains He sends we just find within them a reason, a purpose, another piece of the puzzle that is His promise.

For it’s a promise we shall never see from our perspective.

No, we’re entirely too worried about worry and the whining we get to do because of all that worries us, all that wearies us in this life.

Indeed, I believe that just as soon as we manage to get over ourselves and all our selfish tragedies, such is the very same moment that finally we’ll start to see that everything here does happen for a reason. And that the reason is a growth in righteousness that we can elsewise never know anything of so long as we remain so self-righteous as to contend that our lives are unfair because our lives are hard here.

They should be.

For if they were easy then He must have nothing left to teach and thus, for us, no remaining opportunity.

Nothing else then, nothing better for us ever to be.

And, well, what’s scarier than that?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold