Day 4094 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 88:15 NIV

What is despair?

Is it a result of a life broken beyond repair? Is it a symptom of a soul seemingly the same? Is it the number of days spent in the sun being drown by those flooded with rain? Is it a man who’s borne so much pain, strain, struggle and sorrow that all he seems to know is to hurt? Is it a hurt so deep that there’s no hope left to find or feel? Is it something a person can even feel at all or is it maybe just such a depth of despondency that the dejection discovered finds no objection from joy as there’s simply no such happiness to disagree with our feeling so far down anymore?

Is it a matter of all of life’s terrors finally triumphing over us, leaving us in a pile of torment that no torrent or tempest could ever wash away?

Is it a day at which we’re all to arrive in which our life is so far away from the sun that we finally just succumb to the idea that we’ll never know life again?

In fact I do think it’s a place that most if not all of us have been, maybe more times than we’ve cared to remember. After all, why remember such times in life in which life was so far from fine and thus us from okay that of it we even then had nothing good to say? Indeed, why hold tight to those tightropes from which we’ve fallen having been found stalled along them, teetering upon what became the very edge of our own disasters and their inevitable destructions?

No, there’s no life there to see inside the many miseries we’ve met with in life.

Or so we assume.

But what’s becoming rather scary is that it does seems as if we’re all slowly losing our ability, our willingness, our audacity to move from them, learn from them. Rather anymore we’ve become a people who seem to mind not wallowing within them as we think them a matter which means mercy given us from others. We think that our looking always sad and sorrowful will somehow help us to avoid the now generalized wrath of what is a world so wicked that indeed very few care about anyone, themselves included.

Indeed, I believe that there are those who even bring misery upon themselves in the form of either physical pain or mental torment, a life given unto tearing oneself apart seeking for always only this opportunity to find someone else to feel sorry for them so that they can feel better justified in their having long since chosen that as the way in which they too wanted to spend this life.

Why?

Because it’ll always be easier to let this life beat us down seeing as how that’s pretty much what this life’s meant to do.

For it’s true that this life is a test in which we are thus tested, tried, tempted, all with the hopes of our souls to refine as they hopefully come to find that way through life that seeks not its prize nor rest within this life within this place but rather the both in only that face that we can’t see in that place that we’ve not been in that hope that with Him there is still room for us despite all that’s happened to us and just how horribly we’ve handled it.

That’s the part we never talk about, isn’t it?

See, so often it seems as though our every story is one believed won by being written either in our glory or a scene so gory that those who hear of it feel no option but to either cheer us on or come alongside and cry with us. There is no middle anymore, no compromise to be considered. Rather everything in life has become either so very good that it seems to agree with our estimation that we’re good people to whom good things are thus deserved or instead so very bad that it entirely counteracts our acting as if we’re actually good people who deserve good to meet us inside every step we take toward what’s apparently a further perfection.

Never talk about our imperfections.

Never then consider our lack of introspections.

Never then come anywhere close to being able to notice all the contradictions.

Never then become of the ability to realize that all the bad things that happen in life are either the direct result of our walking directly opposed to God’s good will or that of someone else doing the same.

Which is odd seeing as how we’re a people who, having apparently been given always the short end of the stick, always seek for someone else to beat with it. Indeed, we seek incessantly for someone to blame for our lives having gone this way that they have. We seek a reason as to why we’re always mad, always sad, always so far from glad that we eventually come to believe that we’ve never had a chance to know anything of happiness, of hope, of even the healing we know we need thanks to all the hurting and horror we’ve known.

And maybe we have had it bad.

Maybe we have endured more than our share of struggle and strife.

Perhaps this life has gone so off the rails that we can’t afford the bails nor even the buckets with which to ourselves try and bail what is a ship that just feels as if it continues sinking into that same stinking existence that we’ve always existed within. Indeed, maybe the rain doesn’t stop. Maybe the hardship continues to come. Maybe the suffering of life itself is all we’re meant to know.

Maybe we’re supposed to be broke, lonely, afraid, ashamed.

Yes, maybe despair is a good thing.

In fact, perhaps it’s the very best of all things. Perhaps we need to become so broken at times that indeed our lives feel as if they’re not worth living.

Why?

Because maybe those are the times in which we finally learn to decide that they are and for what we should live them. Because maybe those times in which nothing is going right and nothing feels good are the same moments in which we finally meet with this resiliency that refuses to give up. Maybe those days that find us so strained and sorrowed as the same as come to help us know that there’s something better and that too we’re thus not there yet.

Yes, maybe we need this life to be miserable even more than it is so that we can finally seek for Him who came to this world literally to die, to give up His life, to take up a cross and use the suffering thereon to find the lost via opening their eyes to see the truth that tells us that this life is perhaps meant to be the one in which we are tested, in which we are tried, in which we ultimately fail and fall short in and of the both.

Because when failure and fear no longer remain things we think we can avoid, then all of the sudden we start becoming unafraid to fail, to feel pain, to know struggle.

For having experienced, endured all the above already, doing so again is nothing but another day spent in the suck.

All of such combined into a kind of hope we’d simply never find and thus never know were this life to always go so easy, so safely, so comfortably and successfully as we’d all so obviously prefer it did.

No, we don’t need this life to go well, to be easy, to feel safe.

Because should we have such rewards here and now, well then what could there be that could be better wherever it is that we’re going?

Never think about that part either.

How there has to come war if we’re to know peace and what all it really means as it finally comes to overcome the combat. Or how there must first come hurting if we’re to know the healing that makes it all better. Or how we’ve to endure the worst of weather if we’re ever to appreciate the gentle breeze that turns tall grass into seas bringing wave upon wave of relief from the heat. Or how we have to experience fear, worry, sadness even if we’re ever to feel them fade away upon that day when we arrive at that place in which it’s said that no such things exist.

Yes, we have to know the bad of this life to know the good promised us when it ends.

Otherwise all that’ll end is the good life we had inside what were days and decisions always so good and easy that we really never came anywhere close to finding any reason to close the chapters we’ve been writing in this book we’ve been living that’s found us so often living against He who died for us to do something better with this existence than we’ve done.

Again, we never talk about that part.

How we’re the ones who bring upon ourselves our every single disappointment that we ever experience in life, doing so entirely blind to the fact that we are because we still don’t seem at all able to understand that it’s our many expectations that set us up to be upset when we fail them or they fail us or we don’t find them or they even seem to run from us.

We’re the ones who’ve taken it upon ourselves to imagine all these idealistic outcomes in life in which everything always goes just right, we always feel just right, the entire sum of all that’s life is simply always so right that nothing then ever goes wrong. And we’ve bought this lie for so long that we seemingly know now no other way to enter every day but with all our hopes and dreams and plans for things to go so well that life itself swells into such an overwhelming glory that we don’t know what to do with all the health and wealth and happiness we find.

We’re the ones who cooked up that expectation of this life going always right.

And so then we’re the ones destined to be disappointed anytime that something doesn’t fall in line.

And yet we never stop the imagining. We never stop the dreaming. We never cease designing all these ideas and their ideals in what remains sadly a life that we still sadly assume our own.

That’s the whole point of despair.

It’s to finally break through the nonsense and show us to a life that’s an abject nightmare all so that we can finally be forced to begin coming to terms with the fact that all we’ve done is turned life into a nonstop list of our many expected excitements. That we’ve insisted our story become one written always in glory and nothing but gold. That we’re the ones who’ve all but demanded that everything go our way because we’re the ones who continue to insist that our way is actually a thing.

It isn’t!

Our way is but a prison constructed inside our own minds in which we play either warden or victim depending upon the situation. We sit in judgement of those not doing things the way we think they should. And yet then we too play the wounded whenever life again goes in any way opposed to our plans and preferences. Indeed, all but all of life anymore is all but insisted to fall prey to our playing as if we know what we’re doing and that we’re doing it all so well that, again, we both deserve nothing but what we determine to be good things to happen to us or thus to complain endlessly when said good things don’t come our way.

There it is again, our way.

I’m telling you friends, I don’t know that there’s a more dire disaster to ever be proven than that delusion that we’ve designed that we call our way.

Because it’s set us up for so much disappointment that such things as despair and dejection are simply now bound to happen because life in a broken world simply cannot then ever possibly hold the many outcomes and victories and perfect sceneries that we’ve come to insist upon it. Indeed, we’ve chosen to live this life as if a life in this world could be perfect despite there being nothing of actual perfection in this world.

So little in fact that most don’t even try for it anymore.

Because, well, what is it? What is perfect? What is easy? What is safety? What is success? Are not they all some manner or measure of a personal subjectivity unto a person’s own feelings, expectations, disappointments even? How is it that we’ve all managed to become so sure as we sure seem to always be that we always know what’s best?

Granted, there a great many things in life that never feel good or seem good or sound good or go down good.

But isn’t that true because they help us peruse the better that there thus must be?

Again, if we’ve not endured war then how can we appreciate peace? If we’re not weary and worn then of what worth is rest? If never we’ve been broken or beaten then what’s the use in our leaving what’s then a life that has gone at least alright? Indeed, if life has gone alright, not too bad, pretty well most days, then for what or where can hope be or inspire us thus to go?

You see, as I get older I’m becoming more and more convinced that we need more and more the bad things in life, the heavy things, the hard things, the miseries and mistakes that we both make and yet cannot possibly make a life of so that we can finally start to find that there is a life that does exist above them. We need to hurt so that we’ve the hope of not hurting someday. We need to be left alone so that we have the hope of not being lonely. We need to be broken so that we can finally start coming to terms with the fact that we can’t put ourselves back together.

All so that we can finally learn to seek our help from another.

And, well, who better than He who died on that cross, a place chosen because it looked like a tree and was made of the very same stuff that makes trees what they are, all to put then the proverbial fruit back in its place so that we don’t waste any more time trying in this life to find more that we needn’t know about. But that rather we can just look to Him whenever we don’t know what to do, what to think, where else to go?

Indeed, as Peter asked in John 6, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Get that?

Eternal life.

Not this life. Not this time. Not something confined to only all we’ve known and all we still somehow hope it can someday be.

No.

Christ came to lead us out of this world by asking we lay down these lives and take up crosses, following Him wherever He goes and enduring the entirety of all His path goes through.

And what did His path here go through?

Everything we don’t want to.

He felt the sting of rejection. He endured the loneliness of watching friends walk away. He literally told one guy that the Son of Man had no place to lay His head, a truth that meant that He had here no home, no safe place, no comfortable hideout hidden in the woods to which He could retreat from a world that chose to treat Him like a criminal, a freak, a liar, a loser, a loner that nobody would miss. Yes, He endured the worst of us who think this life is the one we need to go the best.

A path culminating in His dying in an agony we cannot possibly even begin to imagine as a crowd looked on mocking Him, spitting on Him, cursing Him.

Why?

Because He’d healed them. Because He’d given them hope. Because He promised them that they were not alone but that God saw them, that God knew them, that God loved them so very much that He’d rather watch His only Son die than to leave them, to leave us where we are in what remains still today this damnable assumption that we need life to go our way as is always only defined by whatever it is that makes us feel good or special or important or elsewise powerful.

Yes, Christ came to this earth to pay for our sins in a sign of such humility that it ought to remind us that our being powerful isn’t the purpose of all this.

Being penitent is.

And well, what better place to meet with all the regret and remorse and sadness and sorrow that penitence is than in those places in which all our power is gone, all our courage is missing, all our arrogance is broken and every ounce of any hope we’d ever had has all but packed its bags and wished us well?

Indeed, we need to be hopeless here. Because, well, there is nothing to hope for here.

This world is just the war we’re in, not then the rest we need.

Look, I know that none of us go looking for things to go bad, to feel wrong, to fail so completely that we’re completely without any hope or joy or even reason to keep on going. We avoid those things as they bring this strain that forces life into places we don’t want it go as they’re the same places we don’t want to be. Nobody wants to be sad. Nobody wants to be afraid. Nobody wants to be lonely or left holding the remains a life that’s gone up in smoke and crumbled to pieces.

But friends, we need those places. We need those trials. We need the torment.

Because nothing else can show us what hope is than those moments in which hope isn’t.

Indeed, I truly believe that we’ll never know what life is meant to be filled with until it’s been emptied of everything we’ve tried to make fit within it. That we will never know life at all until we ourselves are emptied of all that life isn’t.

And if that means despair, despondency, dejection, so be it.

Because the best way for things to be put back together is sometimes for their to be broken apart first.

And who better to do so than He who sees the heart first and knows not only what hope is but where hope is?

Question is do we trust Him to get us there and will that trust hold out when this life proves that what we’ve known of hope can’t?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold