Day 4095 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Lamentations 3:17 NIV

What is depravation?

Is it to be deprived of something in life, of life itself perhaps? It is the missing of something, misplacing of something? Is it the seeing all that another has and holding only in that a list of all we don’t? Is it this insistence upon housing our hope inside all things held either in the hand or heart of those with whom we share this hole? Is it the relative wholeness witnessed within the walk of another, a comparative lack then seen inside our own? Is it to go without, to never know, to never feel, to always wonder what it might be like to be like another?

Is it the life of a drifter who’s sometimes unhappy that they’ve chosen a life without a home?

Is it understanding the idea of home, and that of hope, and realizing that no matter what we might try our trying still to find either where we are is but as wasted an effort as any might try and that toward anything at all?

Of all we have, of all we’ve seen, of every story we’ve lived and all the memories they’ve made, why is it that we all seem always as if we’re always missing something? As if we’re always lacking in some way? As if our lives are perpetually empty of something we feel either owed or simply curious of and wish to know, want to hold? What are we missing? What don’t we have? Why is it that life here is so bad as it so often seems to literally everyone?

How is it that we all know so much of emptiness in what is a life so filled with so much more than we’ve ever needed or even known what to do with?

What are we doing without?

And, well, why might that be, where could it have gone, why did it go and did we have anything to do with it going?

I stood just last night at my bedroom window watching out as the firebugs danced through the tall grass behind us and I just wondered why it is that something so simple and yet curious as a bug that’s butt lights up can manage to just simply exist inside the entirely simple existence for which God created it and yet we, as progressed and advanced as we so continually tout ourselves to be and wish still the more we were, can’t manage to make it a minute without feeling bad for ourselves thanks to all we’re missing in life?

Hundreds of stars in the sky and dozens of flashing bugs drifting below them seem to know then something we don’t.

And so yeah, seems then we are deprived. That we are missing out. That we are all stood on the outside of life looking in and wondering why ours doesn’t look like theirs, work like theirs, feel like theirs. Why is ours always the one that’s going without, missing out, falling short of all we apparently believe it still should be? What else should it be my friends?

What else does life owe us that it thus far hasn’t apparently shown us?

Indeed, why is it that, as the title of this book would proffer, why is it that we all seem to know so much of lament in what’s long been a quite lamentable life? Again, where did everything go that we were supposed to have or hold or feel or find? Where is that life in which we could be happy, content, perfectly at peace with the piece we’ve been given?

Why is it that still we’re missing our piece of peace?

Is it just not there?

Have all the storms we’ve faced along the way blown it away? Do all our struggles keep it away? Does our sadness, our sorrow, our shame keep it at bay? Is it always to be only the hope of another day, never then this one we’re living for now?

How is it that we can manage to hold hope hostage inside this life we’re living in this world we’re leaving but we can’t ever seem to accomplish the same with peace? Can’t find it in this place. Can’t force it to show its face. Rather it’s always hidden on the other side of hardship and just beyond the hatred we have for it.

But could that be it?

Not that we’re deprived of peace but that we’ve rather allowed it to always remain reliant upon some ideal set of situations or circumstances that are literally never coming? That we’ve invented a version of peace that needs life to go a certain way, a way in which it never goes? Is it all these ideas we have and the ideals they hold of however it is that we ourselves think this life should go?

Thus us then still on the thrones?

Indeed, to be deprived means to be denied. It’s to have something refused us. It’s this kind of outside rejection of our having something that we obviously care about enough, and apparently know enough about to do so, that we think our lives are incomplete without.

Are they?

Are our lives truly as unfinished as our constant unhappiness seems to say we seem to assume?

Would our lives feel more complete had our feet truly trod every path toward every trophy and triumph we’ve ever wished to have?

Should something such as hope, and the peace in/of life that it’s so often for, should it be always so forced to fit on this side of that line that divides here from forever?

Considering that we’re all still alive and eternity still on the line waiting for us to pick up the phone, why then is it that all we still seem to know is just the lack we have in life?

Is it not because this life we have hasn’t been our version of perfect? And too that the life we haven’t yet isn’t yet anything different? Indeed, it seems we all continue to find plenty of ways to either doubt or defer the dilemma that is forever as we rather seem plenty content to remain constantly focused on the content of the current and that often only using it for an endless comparison between what we have and what we don’t as is often found in our studying the lives of those around us.

They’re always the haves whilst we the perpetual have-nots.

But again my friends, what is it that we don’t have?

And even bigger than that, is it something that we can’t ever have or simply shouldn’t try to have here?

You know, considering how this world is nearing its end and thus too everything had and held within?

Why do we want the best of everything inside this one place we’re all promised to be leaving? Why do we spend so much time seeking so very much that cannot possibly come with us, and that no matter how big the casket nor wide the hole they lay it in? What would we honestly do with some mythical ‘best life’ in this one life in which we’ll all live the least?

I think about this all the time.

For sure, this life seems like a long time, and to us, well, it is. This is literally the only life we’ve any of us ever known. This world is our only present understanding of what it feels like to be at home. As of now all we can see is all that can be seen as of now.

What about all that can’t? And yeah, granted, we could make the argument that we’re at present being then deprived of it. And indeed, that case does seem to hold at least some measureable water.

But just because we don’t have something on us, in us, with us at this moment doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re being deprived of it.

Maybe we’re just being readied for it.

Maybe we’re just enduring things that are there to help us to better appreciate it. Maybe this life as a whole, as long and wide as it so often is or isn’t depending upon our own personal measurement of what matters and why, maybe this life and all it is is nothing but an opportunity to experience everything we don’t want to so that whenever we do finally reach the end of our stay, we can go away with no fears, no sadness, no sorrow to be seen as we know in our hearts that we’ve only seen here the worst of life and have then the very best to look forward to.

And yet how impossible it is to look forward to anything when it seems that everything we’re willing or able to worry about is only whatever it is that we feel we’re going without!

And yes, perhaps this life and all the misery met within does seem to mean that God is slow in keeping His promises as we all know His promises to include such things as peace and rest and joy unending.

And yeah, we ain’t any of us ever had any of those thing yet.

Does that mean we’re being deprived of them? That He’s refusing to let us have them, hold them, know them? Is He then unloving, unkind seeing as how He continues to allow this life to test us, to best us, to break us down and leave our faces constantly frowned as we stare at the ground seeking for the substance of the ever more we continue to think we need?

Or is He just still waiting for us to finally find that, like those firebugs lighting up the field simply because that’s what He created them to do, is He just rather waiting for us to lose this list of things we don’t have and find in that an ability to appreciate all that we do have?

Indeed, when’s the last time we tried that?

To just be happy with what we do have? To be thankful for the hope we have known, do know? To rejoice over the many blessings that we’ve instead more often only taken for granted? Indeed, when’s the last time we didn’t take life itself for granted as is done in all these plans we’re making for all these things we’re thinking that we really, really need and will hopefully have by this time next week, next month, next year?

You see friends, we’re unwittingly living in the future but willingly keeping even the future here!

In the very same place in which hope and peace and joy and even reason so often prove so impossible to find, to feel, to have for more than a moment at most.

Why do we do that?

And could our doing that be what’s causing us to consider that we’re missing out, falling short, failing to find inside our lives the sum of everything we want found and felt in what would then be lives that no longer fail or fall short of our unbridled expectations but are rather finally filled with all the frills and thrills that we just know would make our stay here far more amazing than it’s ever seemed to be?

Why is our stay here so far from amazing?

Could it be that we’ve become so busy thinking of all these things we’re missing and scratching our heads in regard to how to find them, and how to afford them once we have, that we’ve left ourselves no time to stare out a window into the dark gray canvas that forms the perfect backdrop for our to watch some of God’s more amazing creations flicker away simply because that’s what they do?

Depending on how long you’ve read along with these daily posts you might just so happen to know that my family and I finally got the chance last April to move out of the apartment way of life. 10+ years spent in an apartment setting sat inside a city filled with all the lights and sounds and concrete that anyone could ever need. And indeed, within that decade I’d forgotten about lightning bugs. I lost the awe of staring up at the stars because you just couldn’t see them thanks to all the all-night lights shining always around us.

I forgot the sounds of crickets chirping in the cool of a summer’s evening. Forgot how effortless the birds make flying seem to the planes that may fly higher but only under artificial power that relies on fuel rather than food.

Forgot a lot in all those years in which I didn’t get to see it, hear it as much.

Was I being deprived of it? Did all the birds and bugs and the millions of stars shining always above cease to exist inside that existence in which they couldn’t be seen or heard?

Or were those 10+ years only getting me ready to feel this childlike excitement to stand at my window and watch them all for however long I want now that I can see them as I get ready to call it an evening and fall asleep to the sound of those crickets playing that lullaby that God taught them to sing?

I’ll tell you now that seeing and hearing all these things means more to me now than when I was a kid.

Because you can’t know how special something truly is until you’ve gone without it for so long that it takes you by surprise and somehow manages to keep doing it night after night and day after day.

And yet we hate this life having to be lived that way.

We despise having to wait. Rather we’ve become of such constant impatience that we’re again always so busy that we haven’t the time to stop and smell the roses or sit on our porch and watch the clouds drift by above. We make so little time for the simpler things in life because we’re instead convinced that they’ll always be there and thus we needn’t worry about them letting us down.

But friends, what if our selfishness has caused us to discount the fact that maybe we’re the ones letting life down? What if those lightning bugs have been sparkling every single night of this entire life just hoping that we’d see what they could do? What if all those stars hanging motionless above have been waiting always for us to find a moment to stop and imagine how far they are away?

What if Heaven isn’t where we are because He who went there to make ready our place is still waiting for us to want it more than another piece of this place we are?

Knowing how much it means to see the stars and watch the lightning bugs drift off to the sound of crickets, I can’t imagine how amazing it will be when we finally make it home and are there forever able to see the sum of everything that this life was leading toward and thus getting us ready for.

Question is though how much longer shall we deprive ourselves of that hope?

Indeed, how much longer will we detain our hope here on this side of what all is life? Truly friends, what can we even know of all that life is when all it is us to us is just some list of things we don’t have in this world?

Would our lives be that much better if we did have peace in this place? Maybe. But is peace something we should be so willing to waste here? See, I’ve come to realize that everything in this life is already gone. It’s all already lost. And that’s because, again, we can’t take any of it with us. But the promise is that we will all leave this world.

Where shall we go? What all awaits us arriving there? How long will life there be? How does one even begin to wrap their minds around eternity, let alone set to measuring the same?

And if even the concept of eternity is entirely too big to imagine, too impossible to measure, then who are we to determine even here what matters?

After all, what of what’s here can matter when we’ve still the entirety of forever to look forward to?

Or, again, is that even something we know how to do? Or are we rather so transfixed by all that’s temporary and transient that we’ve all but fully forgotten that so too are we and thus too all we have and maybe even all we don’t?

Indeed, who are we to say that we’ll forever fail to have all of that which we’ve always wished we had? Is God really going to refuse us such things as peace, rest, joy for all of forever?

Or is He just sending us into all these days in which so many things go so very wrong in order to help us find that childlike hope of that home that isn’t here, a hope that will one day explode when we’re finally wherever it’s always been?

My point friends is that we’re entirely too willing to spend our lives lost in wanting, in wishing, in worrying about all it is that we think we’re missing. And don’t get me wrong, it would be amazing to find joy and feel peace a little more often than we so often don’t. But that we don’t only gives us still the ability to hope for that day inside that place in which peace won’t be hard to find anymore. That place where joy will become so normal that we’ll never again know anything else of everything less.

That place where life itself will not end but will rather forever be all that it was always supposed to be.

Which is pretty much entirely different than everything it’s sadly become.

Yes, the argument could be made that we are doing without, going without, being then deprived of certain things. But is that really the case we want to make? That God’s being mean by making us endure a life in which more goes wrong than ever feels right?

Or might we be far better off, even right now, if we allowed ourselves to learn again how to believe in the purpose of patience and how it’s to help us experience the worst part first so that, whenever the better finally arrives or we arrive unto it, it there and then proves so amazing that we don’t even have the ability to remember anything of all that was lesser and harder and scarier and, yes, emptier.

That’s my point my friends. It’s that we need these lives to be empty, to feel unfinished, to not go the way we want them to. Why? Because everything that’s hard or miserable or that leaves us feeling empty and lonely and thus deprived of something, it all gives us that very same something to look forward to, to hope for, to even pray for.

And, well, I for one can’t find any harm in anything that encourages us to learn how to hope or even start trying to pray as both hope and prayer lead us ever closer to God and thus further away from here.

And that’s got to be just about the best thing we could ever possibly do seeing as how, since we’re all so unhappy here, we’ve apparently then not quite so much to lose in our looking forward to leaving for home.

Which is what our being deprived of peace and rest and joy is supposed to help us do.

For ‘tis a great thing to be deprived of the prosperity that is peace and that remains hope for however long we need so that we can finally learn to divide our needs from our wants, set the latter on fire, and in doing so find the same finally stoked inside what then becomes a life that cannot wait finally be in that place where all we’ve missed is so promised us that we’ll spend forever enjoying what we’ve not had much chance to meet along the way.

Don’t focus on all you don’t have here. Rather concern yourself with all that here doesn’t have and you’ll finally start to understand what hope really is and where peace has always been.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold