Day 4102 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Job 5:17 NIV

What is emendation?

Is it something of an amending but only vaguely specific? Is it something of a preference, an input as given us from another who sees something concerning in our present? Is it a present offered those who, though writing their own story, or so we’re often told, are found to be either unworthy or unable to actually hold a pen? Is it an emancipation from a life lived as if a scribe living a life that’s meant to die no matter how many attempts we’ve made at a better rewrite? Is it rewriting a life rewired to find us no longer hired out for temp work or minimum wage?

Is it altering the ways in which we walk, the words used when we talk, maybe even something which inspires us to talk less as it suggests that our every word will be weighed?

Is it the weight of a mistake, one we didn’t catch but rather was caught by another who, in this case, cares enough to inspire in us a willingness to be rebuked?

If anything I think it’s something a proof of humility making it through what’s elsewise been, for all our lives, an exterior so toughened because it’s learned to assume that anything else is everything inferior. Is it? Is everything different than everything we’ve done truly something not worth our doing? Has everything we’ve ever done accomplished a life in which we’ve too much to risk losing to dare spend even a breath thinking about something better?

Is where we are who we’re supposed to be?

Is who we are the only place we were ever meant to go?

Or might there be something else to know, something better perhaps, as is hidden down that path of our not thinking we know everything of a life that we’re still living? That question has long fascinated me! And that’s because, despite our current age or proclivity, truth is that if we’re still here and thus still alive then reality is that none of us who can say we are have any idea as to what it’s like to have made it this far. Because none of us have never been here before.

There has literally never been another May 17th of the year 2026 in the entirety of human history.

This day we’ve awakened unto today is the first and only like it.

Problem’s become that inside every day we’ve ever lived we’ve all lived doing basically the same things as we did the day before. And sure, there may be some reason to that should anything we’ve already done truly be anything of all we were created to do and put here to try. But I fear that odds are, as bet upon by both guilt and regret, we’ve not really managed to get quite so much so right thus far. Rather, as measured by guilt and regret being things all of us have met, seems more likely that we’ve really more room for potential improvement that we might be of the ability to imagine.

Not that we will because, well, let’s face it, it’s becoming heartbreakingly obvious that improvement toward a personal capacity for individual potential is, let’s say, waning in the court of public opinion.

Rather what seems to have become the general verdict rendered of such court is that we’re all so smart that we can basically retire from said trying, and that even unto the writing of our own story as has long been the main-sought glory of all ego and pride, and elsewise just let technology take over. Indeed, outside our every window, even these we wear between our ears, that too no longer hear, what we see inside every single day is a people falling away into screens watching things which bring them no benefit whatever.

And the common response to anyone who points out the petty pities of it all?

“Whatever.”

Don’t care. Know what I’m doing. Leave me alone.

Indeed, we’ve long been a people who’ve considered that we’ve had it all figured, right down to spending the vast majority of our time worrying about finances and how we’re going to make it to what are days coming our way anyway, and that regardless of whether or not we’ve the means the make it through them.

Truly, we remain a people entirely more worried about what we have than the entire sum of who we are, where we are, where we’re going, what anything means along the way.

Again, we all just continue to agree to wake up every day and all but wish away every chance we have to change, to grow, to actually come to know something more regarding the meaning of life and how ours are then to be measured whenever we get wherever we’re headed.

Which is something itself that’s been long since lost behind our counting costs and ignoring consequence.

Because, again, we just continue to agree to live with our heads down, oddly enough aiming our eyes toward our feet, which you’d think would inspire us to watch where we’re walking at least. But no. No, they’re just held low to gaze with ease at a phone that’s become our window to the world we’re walking through whilst staring at it.

All while pretending that we know what we’re doing despite our having no idea what all we’re missing.

Let alone everything we’ve misunderstood and are at present both misunderstanding, and exponentially worse, misrepresenting.

You see, that’s why God came in Christ. Sure, there’s some love to be measured in it as well as, well, greater love has no one than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. A love only doubled upon in that He somehow managed to see as friends those who were living, are still, as if enemies thanks to our differing enmities. And so yes, love technically remains the obvious undercurrent of He who is the Cornerstone. But there’s another part as that part isn’t alone.

And the other part is that He came because we’d become what were, still are, wayward emissaries who’d vastly lost sight of the mission we’d been given as those meant then to be missionaries sent into all the world to proclaim the Gospel of He who came to show us what love is and both why and how our lives had come to be written in a way that only proved able to say we had no memory of it.

In other words we’d lost the plot and He came to help us both sort it out and that toward a vastly better ending!

Literally now one of those happily ever after things.

For that is the promise He came to bring as is held in His having gone to make ready us a place in that place in which all that makes this place so filled with such pain and strain and struggle and stain isn’t to be found.

A promised land so amazing because we all know the pains and strains and struggles and stains of this life lived in this place in which those things are far more common, and these days oddly commended, than I think any of us ever would have imagined we’d eventually become so willing to accept as it appears we have.

And that because we have.

We have settled. We have agreed. We have accepted a life lived in greed and fed upon the gluttony of every idol known to humanity. We’ve all given away more opportunities at things and people better than anything we’ve any of us ever had or been.

In fact, giving away is basically what the story of our lives has been.

And the issue then is that, again, we’ve long lived as if the writers of them!

Meaning then that every disaster and any disappointment was, wait for it…

OUR FAULT!

Yep, it’s all our fault. Every failure, every fear, every tear we’ve never cried thanks to a life in which caring and compassion have all but gone dry, and that even for ourselves who we’ve held as if but slaves or inmates chained perpetually to our ever growing lists of opinions and preferences, it’s all on us. We did it. We broke it. We lost it. We sold it.

The ‘it’ in this case being, well, everything.

We lost everything. We broke everything. We sold away everything we could have been in order to buy whatever it is that we’ve become.

Again, the mere thought is one so maniacally intriguing and yet so personally bothersome that I can’t help but be absolutely amazed by it!

What life didn’t I live thanks to the one I did? Who’s the person I didn’t become because of the person I was? Who all might I have known had I known those I now know no more? What all could I have accomplished in the years, decades even, spent doing things that I now regret doing?

Is regret an accomplishment?

Or is it rather the basis for an amendment that is the point and purpose of emendation?

See, to emend is to make correction to, and that specifically to a written material like a book or newspaper article. To emend is basically the job of an editor who, thanks to experience and education, has within them the highest ability to know what things fit and what more don’t and how to make it all hold the idea that’s trying to be portrayed through what the material’s author was attempting to say. They know different words which might add a bit of interesting flair over there and a bit of polish to the prose over here.

They’re the ones who put it all together and ensure the story is both cohesive, properly punctuated and, most elementary of all, free of common spelling and grammatical errors which might have been unknowingly missed by the writer who was working against a deadline and thus hadn’t the time to make sure it was a fully polished piece.

Kind of like this piece we’ve come to live in what’s again long been a life we’ve lived as if we had the pen and knew always both what to say and how to say it perfectly.

Only problem then is that our pasts have each proven entirely far from perfect and, well, our present often ain’t looking much better.

See, an editor who’s tasked with ensuring this here written piece were polished and ready for someone to read would probably take issue with my use of the word ‘ain’t’. But for now I’m also the only one who edits these things checking for cohesion and lack of errors in spelling, so I guess we’ll both just have to be let down.

Which, oddly enough just so happens to be my point.

It’s that we should be let down. And that by both the words we’ve said and how we’ve said them, the lives we’ve lived and how we’ve lived them, the lives we didn’t live and how we don’t know how much better both they and we could have been had we did.

An editor would probably have questions about how I ended that sentence too, but I personally think it makes sense and rolls off the tongue pretty well.

But again, that’s a problem relating to my point as well. It’s that we’ve become so confident in ourselves and our abilities that we don’t welcome any help anymore. We don’t look for those who are willing to shoot us straight or say the things we probably don’t want to hear them say. Instead we, not ironically at all mind you, have resorted to gathering about ourselves a great number of those who have themselves agreed to live only seeking to always please and hopefully appease what are these itching ears we have between these blind eyes we bear below these numb minds we mine above these stone hearts we don’t yet seem to realize stopped beating to the tune of life a long time ago.

Because we all grew cold in lives lived alone, each of us stuck inside our shells of ourselves writing away at what we’ve seemingly actually come to believe were our stories. We’ve each of us spent years, again decades maybe, working feverishly upon finding everything we wanted our lives to be. But you see, leaving us in the author’s seat has only handcuffed us to the hopes we’ve proven willing to have. It’s chained us to the changes we’re willing to make and thus entirely disinterested in those we weren’t, aren’t so willing to wonder about.

It’s confined us to our own minds and tasked them, confusions and all, with coming up with a story that somehow encompasses our own gain and that of every glory despite how we’ve gotten things wrong and messed stuff up and left stuff out and, when all combined, then know nothing of any life other than the one we’ve been living however it was that we alone determined to live it.

Friends, we’ve each played the lifelong victims of an arrogance so putrid that we now prefer to take our stance upon personal preference or popular opinion rather the Word of God.

Why?

Because we clearly didn’t have any say in how it was written as, well, it says some really mean stuff. In fact, His Word even defines itself as being “sharper than any double-edged sword” and, as such, able to penetrate us “even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow” in which, by so doing, “it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

In other words, His Word exists to slice us up and tear us apart and leave us so broken and that with hearts bleeding out that we finally, in the midst of our mess, come to find out that we’ve made a complete mockery of life itself. His Word opens our eyes to how wrong we’ve gotten everything we’ve ever done, every word we’ve ever said, even all the thoughts we allowed ourselves to think.

Truly, Scripture is there to tell us all how easy it all should have been and that by pointing out just how hard we’ve made it all this time.

For the history of humanity is that we started in a Garden, just us and God’s perfect provision, a story written with no needs and one in which we then knew nothing of wants thanks to our every need being met. And that was it! The entire idea that He’d had was to create creation, with us being the pinnacle of His creativity, proven in our being made in His image and thus the closest anything and anyone could be to being Him, and that to simply enjoy His creation in what should have always remained a simple appreciation for how simple His intention always was.

But no.

Maybe it was boredom, perhaps curiosity, could have been simple misunderstanding, but whatever the case you want to make the fact is that we found out all about another idea that became our idea that’s since convinced us all that we could come up with something better.

And, well, here we are.

This is what we’ve come up with. This is the story we’ve written. These lives we’re living in this world we’re killing are the grand culmination of everything we’ve all of us ever considered being worth doing, saying, thinking, believing, buying, doubting, denying, selling, stealing, setting on fire and laughing as we do like these maniacs we’ve become.

And despite all the smoke and all the ashes, all the hatred and all the lashes, we just keep laughing. We just keep writing. We just keep on lying and that to both ourselves and anyone who’s dumb enough to keep listening to us as we regale the world with all the tales we tell of these amazing lives we’ve lived as these apparently perfect and impressive people we’ve been.

When does it end my friend?

When will we have destroyed enough? When will we have fought enough? When will we have failed enough? When will there ever arrive a fear in us as to the lives we’ve failed to live as the better people we’ve failed to be thanks to this literally God-forsaking idea that we’re Him and He’s not there?

What do we gain from that?

Because the fact is that everything we see inside this world smoldering and unraveling is the result of the choices we’ve made to live these lives as if He doesn’t deserve a say in anything we say or do.

And is it anything we should be so proud of as we are as we prove in our daily disinterest in changing?

Can we look at our lives and how we’re living them in this world and how things are going and say with any real honesty that we don’t think we need help?

Friends, it’s all falling down. Our stories of our glories are proving only gory and not fit for families. We’ve passed ourselves off as PG but we’ve lived lives that make R seem kids TV.

We need help, and that both as much as we can get and that based on however much He’s still willing to give. Which it’s honestly a true, verifiable miracle that He’s willing to give us any as is proven in our each still being alive today!

We shouldn’t have this chance, you know, having blown off or botched the millions of others we’ve had and missed already.

And yet He gives us more time because, as His mean and nasty Word tells us, He wants none to perish but rather all to come unto repentance whereby salvation is found within.

Yes, He wants us to turn away from these lives we’ve lived and the way we’ve written them, lay down the pen, take up a cross and let Him use it all to make us right again. And yeah, that whole process starts with us being disciplined, chastised, called out, all but verily vilified.

So what?

Friends, we are the bad guy in this story! And again, if you don’t believe me, just look at what we’ve done to the world! All we know anymore is politics and wars and arguments and protests and such a deep-seated interest in hatred and division that there are those who think love is weak and kindness stupid and the message of the cross still foolish.

Even though those are the only things that can help us, the last being the only which can save.

Why do we like it this way? What makes us so certain that we can’t be improved, that our lives shouldn’t be reviewed, that we shouldn’t be rebuked?

We’ve destroyed everything we’ve touched and hurt everyone we’ve met.

How is it that we’re good with that being the story we turn in?

And what makes us think that He who sent Christ to lay down His life will somehow be pleased or impressed with lives written the way we’ve lived them so filled with arrogance and vanity and lust and idolatry? Friends, we’re nothing of all He created us to be!

How is it that we still can’t see it?

And, well, will we before it’s too late and our deadline has passed and we’re just dead?

Again, He wishes for none to perish but for all to come unto the gift of eternal life offered us on the other side of repenting from these lives we’ve been living. Thankfully He’s still willing to help us emend our stories and amend our lives and save the same in doing so.

But sadly we’ve come to so despise any such discipline that most here remain hopelessly lost inside their own story.

And many will sadly stay there.

Thankfully none have to.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold