Day 4111 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Galatians 6:9 NIV

What is persistence?

Is it a person with an almost personal vendetta against compromise? Is it a personal resolve to never allow any single hope to dissolve? Is it a deep-seated belief that there’s always something better we can see, something more we can be, something we can do in order to make it through whatever we have to in order to see that better we can be? Is it knowing in your heart that, despite everything only continuing to fall apart, that at some point it’ll prove to all fall into place? Is it a place we go inside our minds in which all we find is a violent unwillingness to quit?

Is it the purpose of patience?

Is it a byproduct of a patience’s purpose?

Sadly, if anything, it seems to be something many here are forgetting. And that likely because, well, yeah, doing literally anything is wearying. Doing anything is tiring. Doing anything demands an almost exhaustive amount of everything from hope to effort to belief to trust and that in both we as us but so too whomever we may need to help us. Indeed, even asking for help has long been seen as something wearying and worrying and in fact all but wounding somehow.

It’s truly as if we’re all terrified of admitting that we’re not all that great at living a life.

Not sure why as, well, none of us have ever lived one before and so, in truth, we’re all here just kind of continually figuring out what to do, what all we’re supposed to do, what all we’re not supposed to do, how to do that which we’re supposed to as best we can and so too then how now to waste our best upon those things that aren’t for our better.

Or anyone else’s for that matter.

But alas I think the problem is that we’ve all become so personally inclined that we’ve kind of reclined from that way of life spent caring about really anything much at all. Anymore if it doesn’t offer us something we want, and even that in the heaping measure we’d prefer, then chances are we’re just not interested. This whole ‘what’s in it for me’ mentality has become the very backdrop and foundation for our every other form of forlorn depravity as it allows us, endlessly, this place of, well, stupidity, upon which to build further this belief that we’re all that matters in life.

Indeed, we all live as if second place is just first loser and we despise the idea of our being losers as we know sadly enough those moments in which we’ve gotten to experience what it is to win, and that usually whatever we want, that we now seek only to want more inside what’s become a life in which we all insist that we all win at everything.

And yet that immediately if not sooner.

Truly, we’ve somehow managed to all but perfect this blending of pride with impatience and indifference and disinterest and disdain and disagreement and displeasement and the very displacement of every past debasement that we dared allow ourselves to have so been allowed inside what we all once were.

Which was only the losers who didn’t have what we have now.

Yes, life has progressed and we have improved and society has advanced and that so far that anymore many are able to literally do as little as humanly possible and still succeed. Today we’re literally watching people rely on robots and computers to live their lives and they’re not merely just getting by, no, they’re rather seeming to thrive!

Why?

Because that’s always been the way of life that basically everyone has ever wanted to live.

That version of all this in which we don’t have to try because then we’d not have to fail. That brand in which our every belief could focus forever upon our seeing whatever we want to see inside whatever it is we want to seek which remains everything that means anything to just about everyone. All of life has always belonged to our belief in our endless need to be always pleased and at ease and there impressed with those underlings who’ve to endure the stress of a life’s tests that we’ve already passed, and that simply because we refused to take them.

Indeed, as I’ve mentioned in recent posts, there are even kids today who aren’t taking tests in school with just the knowledge they’ve learned but are rather using all these technological tools to take care of their learning for them.

Leaving them lightyears behind anyone who dares be bold enough to try to become something better than they are at the time.

And why is trying becoming something so rare? Because it’s both still just as hard as it’s always been but too we’ve finally arrived at a place and time in which we’ve managed to find appreciation within our societal ability to make machines do all the hard things we’ve never liked having to do.

But yet I think that it’s going to prove pretty safe to say that when we’ve arrived at this ability to offload anything we don’t want to do to someone or something else that will do it for us and leave us looking as if we did it on our own, all we’ve really managed to accomplish is giving our lives on loan to things that then hold us as if at best collateral, at worst captives, who then exist at the mercy of whatever it is to which we’ve basically surrendered our every concern as to everything better that we can then never become.

And that because we cannot be whatever it is that we can’t even believe is worth the effort it might take to get there to wherever it is that we’ll then never go because we seem already to know both what we’d find, how hard it would be and why then it’s just not possibly worth anything.

Because, again, all effort is hard. And it’s seemingly been made harder still thanks to our having arrived inside a way of life in which we can literally sit deathly still and allow systems to handle the majority of our existence.

In short, we’ve made it to what indeed feels the final frontier, and whilst many seem to like it here what for the ease and simplicity of letting other things do all the hard things, the heavy things, the then decidedly more miserable things, truth is that this all just rather perfectly defines the fact that we’ve all basically just given up.

All then that remains left for us to find or figure out or realize way down the line when it’ll likely prove entirely too late to anything about it is what all we’ve given away.

But thankfully, at least as seen inside the perspective of most, we’ve no need to worry about that for now. Instead we’re apparently just supposed to appreciate the fact that our lives can for now coast along the coast entirely oblivious to the torrential tempest hurtling toward us.

Do we have radar systems that we’ve been given to help us realize the fullness of what’s coming?

Yeah.

Do we have safety protocols and evacuation plans we’re supposed to follow whenever the brunt of it finally hits?

Yep.

Have we been given every possible opportunity to in fact be ever ready to race to the lifeboats in which we’ve already long since stored our hopes so as to sail away into fair winds and following seas?

Yes indeed.

Are many if any taking any such precautions, making any such preparations, altering their plans and ending their vacations so as to ensure they’ve completed as much as they might of what remains our only true vocation in what is this destination not to which we were ever meant to arrive but has rather always been the only one we’re at best meant to try and survive until even life itself proves to let us down inside this life?

No.

In fact it pains me, truly an almost physical agony, to say that it seems that most are walking away from the way we’re supposed to go and many more are starting to give up and just go along with them.

Why?

Because we still can’t seem to see that we’ve all become nothing but victims of what will soon prove such a wasted version of life that He who created us to live for the vastly more that many will never agree that we all still can be will in fact have every grounds to say that He’s never known us.

And that’s because He knew us before He knit us together in the wombs of our mothers and thus knew every plan and path and promise and prize that He’d had in and for and believed from our lives.

And thus too just how far short we’ve willfully fallen from what should have been the people we’re not.

As to how that doesn’t bother some I’ve simply no idea as that thought has become one of the only friends I have in this whole world. That most worrying of all wonders which wanders from one end of me to the other trying to find all I’ve missed in life thanks to the life I’ve lived instead. Indeed, what all haven’t I done? Who is it that I haven’t been? How much better could I have been? What all could have been better had I been anyone other than who I know I was?

Is not the fact that I know now who I was as being someone different from who I am not only all the proof I need that I need to keep trying to keep on finding the better still that I still can be?

How dare we quit!

How dare we give up!

How dare we settle here inside this here and now!

Why do we dare so commonly, so constantly to settle for whatever, wherever, whoever it is that we are already?

Is anything of everything that is truly all we want any of it to be? Sure, I’m perfectly filled with all the hope I can possibly hold that all of us do have at least some of those things found inside of our lives, inside of ourselves that are indeed going so very well that we do in fact have then every right and every reason to hope they never change. I pray every single day that people have good days filled with good things, things so absolutely and unashamedly amazing that to turn from them would in truth prove a crime.

I want for everyone to have the very best of all that life has to offer.

Problem is there’s not much of that waiting to be found in this place.

And it’s even harder to find whenever we resolve to just dissolve into our share of that life lived by those who seem only to know to look only inside this place for what can be the best of life.

It’s not here!

Sure, there are some great things to be witnessed or experienced in this world. There are still a handful of dreams for a handful of things that, despite my being 38 and not having much to offer as I find I’m rather a loner that doesn’t really mind it that way, I’ve yet to give up or lose along the way to what is a life in which I find that those reasons to keep holding on so tightly to those things for which I’ve long hoped, literally all my life, seem fewer and fewer by the day.

But I cannot allow myself to let them go. I will not allow myself to let them go.

Why, being as how they’re hopes and dreams and ideas for things that may literally prove now a perfect impossibility?

Because what can keep us going better than our refusal to stop trying for what we cannot accomplish? How better to further this journey than a finish line that just keeps moving further into the distance? What better to make us better than our willingness to betray the sum of everything that is in hopes of finding even a fraction of all that isn’t yet?

Friends, my point is that none of us have any idea who we can be, what we can do, what all we’re supposed to.

But we’ll never know any of it if we just agree that it’s not worth it, that we can’t find it, that it’ll just be too hard, take too long, cost too much to even try.

Since when did we become such fans of just laying down and agreeing to die?

Because that’s sadly what I see when I look at what the world’s convinced most to do. Every single day people’s eyes and lives are all but superglued to their smart phones. Ever try to pry apart something held together with superglue? That too is all but impossible.

And so I reckon it just comes down to which impossible we’re willing to want. Is it to be that this world’s chosen in which it’s becoming increasingly unlikely that many if any will ever improve, ever grow, ever know anything of hope seeing as how hope isn’t something we can hold? Or is it that kind of impossible that knows that while no, we can’t hold hope, we can keep on going until we get so darn close that we can at least know it’s really there even if we ultimately fail to get to wherever it is?

Either way we’re falling short.

Which that’s always been our biggest fear in life. Being let down or letting down those who foolishly chose to believe in us to be or do what they should have known we couldn’t or wouldn’t. Failing to be the better or find the best. Stumbling and thus looking so constantly stupid to a world that apparently believes it stupid to try. Fumbling all but the entirety of life trying to find within it something better than the sum of whatever it is that most folks are doing all they can to convince themselves it’s actually okay to settle for.

Again, when did we all happen to make such good friends with dying?

I mean, isn’t dying the failing to go on living?

And, well, what else can we call this version of an existence in which the vast sum of everything done under the sun is only done inside and that on screens and they showing only scenes of the life we all could be living outside in the sunshine and fresh air in a world that, while most may not care, still offers us every opportunity to do this life differently?

Indeed, why is it that we don’t want better? Is it just because the harvest takes longer? The effort required is more demanding? The audacity to hope is something entirely daunting? We just tired from all the trying we’ve not done in decades?

Truth is that doing nothing is doing something and doing something always wears you out.

Ever notice how tired you feel whenever you’re bored?

But friends, my question is why we’re all so seemingly bored with life. Isn’t there still plenty for us to find, even more for us to do, still more for us to be?

Looking around at all you see, can you truly say with any honesty at all that you honestly think it’s all good enough?

What on earth is good enough except the sum of everything on earth?

And what then can that good enough mean whenever we’re not allowed to stay here anymore?

Do you see what I’m saying? It’s that we’ve all seemingly opted for a life lived on permanent vacation and, in so doing, we’ve all pretty much stopped doing everything. Sure, things are still being done. But are we the ones doing them? Are we the ones learning the lessons that life continues to teach? Are we the ones growing in all the ways that our countless abilities and opportunities offer to allow us to do so? What all are we coming to know about all we’ve never known before?

Or are we progressing that way toward growth and knowledge and learning at all?

Sadly, again, doesn’t seem as though many are.

Rather it honestly appears as those most have just decided to settle for this approach to life in which so long as something even pretends to be going right, good enough. A good day’s work! Congrats and cheers to all our peers who’ve too determined that whatever it is that we’re all doing is all that should ever again be done.

We’ve apparently arrived at the very pinnacle of every hope, joy and opportunity in life!

Enjoy your retirement my friends!

Just be careful spending too much time looking at your golden watch because it might just happen to remind that time itself is running out and we’re thus losing chances to make improvements that, despite technology offering to help us prove we simply cannot make, I think we all know deep down that we most definitely can.

Perhaps we’re just still scared to try. Maybe we’re still aware of how much time it would take to try. Maybe we’re more than well aware of just how prone we are to proving imperfect, unsure, unwilling, disinterested, dangerously weak.

Yes, all the things that we don’t want anyone to see as we’re all supposed to go on pretending that we all know what we’re doing and are doing it all so very well that we truly cannot improve at all.

Good news is that nobody’s looking as rather everyone around us has disappeared into their phones. Issue is that we seem unwilling to believe that as rather we go on trying to impress people rather than please God.

Probably because people are rather easily impressed and we know deep down that there’s very little we can do that could ever even possibly prove in any way pleasing to God.

A lie we believe because we seem to have forgotten the value of belief.

Indeed, for any to seek Him the same must at first believe Him there and choose to head His direction with the audacity to imagine that there’s a reason, a purpose, a prize, a promise perhaps to be found in doing so. But there’s that dangerous word again:

Doing.

The one thing we all seem to be all but deathly afraid of trying.

But friends, what do we honestly have to lose, other than everything we have and too everything we’re not? Can’t you see that that’s the reason He calls us to keep going? Because He alone knows what all we still can be? That He alone knows the distance between who we are and who He created us to become?

Please stop stopping. Quit quitting. Give up on giving up because we’ve all got so much more to do, to see, to be.

Don’t risk showing up to Heaven only to there be forced to see all you could have been. Chase down every hope and any dream that He allows you to have. Not because we can or ever will. But because those things call us to keep going toward what we believe to be something better than everything we have and all we already are.

Yes, we stand to lose all we are by seeking for something better. But friends, what if we accidentally find that better? What if we do reap the harvest of that hope that we’ve refused to let go?

Truth is we won’t know if we don’t try.

So try. Just try.

After all, why else would we still have time if not because we were supposed to do something with it?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold