Day 4115 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 12:4 NIV

What is enough?

Is it a measure of misery mixed with a moment of peace? Is it a scene showing the sum of something that defines all we’ve done that agrees we could have done no more? Is it a place we go to which we know that we’ve exhausted every opportunity we’ve ever been given before? Is it our experiencing of a level of exhaustion that we’ve never known, a tired that proves more is simply all we’ve not anymore to offer? Is it our offering of all we have, and yet that still somehow defined by what we’re willing to give? Is it giving everything we have with the audacity to actually hold nothing back?

Is it enough to feel bad, to know shame, to carry guilt around as if a suitcase that never leaves our side?

Is it enough to spend our every single day and so too our every single night allowing our eyes no sleep but rather insisting we tear-stain our shirts and sheets?

Is it enough to hit our knees and there ask for forgiveness for the many wrongs we’ve done and all the many mistakes they’ve won?

Yes, enough is at least partly all of that. And yet even the sum of all the above seems still so often not nearly enough. Or at least it does to some of us. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve thought I knew what all enough was plenty of times over the years. I’ve truly both had my fill of those many things in life we none of us ever want to feel whilst also finding myself wanting more of those we enjoy decidedly more. And this seems to have only confused my understanding as to what enough is.

Because it seems as though I’ve both often felt as if I’d had enough of something and just wanted it over and yet wanted still more of something else but found it over instead, leaving my enough of the good stuff at least somewhat empty while my enough of the hard stuff continued to fill.

And most days the one continues to fill whilst the other empties still.

And I don’t know when either will end.

So how then can I know where mine is?

My end.

Truth is that that’s the only place in which enough is. It’s waiting always at that place in which reality proves that there is literally not a single thing else that we can offer, that we can try, that we can find or lose inside this life. Enough is the finish line, and well, we’re not there yet as rather we’re all yet still here on this side of what remains that distant line that’s been defined not by us nor how we’ve lived our lives but rather by He who is the Life.

And that because He did enough.

Because He is enough.

Thus we’ve no idea as to what enough really is until we’ve actually found that place in which we have absolutely nothing else to turn to, to lean on, to learn from, hope in, seek for, want more, hold high or bring us low. We cannot know what enough is in terms of this life and the fight it is, the faith it takes, the pain it brings and the things it means until we know that it means nothing without Christ and somehow still even less until we understand both all He’s done and why He did it.

We can know nothing of anything until He’s all we care to know.

Problem is that’s often the last place we go because in it we see not room to grow or hope to know but rather only a life to lose nailed to a cross we’ll hold.

And we all still think that life is supposed to know nothing of us such loss, of such misery, of such absolutely horrendous humility as the willfully giving away of everything all so that we can be absolutely certain that we’ve withheld nothing but have truly indeed offered everything unto His refining.

A process of which we cannot have enough, not considering all the messed up stuff we’ve done thus far.

Indeed, so many days it seems as if we’ve yet to have found even enough of doing messed up stuff. For still we find ourselves speaking words that just don’t sound the way they should. We still do things that guilt and shame say we might not should have done. We think thoughts that become theories that become idols that we serve as if they’re not just ideas built in the lone mind of a lost life.

Yes, still we sometimes allow ourselves to think we’re not lost.

Proving then that we are.

For if we’ve not yet reached the point in our many rebellions and failures and astounding stupidities to realize the very depth of our own depravity and how it’s a low that we seem only to know to force ever deeper into the same doubts and denials that have always defined it, defined us, we then clearly cannot know enough about whatever it is that enough is.

Because enough is enough. It’s the point in which there’s nothing else needed and thus nothing more to be asked or given. It’s that place we’ll go, now or never, in which all there is to know is finally known, and that whether we want to know it or not. It’s this verdict rendered in which our sentence is either commuted thanks to our continuing to press onward unto the hope that is His glory, something we should spend an entire life knowing we know not enough of, or rather one given in which we’re recommended for sentence and there given the entirety of the just due we’re due for all we’d done both under the Son and yet too as if He weren’t there.

That’ll be enough because, well, upon that day there will indeed be nothing more we can say, nothing else we can do, not a single breath left in which we could dare to choose to finally lose all that’s found us so lost as to be left.

And that for dead.

And that forever.

And that because death doesn’t know enough.

Indeed, in this life there are some things that are never truly satisfied. “There are three things that are never satisfied, four that never say, ‘Enough!’: the grave, the barren womb, land, which is never satisfied with water, and fire, which never says, ‘Enough!’” Proverbs 30:15-16

That’s one of those short little passages that, when allowed, prove to bring about such a thought that it asks we think about so many things that odds are we’ve never really thought before.

And I for one truly appreciate how the Bible has enough of those thoughts for us to think that it does truly seem as it is really truly is both living and active. For that alone proves that we know nothing of enough as there is, for us, always something within that Word that we’ve either never read, never heard or even have read and did hear but somehow not quite the way in which we will the next time we try.

For that’s the whole of point of His having given us both His Word and this life that we so often live against it. It’s to exist as a blueprint for what becomes a belief that refuses to ever believe that it can know enough, have enough, hurt enough, lose enough, live enough to cover up all the life we’ve lived and lost to what is the past in which we sought the same enough that still we seek just of what were then hopefully vastly different things.

For indeed, I do truly hope that we all have had our enough known of those things that steal and kill and destroy, and that never seem to know enough of their so taking away a life from us.

But do we?

Do we know any such things that have caused us such pains, such miseries, such fears and terrors and tremblings that we’ve indeed turned away from them, left them in the past, wished them well and walked away? Have we in our hearts, our minds, our lives any such list of things that we had our fill of and, once said fill was found, found that we wished it all only emptied out upon the ground that we then determined to stand upon no longer, to search within no more, to crave and lust after not ever again even another breath thereafter?

I have some, and yet I feel as if I don’t have enough. And that’s because hidden within all the ones I do have I’ve found they hold such this hope that it leaves me always wanting more of what is that feeling of a still-foreign kind of freedom in which walking feels different, talking sounds different, living life itself is different. It’s something defiant, something desperate, something diligent and disciplined and it always leaves me so deeply determined to know more of what are all those things that I still need to lose, let go, leave behind.

I’ve come to find that I absolutely love losing a life!

For thankfully we’ve still the time in which to find the one that was always meant to take its place, the one whose place the life we can afford to lose has sadly come to take.

And indeed, I have found that losing a lost way of life is the surest way to find every measure of hope and joy and peace and meaning that we could never know we’ve always needed.

But yet I fear that my finding that I spent so long not knowing this sense of hope and freedom that I feel I’m finally finding only proves that I likely still know far less than I so often love to imagine I might. Because I’ve been so wrong so many times that I seem to finally find this strange ability to imagine I may well be wrong again inside any moment in which I dare to think I’m right.

Because, well, what does being right know of enough?

Can’t we all feel always that sense of pride and power proven in our delusions of thinking we’re right, that we’ve finally figured something out, that we understand something to the very fullest reaches of all possible understanding?

And yet, again, having been so wrong so many times, how then can we know for sure?

For in those moments in which we are either right or wrong, truth is that certainty is still far off.

Yet we stop. We chalk it up as a win and move on to seeking the next. We give way to that same worry that worries about what all we might stand to lose should we refuse to stand real still and bask in the glory of this story that we think has gone well, and that only because it feels good enough.

For there’s sadly that iteration of enough too.

That one in which we lose all willingness to try further toward something more. That version in which we die to everything else we still could try to see the more, be the more that we’ll then leave, perhaps forever, entirely unknown. And that’s because enough is enough, but good enough never is. For good enough is only a determination to give up. To settle for whatever it is that we’ve already found or felt. To accept the sum of what is without the courage to consider what isn’t.

A courage we readily discount because we know that at some point we risk the pain, the misery, the suffering, the literal blood coming out.

And, well, I dare say that very little means that much to us that we’re willing to invite that stuff.

And I say that because, well, we seem obviously a people who daily deny it in whatever way we can. Rather we seek incessantly for such things as comfort and pleasure and popularity. Indeed, of such things we’re all known for having never known enough. Same with riches, fame, friendship with what is a world still rife with glaring enmity against God.

No, we’re still at least somewhat lost inside this idea that our lives, since lived inside this world, are supposed to be filled with all that too is inside this world.

That we’re supposed to always feel good, always look good, always sound good to those who contend always that they’ve found good and know how to help us find it too. But that’s something they’ll always only do should we agree to lose this idea that we know enough about something else to leave it of any measure of importance.

Belief in Christ chief amongst the things we’re all expected to lose if we’re expecting help in finding what this world tells us is enough.

But friends, what of enough can this world offer when all that’s seen is only temporary? Is enough supposed to be so ending as that? Is enough something that we should agree to some finish line for? Is enough able to run out, fall short, end without notice?

Is enough something that we’re even supposed to notice, to worry about, to so try and measure as so often we try?

What if rather we just poured ourselves into living our lives as if life was meant for us to live without any such limitations as our understandings as to what enough is and what more it isn’t?

Yes, what if we just took up our cross and followed along behind the One who is the Way that came unto this place to be emptied out, agreeing to be the same ourselves? What if we dared stop focusing on all we’re at risk of losing and just counted all things as lost already?

What all might we find?

How much better might we feel?

How deeper could freedom be and further could life go should we not go on continuing to hold all of our interest in measuring the importance of everything via our understandings and wherever it is that they wish to remain seated?

For the hard truth is that we know nothing of enough. Rather there’s always something else that we can do, something wrong we can lose, something right we can fight to find. There’s always a change to make that would in fact prove an improvement made. There’s always a repentance we ought opt for that would make our walk more sure, even on the shore and that in the waves of our waving goodbye to what is a life that will, perhaps only eventually, inevitably prove to not be enough.

And that because there is nothing in this world that can be enough. There’s no amount of fame or fortune that could ever find a greedy heart and gluttonous mind satisfied. There’s no level of depravity to which mankind has sunk at which we all unanimously agreed that going further was inconceivable. There is no end to sin inside this world, no end to it inside of us.

No human has ever had enough of sin because, well, sin is fun. Sin feels good. Sin looks good.

As far as we’ve all of us considered or understood in the past, sin is good.

Problem is that sin is death and, well, we truly haven’t then fought against it nearly as hard as we should have. Rather most days find us all still doing things, thinking things, saying things that bring not life nor us any closer to wherever the best version of it truly exists. Sadly we all still rather fail and fall short of the glory of God.

We know nothing of whatever it is to have messed up enough as it seems we all still find plenty of ways to do just that.

So again I ask, what can we know of enough, especially that of all that’s right, upright, honesty, holy, helpful, hopeful? What can we know of enough of all that’s good and moral and merciful and meaningful? How can we know any measure of anything decent when it seems our days find us still on the descent aimed away from the same?

Indeed, how can we say we have any idea as to what salvation means or how much it cost when still we opt for those things in this life in this place that we know will leave us lost?

And why is that we can say that?

Haven’t we yet had enough of feeling lost, broken, guilty, dirty, ashamed?

Why ever settle for ever feeling any of those things?

If not because we don’t yet know enough about what they really are?

Because if we did, we’d certainly not continue doing them. We’d not continue giving in to them, making room for them, welcoming them then into our lives and however it is that we continue to live them. Truly friends, how are we living them? For what are we living them? For something better? For something more upright, upstanding? For something closer to hope, happiness, holy perhaps?

Why ever accept that we could ever know enough of anything when that would mean that we run the risk of knowing enough of everything, goodness included?

No, I’m finding that we need erase all such self-drawn finish lines in life. That we need to rid our thinking of any such thoughts as all those lost thinking that we know enough, have done enough, can do enough. We need to be finished with our thinking we’re finished or that we can finish this on our own and by ourselves.

We can’t.

Because we’re not enough. Because we don’t know enough. Because we’ve not done enough. We can’t do enough. We can’t change enough. Can’t cry enough. Can’t lose enough. Can’t love enough. Cannot live enough to ever know what life really is nor why we have one.

Because He’s the reason we have one that is never filled, never full, never finalized until we’re found knelt before Him unable to look into the eyes of the One whose life we stole thanks to our sins.

He is enough, but sadly, we all still know entirely too little of Him.

And I say that because we all still fail in regard to following Him. We’re all still sometimes ashamed, afraid of talking about Him. We’re all still often unwilling, unable, left feeling unworthy of talking to Him, walking with Him, testifying to Him.

Why?

Because we all still sin. We still fall short. We still live these lives in which it’s daily clear that we don’t yet know what enough is.

Not of Him.

Not of sin.

Not then the sum of all He’s done to help us overcome all we’re still falling for.

We all have plenty of room left to grow, plenty of progress still to know, an endless degree of personal advancement aimed away from all manner and measure of human depravity and that then spent toward what is an equally endless capacity for such better things as hope, humility, honesty, modesty, morality, mercy and He who made them all available to us once more.

Friends, within this life we’ll often find that we may feel as if reaching the end of the shore that is all of which we’re sure is good enough. That we’ve gone far enough, tried to be enough, have hopefully done enough.

But He’s no stranger to asking further into the danger found in our stepping out of the boat onto the hope that He can do what we cannot.

And until we find ourselves not only willing to step onto the water but to do so without any ability left to worry about it holding us up, we do not know enough. We have not done enough. We have not tried enough, cried enough, died enough.

Because until we’ve lost our lives trying to fight this fight that is this faith, literally coming unto a desire to lose everything if that’s what it takes to find out who He is and what He did and why it was done and where it all leads, what it all means, there’s then still plenty left for us to do.

Do not stop on this journey home.

For we shouldn’t ever dare believe that we can know enough of what that hope is nor then what all we should give unto ensuring it realized.

And that not even for only our lives.

No, we’re here to both know Him and make Him known.

How dare we ever think we’ll ever do enough of either?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold