Day 4116 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 4:13 NIV

What are we missing?

Is it an understanding as to the promise given unto all of us? Is it the ability to appreciate the honesty of the call? Is it the humility that would allow us to better uphold the opportunity? Is it an awareness as to what all this means in that being so hard only proves to accomplish a deeper hope that won’t let go of us even when we prove unable to keep hold of it? Is it realizing the fact that we’re dying, a realization given unto the heart of every man so as to inspire within the same an urgency to seek for some way to escape that reality? Is it reality, are we missing the true gravity of why we’re here as waits always hidden in what all we’re not doing?

Is it that fact that all we are doing is most often just losing everything from our time to our lives to our minds in what’s become so sadly a life in which so much matters that doesn’t and all that does often then doesn’t either?

Is it the chance to change, the opportunity to actually start over, the being given back all the years we allowed to go to the locust, all the years we’ve left to which the same needn’t happen again?

Indeed, what are we missing inside this insistence that the same things continue repeating time and again? And in truth it doesn’t even really matter what as said routines can be filled with either nothing but good things or entirely more proven in the same number of bad. It truly doesn’t matter as the point is that life is not something that should have become so repetitious as it is. And that’s not to say that patterns and routines are always a bad thing either.

It’s just an ongoing thought of a tired man who wonders what all we’re missing because of all we’re not.

And, well, what aren’t we missing? It’s pretty clear that few if any of us ever miss any opportunity to have fun, to feel good, to do or say or even believe whatever it is that we think might make us look good to those for whom we’ve come to perform in what are anymore but lives lived on virtual stages seeking applause via heart buttons and agreement in comment sections. In that we’re too not missing friendship, acknowledgement, some sense then of validation that we’re here and that we matter somehow.

We’re not missing such things as success then nor even pleasure either as it’s pretty clear that many here do in fact find themselves enjoying themselves more often than not. And no, it’s not that life is always easy as I think we all know it’s often not. But it does seem as most do whatever they can as often as they might to enjoy this life, to make this life seem the very best it can.

But you see, that’s my question as is asked in wondering what we’re missing.

Because, well, what is our understanding of best but so often a blatant betrayal of the same? I mean, hasn’t our estimation of best as sought and found within the past sometimes proven only false? For we’ve all done plenty to ensure that we’ve found plenty of those things that we thought would make our lives better, or at the very least us feel better whilst living them. And sure, I imagine that many did in the moment in which it seemed they could, did, would for a while maybe.

And yet that passed.

The joy we assumed in our enjoyment faded unto our feeling as if we needed find something else to help bring it back. The happiness we’ve held inside those moments in which we finally got to hold something we thought we wanted turned oddly hollow as soon our hands laid hold of it again leaving us right back on the hunt for what we then hoped wouldn’t prove as quickly hollowed. We’ve all known so much fun and fame and fortune and friendship and yet as we sit here wherever it is that we are odds are that we find most of those with whom or from whom we’ve gleaned what we’d thought gained are just gone.

Or maybe that’s just me.

But I just can’t help but believe that there’s really no such thing as a lonely experience but that rather nearly everything we think and feel is or has been felt and thought by another. Because there’s just such this commonality to our creation that seems always to prove that no matter where we’re standing or how we’re doing, another’s been there before.

And yet anymore it mostly seems as if we’re all not anywhere.

Because it seems as though something’s happened to us that’s inspired us to just stop. To stay put. To find a nice patch of green grass and even stop looking unto the color of that other on the other side of the fences we’ve put up. Indeed, growing up there was this ongoing adage that estimated our being a people who were always looking for something better, a parable proven in that we did seem as if we did believe that the grass were always greener everywhere other than wherever we were.

And in truth, part of that has continued to make it through in that we are still a people vastly able to see always the sum of everything else as everything better than all that we have, all that we are.

But the problem is that we don’t look anymore. We don’t look for better. We don’t try to find it or endure what all it takes to become it. Rather we’ve all just sort of settled into this assumption that a life is supposed to be proven in comfort and calm. That somehow what’s always best is for our to remain at rest. That we’re somehow the best we can be as we are already. That we’ve arrived at both the place and time in which the entire point and purpose and promise of our existence can be proven, if it hasn’t yet.

And alas, it seems anymore as though it has for a growing many.

Because it seems that said many who are growing more convinced that this life in this world is as good as it gets, they are indeed enjoying their reward as is apparently proven in those same things as comfort and calm. Not that the world’s calm nor that they’re really comfortable all the time. But both are close enough to being either common enough or even ignored enough that life itself sure does seem as if seems to hold all the things that many here want.

But as for me I just can’t help but wonder what more we’re missing that’s only found along that path that so few are taking.

For it’s increasing in obviousness that the path of least resistance remains the one running alongside that defined as the wide. Maybe they’re one and the same in fact. I just know that I find myself so often looking around and listening even to the waning thoughts which sometimes remain varied within and find myself wondering as to both how and why I feel so often so different. And even though I assume it may well seem otherwise, it’s not a matter of my thinking I’m living a better life or am any better at living life.

It’s simply that my life is increasingly different from what’s clearly considered normal.

And I could spend plenty of time recounting the ways in which I feel it that way, but that’s not really the point and these posts aren’t about me.

Rather the point for this post is that I can’t help but feel inside my bones that we’re at great risk of missing more than we know in our culture’s common concessions chosen for the simple sake of mere comfort and calm.

Not that those things are bad as they are in fact part of the goal.

It’s just that I fear that in all our trying to find them here, all we’re really doing is diluting them to the point that they’ve, for some at least, seemingly become something of an idol they serve rather than an ideal they seek. And this I believe because inside of every single day I see what seem so very many who seem so very happy in what are lives so clearly unholy that the same cannot then have any understanding as to both where we’re standing and how it’s that truth which will find us all unable to upon a day coming soon.

For then we’re told that every knee will bow and tongue follow in promised progression as it begins its confession that Christ is King and we’re but the beggars waiting outside the gates hoping to be welcomed by He who, if we’re honest, we all know far less of than we ought to.

Not that some aren’t trying but simply because this life we live in this place in which we have often has this unique ability to turn our attention away from the faith which should be given our every intention along with such an intensity that we even oddly find ourselves welcoming the worries, the wars, the wounding. Not because we’ll ever enjoy them.

But because in Him we should find a purpose, a reason, a need even for them.

And that’s what I think we’re missing.

It’s that deepening kind of relationship with Christ as ought to be forming inside a deepening reliance upon the same. And I fear we’re missing that here because this world continues to make for the kind of advancements that do bring us more comforts, more enjoyments, more successes, more pleasures, more promises even. Indeed, we’re in a world now in which the things we have to do in order to just survive are being increasingly handled by others and that not even anymore our sisters and brothers but rather robots and computers.

We’re rapidly racing toward a moment in our collective experience that’s promising to find for us a drastically decreased need to work or worry as there are many who are promising that things are getting so much better so much faster than even they imagined they might that we all might be able to retire and just enjoy our lives basking in the ability to place all our trust in another to do for us all we don’t want to have to do anymore.

And as that list of things we don’t have to do or won’t have to try continues to increase over time, what it seems we’re starting to find is a people who have a dwindling ability to endure much if anything that they could in any way either convince themselves or be themselves convinced they simply needn’t do.

Indeed, we are here at that time in which we’ve now so many teachers whom we can gather about ourselves with their willingness to tell us what we want to hear that we indeed needn’t worry of having to hear anything we don’t, to feel anything we don’t.

Even being lonely is being assuage by all this newfound technology that’s achieving for some, maybe even many, what are virtual friends who are for some becoming even virtual spouses.

And I just don’t know how to convey in words the sheer sorrow and sadness I feel in that being our reality.

But sadly it is.

And as it is and proves almost daily to become more so, so too does grow this worry as to what all we’re missing inside our willingness to insist upon our missing of such miracles as misery.

Which is something it’s clear that we’d all prefer miss, skip, avoid, never again know anything of. We loathe such things as pain and poverty, suffering and solemnity. We hate them because they’re not the fun we want to have. They don’t bring us the enjoyment we think we need to have. They don’t offer us others who are interested or intrigued by the things we’re doing thanks to the amount of fun or success or pleasure they see us having.

It’s like Job.

He was, as they say, a man about town before his life was flipped and turned upside down, a reality in which it was found that he’d lost everything he’d ever had. So much so that he even found himself at odds with friends who’d come to help because they couldn’t seem to understand or appreciate the misery he was experiencing. And nor could he see that they were trying their best to help him through something that they had no understanding of or experience with.

For life here finds us all the fame and fortune and friendship we could ever hope to have when life’s going well. But just as soon as anything in life turns bad, well, it all starts turning away.

Because we’ve become so adverse to adversity, so scared of struggling, so filled with doubt as to how such things as danger and disaster can ever prove of any worth that we’ve all rather come to assume them as almost something of a contagion that we need avoid at all costs.

Even should the cost prove friendship, romance, honesty, modesty, morality, mercy even.

Indeed, we’ll readily walk away from anything and everyone who seems as if they’ve become more risk than reward.

Which is why so many continue to choose the wide road as opposed to the narrow Way.

It’s because His way is one here proven inside all those things that we’ve all spent a lifetime avoiding. Things such as pain and struggle and strife. Loneliness, hatred, loss. Fear, worry, danger. Yes, His way remains a veritable disaster when compared to the contents of those living as if life might consist inside anything from an abundance of possessions to an avoidance of persecutions.

And yet it exists in neither as rather life itself is promised us as an experiencing of trial and trouble.

Thus proving that so long as those things we’re missing, avoiding, discounting and denying, well, so too then are we missing life.

We’re missing its point. We’re missing the purpose as to why we have one. We’re missing opportunities to see the sun and meet the Son outside inside the sunshine the Son shines to light the way we’re meant to go. We’re missing out on chances to share in the changes He died to make in us to make us more like Him. We’re missing opportunities to find such better realities that fear itself becomes there something we no longer fear but rather hope to find as we learn that only inside is the ability to trust more in He who is our only hope of making it out of here.

Indeed, we’re missing our gift of what time is really meant for as rather than something aimed toward success or satisfaction, it’s actually given us to help inspire us to move toward Heaven.

And we just keep missing that turnoff because it looks like it’s on fire and paved in pain and so flooded with rain and strain that we see along it only struggle and strife.

And we just don’t know how to want those things in our life.

Because we’ve become convinced that there exists a version of life free from them, free of them. We seem to be a people who believe only in this idea of a best life which is apparently only proven in our only doing whatever it is that we want to do whilst either finding another to do all we don’t so enjoy or simply not doing it at all. Indeed, it seems as though we’ve all come to know of this way to live a life in which we lose nothing in life, not comfort, not enjoyment, not the excitement we all have always for both and all their like.

In fact it seems as though we’re certain that the very best of life is only proven in our finding of comfort and calm.

And again, it is.

But friends, we should know that those things aren’t here.

And thus too that we’re going to continue missing them, mistaking them for what may in fact seem so very close to them that we can’t tell the difference. But the difference is proven in whether or not they’re lasting.

Because you see, the promise for you and me has always been forgiveness which leads to salvation as has been given freely unto us through the mercy and sacrifice of He who is the Christ, an achievement that grants us that welcome we should want unto that place of which it’s said there exists within no more crying or mourning or misery or pain or suffering or struggling or being scared of being afraid. Because once there the old order of things will have passed away.

And all that will forever remain is all the joy and peace and comfort and happiness and hope that we could never find on the way.

Not because they’re missing from this life.

Just because we look for them in only all the wrong places.

For we sadly seem to assume them found in such things as social acceptance, financial success, material wealth, even physical health. And sure, those things can and often do prove of some benefit here. But the point is that those things have become the very outermost hopes that we seek for here. They’re all that matter to us, so much so that we instantly reject and rebuke anything that even dares risk anything of them.

But in doing so we’re so often missing what God has sent us so as to help us move closer to that place that’s found only by faith trusting that the journey isn’t where the prizes are promised but rather the experience which makes the promises so prized.

Friends, what I’m saying is that we’re missing the point of this life because within it we so often expend ourselves trying to outrun or hide from the many struggles that we need to have if we’re ever to have any chance of growing in Christ. And why? Because He’s told us himself that if we’ll not take up our crosses and follow Him, sharing then in the suffering He endured on our behalf, then we have no reason to ever imagine that to Him we belong.

For if we’ll not welcome what He calls us to go through, then we have no business ever believing that we should be welcomed through those gates that are found on the other side of that grave that we just continue to refuse to enter.

And trust me, I get why we do. It’s that His path promises to be the one upon which we lose and that literally the sum of everything we’ve ever known, ever wanted, ever hoped to see or be or become. Indeed, His path is walked in misery in this world, and no, none of us know how to understand the necessity of it being that way.

But folks, such is the entire point and purpose of faith!

It’s to help us learn how to walk not looking at what we have to go through but rather focused solely upon where the path goes to.

And indeed, we’ve all gotten that wrong for so long now that it will take a miracle to help us come to even a faint and often fading understanding of how wrong we’ve been.

Thankfully misery is that miracle as it comes in waves that help us reach for Christ as they find for us all our weaknesses and failures, fears and worries, wounds and so then opportunities to be helped and healed.

Comfort and calm cannot offer that.

So please stop running away from the misery that does.

Because it’s not worth missing anymore that kind of life that only misery and mercy can help us find.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold