Day 4117 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 8:18 NIV

What we’re missing.

It’s the chance to find joy in changing. It’s the opportunity to experience hope in hardship. It’s the ability to recognize the necessity of loss. It’s the growth in an understanding that there’s simply more to life than all there is to find where we’re standing. It’s the importance of humility and its unique capacity to help us find a way of life filled with so much happiness that simply cannot exist whenever a person feels they’re owed such a gift as happiness truly is. It’s the peace that comes with knowing where we’re going and that the promise waiting at the end of the road is worth more than all the pain the road will hold.

It’s the gift of getting to walk that road with He who both knows the way through all the worst this world can bring but also that so well that He is the Way to everything this world will never know.

It’s the resolve to dissolve our every worry over absolute destruction designed inside all the danger we’ll face and, with that, every distraction we’ve learned to allow ourselves to be distracted by seeking to not see the dangers and disasters that this life will bring and this world is.

In short, we’re missing the point and purpose of life itself.

Why?

Because we’ve learned to spend our lives lost inside this common considering of all that’s happening from the viewpoint of however we happen to feel about it. We’ve succumbed to this suggestion that life itself holds only this intention of ensuring that we ourselves feel always however we want, are faced then with only those things which offer to help us feel however we like, are then promised some sort of exit or avoidance of all the struggles and sufferings that we don’t.

Indeed, our greatest hope has become living here our best life as if always defined by us alone and the many enjoyments we seek.

And it’s because of this seeking for always enjoyment that we’ve become so reliant upon such things as entertainment, companionship, censorship, container ships bringing us a daily bounty of all this world’s wares whereby we all align in lines on the shore seeking to be among the first to sneak a peek at all the prizes that have come unto us from foreign lands made by foreign hands of they are too but women and men who may or may not have any understanding as to what really matters most nor as much desire as we so often seem to have as to understanding the same.

Which, these days, is just about none.

Indeed, it seems as though we’ve just about completely run out of all interest as to the investigation of life’s meaning. And why? Because it’s hard to find. It’s scary to look for. It in fact asks that we seek it inside those places we’ve never been as those people we never were. It all but demands we do something new, literally told us Himself that such is why He came!

To do a new thing.

Five words which encompass nearly the entirety of all we’ve collectively come to fear in life!

For anymore it seems as though we’re absolutely terrified of our having to do something. We hate such efforts as this life still requires. Just saw another video last night talking again about the literacy problem our nation is facing and it’s truly heartbreaking! Kids in middle school, high school, college even who are, at this point, blatantly saying that they don’t know how to read and that they honestly don’t care to learn. I’ve known of others who can’t read an analog clock. So many don’t know how to cook a meal.

Saw one lady, full grown adult, losing her mind because her ai friend was down for a moment due to updates or something and so she couldn’t ask it how to bake a cake.

All problems we’ve found in our both finding inside ourselves that common human longing to be lazy alongside a world that offers to coddle every such concession.

And, again, as we’ve been talking, I fear that it’s all left us with absolutely no idea what all we’re missing.

Because the cold hard truth is that we cannot even begin to understand all we stand to lose whenever we lose our willingness to learn, to try, to do. Because at that point doing anything becomes immediately our other great fear found in Christ’s telling us why He came here. For we, being so lazy as we’ve always sought to remain, we hate even the idea of doing anything. But if there’s anything we hate even more than having to do something, it’s doing something new.

For we’re rightly certain that we can indeed continue doing all we’ve been doing for however long we have. It’s easy to do those things which we’ve already done. In fact, it’s so easy that we can find always in doing whatever it is that we’ve already done what’s basically unbridled success. And, well, we love that! Our pride absolutely adores that ability to find failure basically an impossibility as that allows us to walk forward in such supreme confidence that our worries and woes, known always for bringing us low, they’re considered then so far below that we can pretend that they we do not know.

That we know nothing of struggle, will face nothing of hardship, will find in fact no risk of any such things as everything hard like that.

And we love that promise because our pride has convinced us that not only is our purpose within this place to live our best lives within the same but also that part of said best lives is to be always defined by our finding that path that we can walk without fail or fear.

Because if there’s anything we hate even more than our having to do something and that something being something new we’ve never done, seems we hate being afraid even more.

And, well, what is there that’s then better able to instill fear than His calling us unto a path that’s paved not in pride nor in prize, not in comfort nor the complacency it seeks, not in enjoyment nor the shallow entertainment it brings, but rather one won within the worry of only losing all we know in such the hurry that we even stop seeking help and healing.

Simply because time’s wasting and this world’s ending and there’s apparently only one lifeboat and it’s helmed by He who asks that we get out of it and walk on the surface of the stormy sea.

Makes no sense.

And that’s what we’re missing.

We’re missing the capacity of faith that’s able to help us to see that the journey is about the destination not the danger, the destruction, the death that we’ll all experience whether we end up being found welcomed home once we get there to wherever it is that all of this is going or simply turned away because we chose to refuse every opportunity to lose this mindset that has us sat upon thrones of theories that have us feeling as if we’re somehow royalty that are here to be served rather than to serve.

Yeah, faith exists to counter that idea completely.

Which I guess that makes it then easy to see why so very many have absolutely no interest in anything else that faith has to offer.

And sure, that’s understandable too as, well, faith in this world is pretty much only measured in all we stand to lose. For it brings with it so many losses and those of things we’ve all come to love. We’ve discussed the loss of our insistence upon doing nothing, especially anything new. We’ve talked about the loss of our confidence as is found most easily in our doing of things we’ve already done. Talked about the pride we find in doing those things which allow us to walk with the confidence felt in knowing we’ll not fail.

But we’ve yet to discuss the giving away of all our stuff. We’ve yet to talk about the learning to walk without anyone else around. We’ve not then talked about how most of those we’ve come to know will walk away whenever we start walking toward and then eventually with Jesus. Haven’t talked about the things we’ll come to find no point in talking about. Haven’t discussed the disgust we’ll find in a growing number of things culturally considered common down here. Haven’t went over the wars we’ll fight and how we’ll probably lose all sorts of things within them.

Comfort probably most obviously chief among them.

But the point is that this faith, in this place, it’s about what we lose. Sure, there are promises and many of them do indeed begin to pay off all but immediately. But even such foreshadowings of eternal peace as those random moments of happiness or joy we find whenever faced with a struggle or worry which should make happiness and joy all but impossible, they don’t ever prove to help us avoid the worries and struggles within which they’re found.

And honestly, that’s probably one of the strangest parts of all this.

It’s that reality into which we’re asked in which we stop worrying about what we’re going through, how we’re feeling, even to some degree how we’re doing. And that because, well, we slowly start to understand that none of this relies much on our doing of anything. Which, granted, sounds amazing to those who love the idea of doing nothing. But that’s not really the point. The point of faith is that it’s rather a gift given in light of what another has already done.

There entire premise of this promise is that it’s been given us through the finished work of Christ on and through that cross.

The rest then is just the mess of mercy and misery that we’ve to decide either to walk through or simply away from.

And yeah, it’s definitely far easier to walk away from it as that’s clearly what we’re seeing most folks deciding. This world is lost inside a deepening darkness that defines for us all the comforts we’ve always considered inside the commonly held assumption that darkness helps us better hide all the faults and failures we’d all obviously prefer we just pretend we don’t really have rather than our having to do anything about the addressing of them and then the worrying and stressing over how there’s little if anything we can do at all.

That is our biggest fear in life.

It’s that point at which we’re proven all but utterly powerless, helpless, hopeless then.

And why is that?

Because, again, our greatest hope has become this commonly held ideal of some best life that’s always defined by our being the ones in power who thus needn’t any help and honestly don’t even have to mess with having to hope as rather we seem to all of us believe that we can find enough, have enough, make enough and be enough that we’ll someday need nothing from nobody.

It’ll again just be us on the thrones with throngs of folks gathered around bringing us gifts of praise and appreciation for our having become the ones who accomplished the very best life ever lived.

Which is sadly still measured as being nothing at all like that as was lived by Christ.

In fact, His example is literally filled with pretty much everything that has nothing to do with anything that anyone would ever care to consider best in life.

Rather, as we’ve discussed here recently, He was a man of suffering who was familiar with pain. He was mocked and laughed at, literally left alone as He hung in an agony we cannot even being to imagine, watching not only the crowd gathered around joke and spit and sneer as He hang up there but so too His friends run away and hide from their risk of ending up hanging next to Him since they were known for having walked with Him, worked with Him, learned from Him.

Indeed, makes sense that a people who’d determined He needed to die probably wouldn’t mind getting equally rid of those who’d been with Him.

And, well, I dare say our absolute biggest fear is being in pain, be it the physical kind as seen inside the torture He endured or even the emotional sort as imagined in the loneliness He felt watching everyone He knew turn away.

We’re all so afraid of those kinds of pains, of every kind of pain, that we do all we can to avoid it all.

And, well, problem then is that on His path we can’t. In fact He told us Himself that all who wish to live a godly life will be persecuted. He promised that we’d feel pain, experience fear, walk neck-deep in our weight of trial and trouble and torment. Literally told those who were with Him that some of them would be handed over to be judged, to be tortured, to be tried in which they’d too be convicted of crimes that deserved their share of His punishment.

Indeed, He calls us to share in His sufferings!

And so often we refuse because still we seem to always assume that we just have too much to lose. For here we have fun, we have friends, we have fun with our friends. We have jobs and aspirations for careers. We have plans for vacations and bigger houses to return to from them. We have dreams for so many things that, to us, it’s all just become the very entirety of our existence, of our experience, of all we still hope to experience with and in our existence.

So when He tells us that following Him will bring trial and trouble, it’s then basically instinctual to run from Him.

Because, again, we want what’s easy. We crave comfort. We seek incessantly all those things which offer to cater to us, to please us, to satisfy us and that with some sort of story or outcome that helps us show us as being those who are accomplishing that commonly sought living of some best life.

Indeed, we’re lost inside a competition whose intention is to see who among us can live the best of all best lives.

And so venturing anywhere near anything that even pretends to risk anything that we think is good or fun or enjoyable is the very last thing we want to do.

Again, we’ve just too much to lose.

But friends, my worry is what all we stand to miss because we’re standing so still looking at all we have that we’re all going to lose anyway.

Because honestly, such things as comfort never last. Happiness fails and fades away. Joy comes and goes, and honestly I don’t really even know if that’s the case because I truly don’t know that many if any of us have ever really experienced joy inside this place. Peace is obviously nowhere to be found. Hope is something anymore that seems to mean only something different to everyone. Love is basically a buzzword at this point. It’s all just crumbling.

And yet we’re all still trying to prove we’ve the ability to be the ones finding this idea of a best life?

Don’t we realize all that we’re missing in all our trying to find what isn’t there?

There is no best life here. And that’s because life here is hard. Life here is scary. Life here is painful. And, well, we’ve lost our ability to see anything good in any of the above. We’re missing our ability to understand the necessity of those things and how, should we ever dare seek for it again, we’d oddly enough find that our best life has already been bought and paid for, and that by blood, and is now promised to be waiting for us to simply learn how to fully and finally let go of all it is that we think we know as to what life means and how we feel it should go.

Friends, Heaven is truly just as close as our willingness to let pride go and seek instead to humility hold.

Thankfully He’s patient with us as is proven in the fact that we’ve awakened unto another new day in which we can do a new thing, perhaps even something so new as not worrying about what all we’re going through but rather focusing on our trying to find within it the reason for it. Maybe something so new as not listening to the news or reading some new lie given us by some shady politician’s promise. Maybe something so new as reading the Bible, or if you’re a child who’s become convinced you don’t need to know how to read, learning how to read so that you can read the Word that sets you free.

Whatever the case may be, the point is that we have to stop running away from all that’s hard, all that’s scary, all that’s of the audacity to ask that we embrace the fact that we’re losing this life anyway.

Why not go out in the proverbial blaze of glory in which we all but set everything we have and all that we are as of now on fire and walk away as if we’ve lost nothing?

Can you imagine the freedom we’d feel in walking through life entirely unconcerned about what happened to us?

Who knows but that we might even find hope in the hard days, joy in the scary things, peace in the wars and purpose in the fact that we get to walk through them with Him who has promised to never leave us nor forsake us. Yes, we might even come to find more of Him who is the Way and that through both everything we’re going to go through while we’re here and too through those gates that will only open for us should we have learned to trust in Him more than our ability to do this well on our own.

And friends, we simply cannot learn that trust whenever life’s so easy that we can trust in us.

We need the hardships. We need the dangers. We need the choices, the challenges, the changes.

Why?

Because they change us.

And while change is still arguably our greatest fear, truth is we’ll never be the greatest we can be, and nor then will eternity, if we never find the humility that helps us learn to lean on Him.

And, well, nothing helps us find humility better than all that’s hard and heavy and harrowing.

So stop wasting your life comparing who you are to whomever someone else is probably only pretending to be. Stop comparing your life’s difficulties with the ease you see in those of those around you. Stop worrying about the hard times you’re going through and will go through again on the way.

Just focus on where you’re going.

And dare to imagine that not much matters on the way other than our following the Way that’s promised to get us there.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold