Day 4130 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 34:14 NIV

chases after change

Which is by no means anything that anyone ever seeks to chase as to chase demands we crave and we most certainly do not know to crave change. Rather we’re a people who clearly prefer the ease and comfort of staying always the same. And that’s simply because it is easier. It is more comfortable. It is in many ways utterly comforting to stay who, what, where we are doing there whatever we’ve been doing as it demands nothing of learning, of trying, of hoping even. And that’s simply because a hope had is, to us at least, the best thing we could ever hope to do with hope.

To have it. To hold it. To know it and thus to fear it being lost as none want for that for which we’ve hoped to ever become that of which we’d known.

No, rather we want all our hopes to be ever with us, to be always near us, to continue this journey within us so as to give us that esteemed assurance that no matter what comes nor where we go nor if we fail, we’ll always have that something good to hold onto. Because we’ve come to believe in a life in which we don’t lose, never stumble, cannot fail and should not hurt. We’ve turned life into this smirk of itself in which the heaviness has been stripped away and forever replaced with a sense of ease that allows us to think that we’ve got it all under control.

And we love that feeling!

That one in which we feel as if we know all there is to know, or at least as much as we need to in order to continue doing as we’ve always done. That feeling we feel in which we fear not fail nor fall as we can withstand the call to do nothing new and thus leave nothing old. We adore that feeling in which we lose nothing and need nothing else as the both combine into this place in mind in which we can worry our time about only our wants. All because when such griefs as worry and need have been perpetually put to rest, so too then can we rest the same.

Perpetually.

And indeed, inside this verse we read of what seems to sound a quite similar goal. To seek peace and pursue it until we know it so fully that we learn it can’t fail us because we’ve learned to stop failing it. But you see, that’s just it! It’s that the hope is rest, the promise is peace, the journey is heading somewhere and that field is evergreen.

But friends, I can’t see how we can so seem to assume that we’re either there already or that there’s here room for it to be.

For where is here peace?

What is peace?

I stood at my bedroom window just last night asking this very question of Him. Because I don’t know that I know. I assume I have, and that maybe at least a time or two. But in truth, I don’t know that any of us do as I don’t think that here we can as here we have what is a life so prone to struggle and filled with strife that each day feels like the knife plunged deep into our souls as we watch a world continue to sour upon the pursuit of power in preference of pride.

And then a deer walked slowly by as the firebugs flickered in the field behind, all while lighting and thunder awakened the night.

Then I realized what peace is.

It’s nothingness.

It’s an absolute emptying of all worry, of all complaining, of all need to change and keep changing. It’s the finish line beyond which we can finally forget all the forging and failing. It’s the outcome of a life that’s come undone unto the point in which peace is impossible within the places we’ve been and the people we were. It’s in the letting go of all we know of all we knew as we seek instead something new inside a place new too. It’s the trading away the very sum of everything that’s kept peace and hope and joy and rest always at a distance as the mere glimpses of them that we may or may not have noticed.

For that’s what I noticed.

It’s that I was standing at a window in a bedroom that my family has fought for in ways that it shouldn’t have had to take. I was gazing out upon an open field that is immeasurably far removed from the apartment view we fought so hard to leave behind. I was seeing the lightning bugs dance beneath the sky, just the same as they’d always done in that decade that I couldn’t seem them thanks to city lights stealing the night. I watched a deer walk through a yard I mow on top of the nearly 20 others that I take care of too, just passing through as if he had nowhere to be and nothing to do.

I realized then that peace is war as without the fight you can’t find the rest.

Which is why He calls us unto this good fight that is our faith that does ask of us things that are hard, that prove scary, that do indeed steal us daily of the things we’ve learned to like and think we love, and in doing so stealing too us away from all those things that would have killed us.

Or at least kept us from living.

And indeed, there is a difference now seen from where I’m standing. And it’s one measured in meaning and wherever it is that we insist it found. And that often because, within this life as we live in whatever way in which we choose, we’re the ones then who daily choose what we when and when we lose. And yet the problem then the same that empty grave was chose to prove.

It’s that we were given this life to learn to lose.

Not because God wants us cold and alone and utterly empty in lives forever the same. No. It’s because for war you train so that the peace you achieve is only all the deeper whenever you get there. It’s because He knows that healing comes only after hurt and harm. It’s because He knows we, as prodigals do, we sold our share of the farm that is the faith that He’s planted in us, of us of which He expects then a harvest. And indeed, within His Word we read that the harvest is plentiful and plenty ripe for the picking too.

But it’s because of that that He gives us this work to do in this war this is. It’s to learn to turn to Him having turned Him down. It’s to find that our way of life doesn’t actually accomplish much of a living worth living for. It’s to help us see that hope, joy, peace, they’re not held inside of things held inside of stores that we’ve learned to hope to have in our hands. Rather it’s because we’ve all now had our hands muddied in lives lived mistaken and we need then to clean them.

Indeed, “Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.”

Because neither the filth we’ve found in the fun we’ve had nor the countless times in which we didn’t know we’d gone so mad as to have thought we could live two lives at once, neither of these are welcome before a God of such simplicity as something now so rare as peace seems to be.

Why is it so rare and there hard to find if not because we are of double-mind? Why the need to repent if not for our having known regret? Why the call to change if not because we’re the ones who charged Him of crime? Why the demand we lay down our lives if not because we’ve held them so tight that we’ve squeezed from them the life?

Why the demand of crosses carried if not because He’s going to help us find daily something inside of us that can only be removed in our share of what a cross insists you lose?

It’s all because we have a life to lose that we’ve chosen to live lost inside all these thoughts thought about everything but Him. It’s because we’ve chosen this way that we say’s our own at the express expense then of that one we’ve not then known. It’s because this life’s always been ours on loan and He who gave it gave it with the perfect expectation of getting a return on His investment.

And why shouldn’t He?

For in our taking that last breath we took, look, it shows that He’s trusted us to try at life. It proves that He’s entrusted to us the time He created for our to do something that’s becoming of what He calls us to be. It helps us see that His help we need because we couldn’t breathe if not for the lungs He made and the air He made to fill them.

What if peace were always that close?

Held inside something so simple as letting everything go so that we could finally come to know the sheer beauty that is the grand blessing of our having the ability to be here breathing? What if peace was always that place in which everything else was gave away, laid to rest, left to waste so that we could focus all we have on the faith we can?

Yes, what if faith were all we cared to have, the only hope we sought to hold?

And that then with the humble audacity to stand assured that we can’t find it here but that then means it must be elsewhere?

Where?

Everywhere we’ve never been whenever we were there wherever it wasn’t.

Indeed, for all of life it seems as if peace has been almost perfectly absent. Again, it’s so often felt this ideal that we’ve at best caught but glimpses of. Something of a ghost we know is there but don’t know where it goes, what it does, who it is.

Just that it’s not us nor where we are because of what we do or don’t.

That’s why peace is always so far away. It’s because we do things, say things, think things every single day that keep pushing it away. That’s again what hit me last night. It was that I’d spent another night filling my eyes, my ears, my mind, my time, my life with what are a perfect passel of problems waiting to be proven the regrets I can’t see them as being just yet.

I’m getting closer thankfully!

But still, I just keep finding reasoning to keep on retracing steps and counting back all the changes I’ve made wondering if I made them right or if they were even right to make.

Why?

Because the devil has me convinced that I’ve lost something along the way. That I let go of something I could have kept. That I might be happier, healthier, better perhaps were I to go back and invite back some of what I once turned away or turned away from. And as it turns out I’m that just-right kind of dumb that proves almost daily willing to wonder.

Maybe I would enjoy listening again to that music I used to love. Maybe it wouldn’t prove much of a problem if I started eating that stuff I used to eat all the time. Maybe it would add some spice to life, some excitement perhaps would I could have back some of the joys and enjoyments that I know I used to know. Yeah, maybe it would make my life better and me feel the same to turn back toward something familiar in that life I once lived.

Problem is that I distinctly remember every exact why as to what I chose and when I changed.

And as easy and comfortable and welcoming as all back-sliding will always be here inside this place in which we can, He doesn’t call us to reconsideration but rather to repentance.

To turn away from that which He helps us see is not good, is not right, is not healthy or helpful nor then the least bit upright. To leave behind that way of life that we’ve all come to live in which we’d learned to love all that was only silently hating us in return. To walk away from a way of life worried so much about so much that doesn’t matter and thus cannot ever possibly help us to do better nor become the same.

All because life as He designed it to be isn’t found upon this plane, which, in case you didn’t know, is defined as both “a flat surface on which a straight line joining any two points on it would wholly lie” and too “a level of existence, thought, or development.”

A level existence upon which exists a straight line connecting wholly two points.

Such as us and salvation unto the promise of peace in that place called Heaven that He came and connected by taking up a cross and walking a straight line up that hill and into that grave so as to save those of us who’ve thus far known little if anything of a life level.

Because we’ve all instead known of only that life disheveled. That life lost in disarray. That life given unto all our hands and hearts demanded to keep holding. That life won within worrying only about what we had to lose and never at all about what all we stood to find in making the room.

Such as peace.

Indeed, we’ve always been the ones who’ve kept such prizes at a distance determined by our particular indifference as designed inside a kind of pride in life that’s left us all thinking we knew what life was and how thus to live it well. But friends, if that were the case then why’s peace so hard to find in this place? If we were any good at this, even a hint of how great we’ve all often thought we were, then why must weeping stay the night and joy come only in the morning?

Truly, why can’t we find joy in the mourning of last night’s weeping? Why can’t we see hope inside the hardship? Why can’t we recognize the reward that is regret, and that because it rewards us with the courage unto repentance? Yes, why can’t we see the life we stand to gain if we’ll just give away the life we’ve lived and lost in its place?

It’s because we don’t understand the purpose of pursuit. We don’t understand the difference anymore between good and evil. We’ve forgotten the distance between right and wrong. We’ve lived this lost way for so stinking long that we stink at thinking, at trusting, at believing and hoping that everything we believe is truly worth losing everything that isn’t it.

We know nothing of faith as faith is meant to be a fight won in worry and not a hurry. It’s a journey taken through letting go of all we know so that we can come to learn the more we don’t. It’s the very outcome of hope as it teaches us what hope is and why that means that it can’t be here.

It’s the promise of peace given unto a people who appreciate that it needs be pursued, and that through a life in which we’re shaken, stirred, scarred, scared, stripped and scolded, scalded even.

All things only faith will welcome as only just such a humble trust can see that only they have purpose whereas our fun and excitement and comfort, well, their purpose is only ever proven in the moment.

Don’t we want something that lasts longer than momentary enjoyment? Isn’t the sound of angels rejoicing worth not listening to a song that we felt we needed to stop listening to a long time ago? Isn’t health worth more than a bag of chips we thought we used to like back before He helped us change our lives and lose that weight and find ourselves along the way? Isn’t selling all we have and giving to those who have none worth far more than continuing to sell our souls to bring into our homes all the stuff we’ve sought to hold?

For what peace did any of it bring?

That’s what I realized last evening!

It’s that there is no peace inside a life in which we allow all these thoughts, worries, frustrations, reconsiderations in our minds. Peace isn’t found retracing steps back to a life we left for what we thought were good reasons whenever we did. Peace isn’t found in digging up the dead and trying to bring it back to breathing.

Rather peace is found in the leaving. Peace is found in the losing. Peace is found only in knowing both where we’re going, how we’re going to get there, what all it took to pay the way and that so long as we’re here that, well, no, we’re not there yet.

Because here isn’t home. The life we’ve known isn’t the life He died for us to know. The person we were, perhaps still are, it’s not who He created us to be.

How do I know?

Because there’s so often no peace.

And, well, what’s life worth if there’s no peace to be found in the living thereof? And granted, the life of a follower of Christ will not have much peace in this place as rather He promised that we’d have here trouble. That we’d face trial. That we would be persecuted and hated and perhaps even killed because of our faith. But He told us all this, why?

So that in Him we might have peace.

Because He is our peace. And that because He is the promise.

And that because He is that straight line connecting who we were with who He died for us to be, a line connected by a level journey aimed ever-upward taken from the evil we’ve done to the good He calls us now to do.

Who cares what we lose when the promise is that we’ll find peace if we let it go?

Don’t get me wrong, I find myself often anymore thinking about all I was before, all I did before, all I enjoyed before. And that because I have made so many changes in my life that, sometimes, I don’t even recognize myself. But friends, I think that’s arguably the best proof of His work that we could ever hope to find. It’s found in the massive overhaul done unto our life.

That and how that difference just might inspire us to seek out what all we could still change in the hope of finding an ever better day lived as an ever better person.

Yes, change can become addicting because within it we’ve the chance of seeing who we can still become.

And, well, if that hope is the same that He came and gave His life for us to have too, then yeah, I’d say it worth letting go whatever He helps us see that we need to lose.

After all, He’s the One who created these lives.

So who better then to know what best to do with them?

And what all does He ask we do?

You can read the verse too.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold