Day 4135 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ephesians 2:14 NIV

betrays the barricades

Which, in a way, means nothing short of betraying ourselves. And that’s simply because it was us who all but insisted upon the now longstanding separations designed inside the distance from where we started to where we are. And that is in itself something that continues to both lengthen, deepen and, in many ways and that in every day, darken. There’s this ongoing division between man and He who made them that’s allowed them to all but forget Him. A choice chosen on our part because we’ve become of the mind who finds a greater hope in His forgetting us than in His forgiving us.

Simply because we’ve become so hostile unto hope itself that we’d rather continue waging this war that is our every worry and want than to lay down such weapons and allow Him to heal our wounds.

No, for if we were so healed we might too be helped unto humility and, well, that’s just about the last thing that it seems we’re left able to assume is at all conducive to the way of life we’re living.

And for once, we’re right!

Humility is the other side. It is the proverbial bridge across the divide. It’s the boat which floats just well enough to get us home. Granted, it has a ton of leaks as it asks an even greater number of losses along the way, chief among them ourselves and their selfishness. But still, it’ll get us there to wherever it is that we’ve never been as they whom we’ve never come to be either.

Because that’s kind of His whole point and promise.

It was, is to bring us back to life from what is this death that we’ve spent a life choosing to live instead. Trouble is that the vast majority of us still can’t see it that way. For all have become blinded by such apparent ideals as doubt and confrontation. We’ve become a people who make sport of denial and contradiction. We exist upon confusion and eat delusion daily for dinner.

We are all the one sinner that He left Heaven to bring back into the fold.

Doing all He did whilst being told that we didn’t believe Him as is spoken in actions speaking in words that even our mouths would be ashamed to say.

Every wonder why it is that we continue to live this way? Speaking personally I wake up every morning anymore just feeling off. I’m talking both physically and mentally. Something has shifted inside my life and while I’ve my ideas as to what it may have been, by the time the pillow calls my name again I lay down to find that I’ve neither figured out the problem nor then done anything to solve it.

Rather I just keep doing the same things over and over again because I know how to do them and, while something in the mix sure ain’t working all that well, the overall outcome is close enough to good enough that, thanks to my remaining just blind enough, I can’t tell the difference.

And I’ve not many to tell even would I could.

Indeed, such is something which all of the sudden seems perhaps a bit of proof of this problem presented here. It’s the whole concept of hostility. And in every manner and measure of certainty, we are most certainly a very hostile people. I mean we bicker and argue and fight about everything. Even within ourselves! Truly, we’re all so engrained with the strain of what it is to compete and complain that we even spend time arguing with ourselves over what will soon probably prove matters that don’t really matter.

Because they seem to for now.

On this side of the divide.

I truly believe that that’s why most of us feel most often, at best, only half alive. Just last night I was standing at my window talking at God again about the day I’d had and how weird it was. Another rainy day which meant I couldn’t do much outside. Tired from the day before so I argued myself into resting up and getting ready for today when I do have work to do and hopefully it won’t rain again.

Ended up going to bed feeling as if I’d accomplished nothing other than letting an entire day slip by as I sat by and just watched it pass.

Lived a lot of days like that.

So bored and upset about it that I couldn’t even enjoy it.

All because it seems that I too have to find enjoyment in only every hour being filled, even with things that I don’t enjoy. Indeed, I would rather suffer through a day of struggles and misery than to sit quietly with thoughts that I’ve become afraid to think. And why am I afraid to think them?

Because I know they don’t think very much of me.

And that’s because they’re thoughts the Holy Ghost wants me to think. Thoughts about what I’m doing wrong or not doing at all. Thoughts about all the mistakes I’ve made and the ones I make still thinking them not mistakes. Thoughts about the changes I need to make, mostly the stupid things I need to stop doing or worrying about. Thoughts about how grateful I should be and how happy I’m still for some reason not. Indeed, thoughts about why I’m always so seemingly unsettled inside.

Inside what is a life in which I play the role as if I am.

Why do we do all this my friends?

Why do we seek for so many distractions in life knowing their detractions from the same? Why do we make plans for days to unfold like days already gone? Why do we convince ourselves that doing something is so much better than doing nothing? What is there that we can do that can make up for all the nothing we’ve already accomplished thanks to everything we’ve already done that either didn’t go well or simply didn’t matter?

Why do we seem always able to become only madder, and not the fun, crazy kind?

That’s what this whole string of posts of late has been about!

It’s this realization as to this journey He has me taking and how it’s one that seems at least fairly intent upon leading me into what looks a veritable craziness. And I say that both because it’s changing everything and that by inspiring me to finally make some of those many changes I never wanted to make all while finding this odd peace in doing so.

Yes, He’s basically leading me away from everything I’ve ever known right up to laying down the only life I’ve learned to love.

And, oddly enough, I love every second of it!

Or at least those in which I’m willing and able to see it, feel it.

But sadly those moments are almost always invaded by this constant doubt that still has me questioning everything. Why do I feel this way? What did I say that I shouldn’t have? What could I have done instead that would have proven a better outcome? What do I need to change, cut lose, let go of in order to find more of the peace that I can strangely feel in this place?

Why isn’t there more peace within this place?

Well, it’s because we’re all so busy that we unknowingly continue to betray the very moments in which it’s offered. And that because offered within those same moments are all the other choices we continue making instead. Choices like worry or want, doubt or dread. Those are the things that we feed on. Those are the weights that we lean on. They’re the shadows that seems somehow to make our life’s darkness seem reasonable.

And I think we’re all, deep down at least, seeking for said reasoning.

But the problem is that all we stand to find is a reckoning.

That’s what we talked about the other day. It’s that coming day in which we’re all going to look up and realize that a life spent entirely insistent upon everything going our way only got us nowhere. That all it brought us was unhappiness and doubt. That all it left us with is questions we can’t answer and wins we can’t justify. In short, our way is what’s keeping us on this side of the barrier that we ourselves built seeking to try and keep ourselves safe from He who came to save us.

And yeah, that’s as foolish as it sounds!

Because He did come to save us. He did come to heal us. He did come to help us see that we need help in the form of healing and saving and that from everything that we’ve instead long assumed was right and reasonable.

And that’s the problem.

It’s that we’ve been running this race aimed only away from Him for so long now that we don’t know how to do anything else. Rather now everything else just seems silly, scary, prone to struggle and waiting to prove filled with suffering. And we don’t want any of those things. In fact we’ve invented a life that tries to avoid those things.

That’s why the message of the cross seems foolish to most.

It’s because we look at it and see only the pain, the suffering, the affliction inflicted upon He who must then have deserved it. All because we’re roundly convinced that justice exists in this world we’ve made a complete mess of. Yeah, we think that things will work out how they’re supposed to here. That all these rather rigid rules and guidelines and other societal expectations will accomplish a kind of fairness that ensures everything reaches a finish that fits and thus makes sense.

That’s how lost we are!

We actually still seem to believe in the structures we’ve created such as politics and the judiciary system which forms one arm of it. We still submit ourselves to the rules assuming within them reasons that ensure our access to the rights we’ve also set out to define. We’ve all but given the entirety of our lives to trying to find all these procedure-based outcomes that can all combine to ensure that every life is guaranteed what God has already given us all for free.

And that without the need of our trying to come up with ways to protect them, to ensure them, to punish those who refuse to uphold them.

Indeed, our nation, about to celebrate its 250th year as one, began with a handful of documents written by men for men seeking to promise unto all men the freedom to pursue such things as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Things God already gave us without needing us to even write them down, much less then with an ever-growing list of laws by which we seek to define the best way by which to seek them.

Because such is the barrier!

It’s our belief that we can do it better. That our ideas will work our better. That our way will lead us to outcomes better.

Why?

Because we’ll get the glory having been the ones who all but wrote the story that we managed to convince everyone else to go along with. All because for all our lives we ourselves have gone along with this story that tells of our glory, our gain, our getting to stand in the spotlight as the center point of a perfect life that everyone else thus seeks to emulate.

In short we’ve all sought to become God.

And thus we’ve set ourselves in His place within our lives at what’s then the obvious necessity of a lack of humility that would help us see that He is everything we never can be.

Such as holy. Righteous. Right even.

Indeed, we are standing on the wrong side of everything from Him to ourselves and yet we’re anymore so very prideful that we legitimately can’t seem to see it. Probably mostly because we don’t want to see it. We don’t want to admit it. We don’t want to believe it! And that because if we did any of the above, we’d instantly let in the truth that exists to set us free.

And there the problem would be that we’ve all come to think that we’re already there.

That we are free. That we are happy. That we are at peace.

And it’s a terrifying thing to realize you’re wrong.

Much less about such things as should have always been so easy seeing as how He created us to have them, to be them.

Proving effortlessly just how lost we really are in that we’ve chosen for this life in which we still have to search for them, ask for them, pray for them.

From the One who gave us them!

If only we could see how dumb we’ve come to be, I don’t think we’d need to see anything else to say of ourselves that we’re ready to change everything.

Issue is that we can’t.

Thankfully He can. But then, again, He’s on the other side of this divide that we’ve designed inside of lives that go just okay enough to keep us from admitting how badly they’re going. And that’s something proven so easily in something so simple as our seeing that we’re getting nowhere. That we’re more or less in the same exact place that we were 5, 10, 20 years ago. Have we made some changes, some of them improvements? I hope so.

Have we made enough changes and improvements to have a better idea of what hope is?

Doesn’t seem so.

And I say that because this world’s as bitter and angry as ever. And sadly, so too are we. In fact I can say, with whatever kind of humility would say such a thing as this, that I’m in many ways worse off than I ever was and that despite all the better changes He’s helped me to make in recent years. Because even some of those changes have been allowed to become ruts that I call routines that inspire me to keep only doing the things that worked well once but that don’t work quite so well anymore.

I’m convinced that this life is nothing but a continual opportunity to learn and grow and, in doing so, come to know that we know nothing about life nor then how to live it.

And I’m also convinced that we’re all easily convinced as to the otherwise.

Which is why it seems that all our lives are so stagnant and stupid. Why everything seems hopeless and horrific. Why every day finds us still doing all the things that we’ve always done, trying endlessly to prove that they’ll eventually accomplish something worth accomplishing.

When my friends?

When will our way pay off? When do we plan on being to that place in which we’ve come to assume peace and happiness awaits? When will our ideas prove the ideals that we can’t see are idols?

Why do we seem so insistent upon keeping all of this living of life stuff so reliant upon ourselves?

Do we not yet know that we can’t do this well?

If we could then explain to me why Jesus had to die.

And sure, there are many out there so very lost inside their own pursuit of whatever prize they’re seeking for in life that they are absolutely convinced that He didn’t as they too consider that He was never alive in the first place but has rather always been the fragile figure in the similar fragmented imagination of fools who, for whatever reason, choose to seek for such things as surrender and the humility which both inspires and agrees to it.

Yes, many here are living lives as if God isn’t the One who gave them to them.

But where can that get us?

What is the best possible outcome to ever possibly come if it’s true that God’s not real? That we get to do whatever we want for as long as we’re here? Cool. But that we somehow manage to sometimes feel ashamed, dirty, guilty anyway? How is that possible? Indeed, where does doubt come from if there’s not perhaps some substance to that which we doubt the existence of?

You see my friends, we’re stuck inside the version of life in which we’re playing ourselves for the fool. And we do it every single time that we think we’ve got something figured out. And that because that idea only inspires us to stop learning, to stop growing, to just give up and settle for wherever we are.

And maybe this is all there is. Maybe we have reached the finish line. Maybe there is nothing more, nothing better to find.

But again, where does that belief get us?

Well, I know where it’s always gotten me and it’s nowhere I ever again want to be. Because being unhappy, alone, ashamed, no, they’re nothing we should want to be.

Thankfully He’s torn the veil and put an end to the apparent reason we’ve all seemed to see to our every hostility aimed against Him. And, in so doing, He’s opened our eyes, and hopefully our hearts, to seeing that we’re all out of our minds to continue waging war against the very God who welcomes us to come home. Doesn’t mean that such a gift of surrender and humility has taken hold yet. And sadly we’re told that it will never hold most as rather said most will continue to hold to their estimation that it’s just better to live as if He doesn’t.

A belief itself which will one day betray everyone who believes in it when it’s found that it can’t exist forever for either we’ll all find that He is there or we’ll all just die and nothing else will happen from there.

And apparently we’re the weird ones for choosing to believe that there’s more to this than that?

All I know is that I’ve spent long enough fighting against the immovable. And too that I’ve always proven the one who ends up moving. Maybe I’m weak. Maybe I’m afraid. Maybe I’m ashamed. I’d honestly agree to all the above. But that I can only says to me that there is something else out there speaking for me, to me, through me I hope.

And I believe that said something else is the Son who died to live inside what is a life that does want to change, that does wish to grow, that does hope to know more of Him as I know there’s still more to know. I know there’s still more to be.

Because all I believe is that I can’t possibly see, know, understand or comprehend everything.

All because all of life continues to show me things that I never imagined possible before. And that has me now wondering as to the impossible. Such as my being happy, my feeling peace, my finding life whenever I finally leave this place.

Does it always make sense? Not even close.

Will it one day?

Whenever we’re home.

And that we all feel this disquiet inside, this unrest, this lack of peace and loss of joy, I contend that all proves that we’re not there.

Maybe I’m wrong.

I just know that I’m done trying to fight to prove that I’m not.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold