Day 4138 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Colossians 3:1 NIV

starts the reassembly of reality

For in Christ, you know, the One who turns tables upside down, seems that so too shall our lives be turned rightside up. And yet this can only come when, again, we are in Him and He then in us. And yet this can only happen when we’ve happened upon the end of us and our love for what, in Him, becomes then what was. And yet we can only have a ‘what was’ whenever we endure whatever it is to endeavor to be undone by what He’s done. And yet that can only just barely begin within what’s been the what is that’s to become, in Him, what was.

See what I’m saying?

It’s basically that a life spent following Him is one in which everything’s pretty much always changing. I mean, even our perception of change changes. This is something I make mention of all the time anymore. It’s our well-known and thus commonly-help aversion to change. We hate it. We fear it. We feel it something entirely unbecoming of whatever this is that we’ve become. And that’s because, as far as our pride cares to consider, what we’ve become is a people who need not to become so undone as basically all change determines to always begin.

For change changes things. It takes whatever is and alters it into whatever it then wasn’t. And our problem is that we’re okay with what is. We don’t mind what is. In many ways we even like what is. In some cases we actually love what is. Now granted, we feel this list of decidedly different emotions inside every single day as every single day brings unto us a usually unfair mix of things we like blended with often more that we don’t. And yet oddly enough this itself is where we learn hope.

Because nobody hopes for what they already have. And yet, if whatever we have is what we already love, then of what hope could love still offer?

If we’re living lives that we truly like, then what hope is there in the living of another? And if we see no hope, no reason, no need to live anything other than the life we’ve come to love, loved because it’s filled with at least a fair deal of things we like, then why would we ever want to welcome any change? For to change what we like would, most likely, only result in a detraction from/disappointment to the same. Now sure, there is always that chance that a change could turn what we like into what we love, making our appreciation and enjoyment thereof only better, ever deeper.

But let’s be honest here, we’ve become pretty picky and that always based on pride. And so, odds are, we’ll always manage to still find a downside.

Because the sad truth of our version of reality is that we’ve somehow come to enjoy being unhappy. We won’t put it that way necessarily. In fact most days find us talking all this smack about this best life that we’re getting closer and closer to living. We spend so much time talking, or mostly posting, about all the amazing things we have going on or that we’re going toward. Life here has become all about plans made for fun had with friends found along the way, probably then because they too enjoyed the same things that they saw that we enjoy.

For that’s one of the easiest and thus most common ways for friendships to form.

It’s a relationship realized within regard to a shared enjoyment or perspective or opinion or ideal. Friendships are typically built upon the basis of common interests or pursuits or priorities. They’re forged over hobbies, found in agreed upon hopes, furthered in a willingness to then walk with one another toward whatever, wherever it is that the both are thus either determined to go or at least would like to someday be.

This is why we all love the friendships and relationships we have in this life. It’s because they find for us a bolstered roster of those upon whom we can rely whenever life proves to make it difficult for our to find our dreams. And this sense of support, of encouragement, of mutual trust and reliability, it forms for us the very foundation of what then seems a life itself bolstered and that allows us to enter it bolder.

Except that it still asks we consider change.

And it always will because, well, we’ll always have here room to grow. We’ll always have things that we can learn, problems we can solve, messes we need to clean up and mistakes we need to make right. For in all honesty, such is life! It’s nothing but one great big experiment in which we combine everything we experience with all we’re afraid would provide no such enjoyment into what kind of just boils down to this daily argument held between who we are and where we’re not.

Sad part is that it’s more often than not the who we are that wins those wars.

And that’s because, again, we’ve become pretty content with these lives we’re living at current. Are they perfect? No. Are they close enough to achieve in us a willingness to settle as opposed to a determination to endure the hardship of discipline and dedication that it would take to only perhaps make them better?

I think most would say yes.

And I say this because anymore I look around and I see a people who are best spinning their wheels and, as for most, seeming to have simply forgotten that they have wheels.

Rather most folks have put their lives on blocks as they live on screens. Anymore almost everyone does so much nothing inside every day they’re given that they seem to assume that such is the point and purpose of the fact that we’re all living. To just have fun. To always feel good. To set our sights on seeing all we like and tune our ears to only ever having hear the same.

It’s all about what we like. Or, if we’re still being honest, what we can be convinced we should.

Which, again as considered alongside the honesty that’s honestly mostly missing in life, is usually how we figure out what we like and what more we don’t.

We outsource that kind of information, allowing such mediums as television and the actors thereon to tell us what we should think in regard to, well, just about everything. I mean we spend so much time listening to so many opinions and perspectives that I think we’d be both really amazed and pretty ashamed as to how few of our thoughts are actually our own. For in truth, most of them have been given us on loan from those from whom we gathered their existence.

Perhaps a celebrity or news anchor. A social media influencer is anymore just that: a person who influences. Influence remaining still what it’s always been which is an outside matter of plausible ideals suggested presented unto us for either our agreement or dismissal, as is itself a choice made almost entirely upon the basis of past influence that’s already completed the very same task.

Question should have always been asked as to whether or not those from whom we’ve allowed ourselves influenced had anything even remotely resembling our best interest at heart.

Which, sadly, safe to say that most anymore simply don’t.

But that’s itself yet another lesson that we’re all going, perhaps only eventually, to realize the hard way.

And that’s because within this life we tend to save up all our hard days spent doing hard things for days still to come. Indeed, as the old adage asks, “Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?”

Well, because one day tomorrow won’t be there anymore as we’re ourselves not here anymore but are rather found before the judgement throne of God above finding out the very outcome of where we’ll spend the rest of forever and whether or not it’s in peace or pieces.

Dilemma proven in that the Scriptures promise that wide is that road that leads unto eternal destruction and there be many here who are walking upon it.

And too that many, because of our aversion to change, will never do anything to change anything about it.

And that because it’s good enough. It’s fun. It’s pleasing. It’s enjoyable. It’s so much of all the above that most folks have made tons of friends and indeed a veritable fortune walking it. And indeed, to a people such as we’ve become, one of pride and greed and gluttony, turning off the wide for the perceptively more miserable experience that is the narrow makes absolutely no sense.

Why give up all we’ve come to love? Why walk away from all the fun we’ve come to have? Why risk watching all our friends continue on ahead as we hold back for even a second to reconsider where it is that we’re going thanks to whatever it is that’s become this life we’re living.

And make no mistake, it is a grand kind of heartbreak to lose friends as, well, loneliness just doesn’t usually feel as great as having friends around.

It’s quieter. It’s harder. It finds us being the only ones there to shoulder our many burdens, and that without even all that much of that laughter that used to at least try and lighten the load.

No, rather life here become a long road we try and hold alone. Leaving us to be then the only ones who have to endure whatever may come, to choose wherever we go, to do whatever we do and to refuse whatever we don’t.

And it’s hard to be so responsible and reasonable and self-reliant. It’s not so much fun to be self-controlled or to deny ourselves things. It’s in many ways quite miserable, at least at first, to feel still that thirst for all the triumphs and trophies that are rather suddenly replaced by trials and torments.

And yet some agree to it because, as we discussed yesterday, they finally find some strange success to it. To the surrender. To the suffering. To the struggle. They find this odd sense of growth, and that oddly enough in hope, in their turning toward all that’s hard and heavy, scary and scarring.

All because those things too give us stories to tell, but somehow ones that have some point or purpose to them. Granted, we love a good success story. We all love those heartwarming happily ever afters. But the truth is that hellywood uses them so often for a reason. And that’s because hellywood deals entirely in fiction, in fakeness and fakery. The entire world is built atop falsehood and foolishness.

And yet we’ve made friends with it!

We’ve spent our lives learning from it how to live like it and have in fact come to love the lives we live!

We love them so much that most of us want nothing to do with change because, to be honest, most here truly wouldn’t change a thing as to change anything would only be to lose something that they’ve come to truly enjoy.

And who does that?

Who in their right mind walks away from such things as comfort and enjoyment and popularity in this life? No, those are all the things that we’re implored every day to seek inside of everything. We’re reminded constantly of this mythical best life that exists here that we all should be living, if not at least seeking. We’re all expected to just fall in line and live this life following forever behind those who’ve agreed to take the lead and point us wherever it is that we’ve agreed to trust they know to be best.

But friends, having all of us made mistakes and been wrong plenty of times, what then do any of us know about anything?

Again, this life is one great big experiment in which we experience what is a daily undoing of at least some of what was done before as it’s anymore always replaced by something new. Indeed, life is racing so quickly anymore that we just can’t keep up with all this world has in store. There’s always something new to try, something more to buy, a new lie to believe, a new life to live. Seriously, if you’d have told me even half of all the stuff we have now just 10 years ago, I’d have thought you were nuts.

And the issue is that not much of it is even any good!

Rather, as far as I can measure, things are mostly getting worse. Everything from attitudes to outlooks, it’s all crumbling inside of lives lived anymore for only more comfort and ease and the ideal that is tranquility that has kids unable to read and teens not interested in learning to drive.

I honestly think it’s fair to say that most folks here are losing their interest in living a life!

All alongside this ongoing fear held by most that’s found in the hope that we’ll never die.

Friends, what do we want to keep doing this for? What is ever to come of our becoming more dumb by the day? How ever can we ever hope to improve, to grow, to find anything that’s in any way any better if never we change anything?

If our focus remains so fixed on this place then this place will too remain all we can ever see.

And that sadly seems more than fine for most as most seem entirely uninterested in finding anything else. Most in fact seem entirely content to never even feel any better!

Rather many have settled quite happily into all their little ruts and routines spent daily doing all the same things that led them to their lives lived inside so many lies that they couldn’t recognize the truth if it was standing right next to them.

And that’s a really big problem because we’re getting really close to that promised day upon which the Truth will return to this place to gather those who are His so as to lead them home whereas all the rest are left forever alone in what becomes a place in which they finally find it proven that a life lived without God is nothing of the fun and freedom this world has convinced so many it is.

No, hell will prove the home of miseries we cannot begin to imagine and eternity will itself prove longer than anyone can fathom.

And yet most folks remain focused only on everything in this world, tying their lives, their futures, their forevers to everything that is only temporary.

All because we know what it would take for us to find something better.

And well, we’re anymore so bitter toward even the hint of change that we continue to turn away in disgust every time that anyone brings the subject up. A hatred proven perfectly inside what we insisted upon Christ in light of His light pointing out all our dark and asking us to part ways with it.

Something many here still seem as if they simply can’t imagine ever doing.

All because most folks know still the darkness for light and the light for a lie because that’s the “truth” we’ve been sold by those to whom we’ve sold our souls seeking everything from friendship to the very guidance of our lives over what are the cliffs we still can’t seem to see because of how blind we’ve become by all the fun we’ve had with the friends we’ve made with those who will go on inviting us back for however long we want to go on living like that.

And yeah, life here is long. I mean I’m 38 and it already feels like I’ve been here forever. In fact, I’m just tired! Every day is so wearying anymore. There’s always a storm, always a war, always a worry that someone somewhere wants me to worry about. Some headline that brings heartbreak or inspires more hatred. Always some new invention intended to make my life easier, safer, vastly more comfortable than it’s ever been before.

And I just can’t keep up anymore.

I just really don’t want to.

I don’t want to keep living a life afraid of change. I don’t want to keep living a life spent trying to find one more thing to think I need or want to have. I don’t want to keep living a life scrolling through everyone else’s thoughts and opinions.

I want to live my own life. I want to life a good life. I want to live life for as long as I possibly can!

And to that I think we would all agree.

But what I know most wouldn’t agree with me on is that I don’t want to live in this world that long. I don’t want to be here anymore.

I don’t like it here anymore.

Thankfully I know I don’t have to. Thankfully I believe I’m not supposed to.

Thankfully God got a hold of me years ago and started opening my eyes to the way of life that I was living, helped me to see where it was going, and lit this fire inside that’s daily helping me find this willingness to weather whatever I have to in order to find what I know I don’t deserve to.

He’s daily turning my eyes away from this world toward the end of the same so that I too can be done worrying about wanting anything here and thus stop wasting my life upon things that will stay behind when my longing to leave is finally fulfilled.

Does that make any sense to most? Probably not.

Does that worry me?

Not a bit.

Rather anymore I only find peace in all those reminders of how little I’ve left in common with this world. And that because I am reaching for something better somewhere else.

I just remember how hard that was to do back when I still thought I had something here to lose.

We don’t.

For all that’s really here is a life we’ve lived lost as to everything that isn’t.

Most will remain lost. Most will never know what it is to consider everything else that isn’t confined to this world and its wasted way of life. Most will live their lives seeking in full their rewards on what is this side of eternity’s door.

Please don’t join with them anymore.

For the fact is that this world’s had every chance to prove that it really had all that was ever best. And it just hasn’t. Rather this world continues going from only bad to worse in a life spent in deception being always deceived.

And I’m just not interested in that path anymore, and that because I know it goes nowhere.

And nowhere just seems a really strange place for so many to hope to be whenever we’ve got God above calling all of us to reach out to see something better promised somewhere the same.

And indeed, His dying for them proves His promises are just better. So if you’d be so kind as to excuse me, I’ll be spend the rest of my days getting ready to leave for wherever they wait for me to be.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold