Day 4139 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV

leans in to the letting go

For as this road goes wherever this road knows so too do we slow as to what it was to know as we knew as what we come to know we knew is only that of what becomes a life we’ll only find as a life lived in what was a past dead whenever it’s one day compared to the place to which this road goes. Which, in the very purpose of hope itself, is a place called Heaven in which there’s held little of everything that’s here and thus vastly more of all that isn’t. And yet this hope, a strange curiosity to be sure, it’s one thus paved in mystery and then to be walked in uncertainty.

And I for one believe that such was certainly always His point.

It was to point us away from all we’ve known so that we might know all we still don’t. To help us to see things that our eyes wouldn’t believe even if they actually could. To teach us things that our minds all but refuse to understand. To show us how to stand in what is basically two places at once, one in the flesh and one in the faith. To inspire us unto the learning as to the leaning that’s needed to convince us to make ready for leaving the flesh for what the faith believes is waiting.

To stop waiting to wonder what else might be outside of what we can see, have heard, do know, don’t understand.

Because such things have defined this stance of what is this life as is lived inside this world where there is so much that we have come to know, to want, to wish we had and hope still we can. This has been life for us! It’s the very sum of everything held in the hand or sold in the can. It’s a pattern of making plans and seeking to see them always fulfilled in what are outcomes hopefully filled with even better results than we ever imagined. It’s literally the very stymying of our imaginations as we daily ask them back to the sad perusal of all that can be both purchased and yet so too will perish.

Yes, we’ve chosen for a life in which all we know of it is to be one day left to fade forever away as our minds will prove eternally unable to remember what’s soon to be proven as everything that didn’t matter.

Problem is that it matters now.

It means something in this world. It holds a certain worth and thus too a value to we who are me and you who do the things we’ve learned to do by watching a world lose their lust for life as has been resoundingly traded for a love for loss. Indeed, we’ve learned to crave all that will cave. To want all that will wilt. To fight for all that will fade and be eventually forgotten.

And what’s strange about this problem is that it’s something we’ve all already felt.

We’ve all of us known so many of those things that we know not anymore. All of us have had memories that we’ve forgotten. We’ve all experienced amazing moments that we can’t remember. We’ve had so many triumphs and won so many of their trophies only to have found them tarnished or torn and then thrown into the trash alongside our worry over them.

In truth there’s no possible way for us to remember all we’ve already forgotten.

And that thought only buys me another inside what is a wonder as to what all of what I know now will too become but the same:

A forgotten memory of what’s soon to be a moment that I’ve been so removed from that it too is removed from me.

Indeed, what all has been already taken? What all have we all lost already? How many ways have our lives already changed? How big have some of those changes already proven to be? As for me, I’ve spoken fairly candidly about at least some of the changes I’ve made in recent days, weeks, years. From losing weight to finding purpose, I’ve endured quite a lot of what most might consider upheaval in my life.

And yet I wouldn’t change any of it no matter how hard it’s been.

Why?

Because I know without question that I’m already better for it. I know that said changes have proven improvements even though they’re entirely still being undergone. I know that the shifts in mindset and lifestyle have become for me a new kind of belief in a better that I believe I can always become. Indeed, there is no now finish line inside my mind. Rather there’s only this fire to find what more I can do, what more I can be.

And it’s become such the ongoing excitement, all this ever-changing improvement, that I now find myself looking back upon who I know I was in the past and I’m losing rapidly my ability to recognize him. The person I was is becoming a stranger to the man I’m trying to be. The things I’ve seen now done by someone I never wanted to become. The life I’ve lived, whilst filled with many amazing memories I still carry with me, it was lived by a me that I don’t want to be anymore.

Because I know that I’ve found something better that’s already proven something more with still plenty more better still always in store.

And I think that’s what life was always meant to be.

I think it’s supposed to be a journey taken daily from what we knew yesterday to who those findings and failures should help us to become by tomorrow. I think it a learning process within which we slowly learn to process the pains, the preferences, the prizes and problems for what they are, and in this find that they are not all that different from one another as they’ve always proven merely things defined by or found in the results of what we’re doing or what we’ve done.

Both of which have come to define who we are.

Which is a people who are in pain despite our preferences being always not to be. We’re a people who have problems we’ve come to prize and still can’t see the prize held in letting go our problems. We’ve come upon this outlook in which we look for only that which is limited by something, be it time or space or matter or meaning, and we think that should we gather enough of these limited things then our lives will finally find unlimited value and worth and reason for having been lived.

But they never do.

Rather all we continue to find is only all of these reasons to keep wanting all we’ll lose.

Jesus came to lay down His life so as to help us see that we could, in fact should, take up crosses our own so as to practice the same so that we too can be ready to leave whenever the coming day has finally came.

In fact His Word is loaded with hints and suggestions all pointing to the same expectations.

And those are that we let go what’s here so that we might be both better ready and more deeply able to understand and appreciate both all that isn’t here and how it’s only found in our finding out more and more all the time about all that He did for us to find it.

Problem is that we can’t see it yet. And this is a massive issue because we’re a people who’ve subscribed to receive every issue of Prove It magazine. We’ve chosen for this approach to life in which we ask for evidence before we’ll believe anything. We want the proof. I mean, I literally live in what they, for whatever reason I still don’t know, call the Show-Me state.

Again, as I attack all the time in these many thoughts of mine, we’re a people vastly tied to this whole idea of seeing being believing.

Meaning that we’ll believe nothing unless we can see it and know for sure that we’re then not being led astray.

Which seems ironic considering how lost we all are in what are lives in which we live for all that’s already limited and too promised to prove everything we’ll inevitably lose. Seems to me that we’re down here playing ourselves the fool in what are lives we live only to do as we’ve already learned to. And that’s want, to wish, to whine whenever we fail to find whatever it is that we want in life, in love, in faith, in hope.

Yes, we’ve even come so far as to constantly rewrite these things so as to ensure they mean whatever our failures need them to.

All because we’d rather reality move than we do.

No, we’re all clearly rather content to always stay wherever we are as, well, our lives are still mostly filled with a whole lot of things that we’ve come to think we like and love. We’ve indeed so very much that we do enjoy enough that, to us, the thought of letting it go as we contemplate the call to get ready to leave, it’s something that leaves us bereaved. It’s a gift given us in grief as it causes us to think about all we’d have to leave, all we’d stand to lose. And this leans then into a feeling of our being then deprived of something.

Indeed, we’ve so come to so love the world and so much held within it that we think Jesus unkind, uncaring because He asks us to sell all we have.

For we think that would leave us poor, empty, all but basically alone in what would be lives lived here without homes we thus couldn’t fill with all the toys, trinkets, trophies that we’ve come to measure life’s meaning in.

And where would that leave us then?

What would be that life in which we so sought the light that life here was lived just wanting to leave? How strange would that be?

It’s pretty strange, believe me!

And I say that as someone who always feels as if I’m but at the very start of this journey, literally only but one maybe two steps in to what is a trip that forever asks I keep taking, well, forever.

And yeah, most days I don’t even try to wrap my mind around all that. Most days I still find more than plenty of things around me to spend my focus on. Most days I’m in fact so busy doing so many things that I find inside most of them that I’ve not much time to think about much at all.

Much less how unready I am to leave what I still sometimes allow myself to see as a life.

Something I think all of us do because we are alive. We are here. We can see things that look cool, feel things that feel good, hear things that make sense, think things that we think do too.

What if all of it’s a lie though?

And I don’t mean a lie as in an untruth but more so a half-truth. For what if looks really do deceive and thus those things that do look cool only do from one certain angle? Or what if what feels good only does so for a moment at most? What if the sense we manage to make out of so many of the things that we hear and choose to listen to only eventually prove to be actually lies that we did then decide to believe?

What if some of the thoughts we’ve thought were right to think only lead us to further bankrupt the bank that is our soul?

I’ve done that more times than I can remember, nor would ever want to count even if I could recount them all.

Indeed, I can’t tell you all the thoughts I’ve thought that I’ve since learned were only keeping me from thinking other things. Can’t tell you all the mistakes I’ve made focusing on things, or buying the same, just because they looked interesting or exciting. Can’t tell you all the lies I’ve believed wanting them to be true so that I could feel that I had done what I was supposed to.

Because that’s what we do here.

We spend every moment of every day doing countless things thinking each of them needed in some way. But for what? What are they needed for? What are they accomplishing for us? Where are they leading us to?

Who are they inviting us to become?

Because the clear answer is already seen inside what we have come to become.

And that’s a people entirely disinterested in leaving this world.

No, we’ve made a life here. We have a home here. We’ve even learned to plant our hopes here and they do seem to produce a harvest fairly often.

What sense would it make to leave then?

Everything we’ve ever had or ever known or ever cared to see or be, it’s all here! Thus it’s all provable. It’s all certain. It’s all so very real that we really can hold it in our hands or convey it, as I try every single day, with the use of the same.

But I’ve often found myself wondering about that too.

Where do these words go whenever I’ve finished writing them? Do they reach those who need them? Do they inspire, encourage anyone who reads them? Does anyone see them at all?

Or is it all nothing but thousands of words written across what usually takes me hours that end up just vanishing once I’ve written them?

I don’t know, and there’s really no way for me to change that while I’m here. But I do this every day because I do believe it does matter, that it does mean something. Can I prove it does? Not in the least.

But friends, such is the entire point of belief!

It’s our doing something because we believe there’s a point or purpose to be proven in our doing it. It’s the words we say which are said because we think they need to be heard. It’s the plans we make as are made for what are outcomes we truly hope come around. It’s the joy we feel in thinking about things that haven’t happened yet.

It’s the wonder that I truly hope we still have as to all that this world doesn’t have.

I’m just worried that we’re all losing that.

And I say that because it seems as though within every day anymore all we seem willing to do is lose all but all of our time and effort and interest upon such things as headlines and hatred. We’re all so distracted by things that we know full well may not mater by this time tomorrow morning. And yet we worry about them because the world’s got us convinced that they will.

And again, we’ve all felt what it’s like to be wrong!

Why then do we continue to play along? Why do we allow any of our time or attention to remain affixed to the things done, said, wanted within this world we’re standing in? Why do we give our hearts and minds over to continuing to assume that all of life is to be lived here?

Why are we so willing to limit everything?

And why don’t we yet realize that this is what we’re doing every single time that we allow our attention or intentions to be focused on this life?

Friends, everything here is already fading. Honestly, just take for example all these smart phones that are always being released. What’s had today will be considered old and obsolete in just a matter of weeks. And yet people are glued to the phones they have today, not knowing then that they’ll not mean anything in again just a matter of weeks whenever the newest version comes out with what’s probably an 8th camera or something.

Life here is constantly changing and yet, despite our fascination with the ongoing progress of progression, we continue to focus only on what we have and where we are and who we then don’t mind staying.

Why?

Do we just not want to believe in better? Have we forgotten how? Do we maybe even consider better to be something already here that we’ve just not found or proven able to afford as of yet?

How sad can it get?

My point is that, as this verse says, everything we see is temporary. And yet, everything we see is often everything we think we need because we’ve become a people all but inseparably attached to our lust for all that our eyes can recognize as something we want. But folks, our wants are going to be proven mostly only wars when it’s inevitably found that everything so served and chased upon this ground only kept us turning and running away from He who came to pave the way for our to learn what hope is and where is goes.

And how it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that’s here other than using all that’s here as what is the eternal jumping off spot from which we leave everything behind that ever we’ve known for what is a far narrower road aimed toward a home in a place we’ve never been filled with things we’ve only here, at best, but barely heard about and wondered how.

For Heaven is the home of love, of peace, of rest.

You know, all the things that are all but missing from this world lost stressing over all we want to have and hating all we don’t have yet?

He came to put an end to all of that and to turn our eyes toward seeking for what this world doesn’t have and thus cannot offer. Things, again, such as peace and rest and healing even.

Yes, He came to turn our eyes toward Heaven and our lives then the same. Because the simple fact is that what we look for is what we will find. Problem is that for all our lives we’ve only looked to find inside our lives all that He’s promised is temporary.

Stop settling for what the grave says you’re leaving behind!

Rather let us learn to let it all go so that we are ready to go whenever He comes back and says it’s time to leave all that was always meant to never be forever.

None of this is forever.

The only thing that we can find here that will matter then is whether or not we knew Him who died to show us how to live.

Everything else is but a distraction then from life itself. Meaning then that what we see is not a life.

All that’s here is rather a loss.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold