Day 4154 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 11:36 NIV

finds belief outside belonging

At least inside this world. And that because if we did belong in this world, to this world then we too are of this world and from this world and if that’s the case and we’re both in but too of this place then our life we have lived to waste not seeking to find fun and friendship within the face of those who pass by along what we believe to be a line that we have walked but now walk no more as we feel inside our bones that there is more in store for those who walk away from the sum of everything that anyone could ever find even should they within this place go everywhere and do everything and find meaning and worth and purpose within the same.

Yes, as He does His work that He’s already done for us, the rest just the opening of our eyes there toward, we find that so too are opened our minds to that life in which we seek not to belong here.

Because if we did, if we do, then this world is right about something. And if this world is right about something then it could be right about many things. And if this world is right about many things then maybe He isn’t right about anything. And if He isn’t right about anything and this world is right about many things then maybe He really isn’t there. And if He isn’t really there and thus doesn’t really care and we’re truly then free to do whatever we want then pleasing the flesh could well be the entire purpose of this existence.

And if pleasing the flesh is the purpose of our existence then this world would then be right about one more thing and if that be the case then He really isn’t there and if that’s too the case then, my friends, why are we here?

That’s the thing that I so dearly love about logic and truth and reality and reason. It’s that no matter where you start along what seems of each an almost ever-growing spectrum, eventually you’re going to find yourself at the same outcome as everyone else. And that because, well, every knee will bow. Every tongue will confess. Every single soul will feel the stress of having realized they’ve lived their lives a mess and need then in every way a Messiah who came with a message of kindness and compassion and healing and hope and that in Heaven.

And that’s where we belong!

It’s not to the world. It’s not in the world. We’re not of the world. We’re not from the world. All of us that is from this place is but this dirt that we wear. That is all of us that is from here, of here, promised in fact to stay forever here as instead the soul will again come to know what is that weight that is that worry as we find ourselves knelt there before a God both of wrath and yet warmth. A God of welcome but also rejection. A God of kindness but also entirely ready and equally justified in His promise to kill us.

Should we be found with more of this world inside our souls than His Son.

You see my friends, that’s why Jesus stayed but some 30 something years before leaving us. It was because He had somewhere else to be, someplace better to which to return. He had come to do as He’d done, to find the one by leaving the 99 behind in that place that is better, a kindness and mercy so full and complete because He already had 99 and, at least according to us, that would render but one more basically worthless. Pointless. Without reason to worry as, well, 99 is almost a hundred and having almost a hundred of anything is worth not worrying about the one that keeps you from having it all.

But He wanted us all. Wants still us all. He died for us all so that all of us could share in a death like His so that so too might we share in a resurrection like His.

Why?

Because you cannot be so revived if you’ve not at first died.

You can’t be healed of what harm you’ve not held. You can’t be freed from chains you can’t see that you’ve been carrying. Can’t find hope in the sum of everything you’ve come to know.

Not even in the place in which you’ve come to know the sum of everything that you do.

No. He came to do something new. And, well, what to us is more new than dying willingly at what was then the clearly brutal end to what was a life that, well, wasn’t much that any of us would consider all that much better? For He walked this world without all of the comforts and companionships that we’ve all had or sought. He walked this world with rather those against Him they fought inside souls destined to doubt and yet still filled with dread. He literally gave His time, effort, innocence to healing the sick, helping the blind, raising the dead.

Why?

Because none of those things make sense. None of those things are things that we knew nor know to be possible. None of those things are anything that anyone would ever expect. Because we don’t expect miracles anymore. We don’t wait expectantly for the things in which we hope anymore. We don’t understand anything of the patience, the humility, the honesty even that would allow us to know hope or to feel healing.

We’re too busy trying always to fit in and feel as if we belong.

And we do.

Just not here.

For again, if we did belong here and this world were our home and these lives then the only ones we’d ever live, then yeah, this world’s approach to living a life would make far more sense than His. And that because this world lives a version of life in which all that matters is all that’s here. A version thus in which such things as comfort and pleasure and success and power do mean something. A version in which those things are important. A version then in which we’d be in the right to seek them endlessly within our lives.

Meaning then that all of us have been right because all of us have sought, and found, all of them more often than we’ve not.

And again, He didn’t.

Jesus didn’t receive the warmth of the welcome that we’ve all come to try so hard to always find and feel. He didn’t experience the love and acceptance that all of us have tried all our lives to never go without. He didn’t have nearly as many friends as our digital existences tally we do. He didn’t get to see many of the things we’ve seen, do hardly any of the things that we do.

Rather He lived here without a place to lay His head. He had but a handful of friends, one of which betrayed Him in the end. He faced argument and ridicule and the sting of rejection everywhere He went and from nearly everyone to whom He talked. He was even refused a simple thank you from a bunch of dudes that He had healed.

He was considered nothing, sadly still is and that sadly by still most.

His life here is everything that everyone wants to know nothing of.

Because He came to prove that this wasn’t His place. That this world wasn’t the goal, the finish line, the prize to find. That spending our lives trying to fit in where we don’t belong is what caused us to become so blind as to believe that we might. That trying so hard to feel as if we do belong here has only caused us to chase after the cheers of those who have clearly no fear of their continuing to fail Him, forsake Him, forget Him.

All things done in hating everyone.

And sure, there’s nobody here who actually hates everyone. But there are a lot of folks here who hate quite a few. And in truth, anyone who hates a sister or brother who they have seen cannot then love Christ whom they’ve not. Anyone who looks lustfully at another cannot then understand what love truly is. Anyone who seeks after dishonest gain cannot then understand His call to walk away from trying to gain anything expect godliness and contentment therein.

Anyone who thinks still that this world still has something to offer clearly then continues to discount His offer to come apart from this place, touch no more of their unclean things, and to do so expecting His welcoming.

Where?

Into that place that we do belong.

Into that world that isn’t this one. Into that hope that isn’t here. Into that prize that is that life that we can really live in what is really love. Into that joy that we few shall feel when we’ve finally felt this world fade forever away. Into that place in which there is peace, something we’ll know then that we’ve known not whenever we finally feel what here we’ve not the chance to have felt. Into the fullness of His every promise that has been given us so as to give us a reason to repent from so much of what we’ve done trying to feel as if we fit here where we’ve come to fit here rather well.

Repenting rather from so much that is here still done that it seems to everyone that our lives have come undone and we then the same.

Yes, He came to make us into strangers, aliens, foreigners in a foreign land. He came to call us to become they who are but visitors passing through a life they plan to lose in a place in which all they come to want is only to leave. To leave ahead of that day anything and every way that has any scent or semblance of this world that killed Him, hates Him, rejects and denies Him still.

He came to pay our bill so that we could see in His death just how much we really are worth so that we just might stop with all this negotiation being so continually undertaken as to what we’re worth as bargained with within a world that tells us daily to do something different. To be something else. To agree with something less.

To pretend that we neither see nor feel what is the truth that tells us plain that this is not the place that we should want to be belong nor then wish to stay.

Why?

Because who in their right mind would want this world to be the prize?

Don’t get me wrong, the world itself is amazing. This spinning ball of dirt and water is simply beautiful. We are surrounded by so many miracles that it would take a million lifetimes to count them all and see the same. It would take just as long to even go and experience everything that every place has to offer. This place is incredible, so much so that there’s not another like it that we know of.

And yet when you look at what we’ve done to it, done in it, stole from it, then’s when you realize why He left the 99 to come you and me find. It was because we’ve become a people apparently obliged to ruin everything. To take everything for granted. To all but use this beautiful creation as but our trash bin.

And no, I’m not just talking about the world we’re living in.

I’m talking about the bodies that we live in inside this world that we’re for now living in.

After all, just look at all we’ve put them through and done to them. Look at all the lengths to which we’ve gone, extremes the same, trying to prove that we were what someone else wanted us to be. Think about all that you’ve said or done trying to please or impress someone. Think about all that you’ve agreed with, or at least said you did, all so that you could feel that sense of belonging that every soul seeks for some reason.

Actually, why do we all seek so constantly for that sense of belonging only to always find so little of it?

Are we just not meant to find it? It is a liar? Is the very idea of fitting in nothing but some fake falsity that we’ve formed inside fractured and failed imaginations?

Is love the same?

Truth maybe?

Are all of these things truly what society has made them seem? Are they just little tokens given us from those around us, ribbons and rewards offered us in exchange for our always agreeing to change in order to be whomever or whatever another may want us to be?

We see inside of every day something such as truth apparently changing. Truly, there are those who exist now upon another spectrum in which their very identity is so prone to shifting and changing that they define themselves and their lives as being here inside some sort of ever flowing fluidity, changing then daily if need be so as to always be whatever it is that they think they’re supposed to be at any given moment.

Is there really supposed to be so little consistency? So little solidity? So little honesty?

So little humility?

Why is it that we can’t see that the brutality seen inside every single day is only proof that we don’t belong in this place? Why isn’t the hatred we’ve all already felt enough to inspire us to flee from the evil which wields it? Why isn’t our world’s equating of love with lust more than enough to accomplish in us a stern refusal to hear them out as we should in all honesty have by now very little interest in anything else this world has to say?

Why?

Because still they say that this is our reward. That this world is our home. That feeling good is all that matters. That we only matter if we give our lives to making them feel better about not actually doing better nor then getting better. That we’re all here but to be daily measured by what we do, what we have, how we look. That our welcome is only to be won within lives given wantonly to wanting only everything that this world has to offer.

Why continue to agree to the sum of everything here as being all that there is?

Again, this world does have a lot to offer. But friends, don’t we know by now that this world takes far more away?

Does not this place steal from us our peace, our hope, our joy and thus even any simple enjoyment of this life? Haven’t we all felt fear and pain and worry and shame? Have not each of us come face-to-face with someone who hated us? Someone who rejected us? Someone who refused to allow us to feel welcome wherever we were, at least as whoever we were? Indeed, haven’t we all of us seen that story play out in which we were clearly expected to do something, say something, believe something specific if we were to be welcome?

And, well, having said it, done it, believed it, become it, why then still aren’t we?

Because you see, the simple reality is that we’ve all done so many things trying to please so many people seeking to earn from them their attention, their approval. And maybe we had it for a moment. Perhaps have it we still. But eventually it all fades. I’ve truly not had one single friend that’s not walked away nor I from them.

Is that what life is?

Yes.

Is that what life should be?

I don’t think so. In fact, I look around at what this world calls ‘life’ and I see very little, and somehow increasingly less, of anything that real life is. Just last night I stood again at my bedroom window watching the firebugs dance in the field behind us and prayed tearfully to God that life doesn’t feel like life anymore as everything that once was has been instead replaced with this swelling sadness.

Everything here is sadness anymore.

Why try to belong to that, in that? Why seek to feel at home in a world that makes us feel like hell? Why seek for some sense of belonging amongst a people who give it only begrudgingly and that for only a moment or two? Why continue to run always away from our feeling of any pain or persecution? Why continue ahead inside this delusion of a life lived in the illusion that we’re supposed to find some place within this place that we belong?

Friends, they kill our kind here!

They hate the truth we claim to stand on. They deny the God we claim to serve. They refuse every gift and promise that we say we’re seeking. They have sadly no problem hating, beating, betraying, again, killing anyone who says or does or believes anything that doesn’t match whatever is it that they want us to.

Aren’t we yet through?

Haven’t we seen enough? Heard enough? Felt enough?

What more does this world need to do in order to finally prove that God is there?

Friends, we’re walking amongst a society that is so clearly fulfilling Scripture that it’s like we’re living inside the Bible itself.

I’m all of the sudden reminded of the many Christians who’ve been brutally butchered here just recently. And too the very mockery of our faith as is being increasingly undertaken in hellyweird. And the lies that pour from every screen we can see and can’t seem to stop looking at. And the lives we continue to live worried about whatever it is that this world wants us to. And the amount of time we still don’t spend with Him and His Word.

Every prayer we’ve not yet prayed praying instead that we can still enjoy our time in this place.

I don’t want to enjoy this. Appreciate it, yes. Enjoy it, no.

Why?

Because the more we enjoy this life the more we stop worrying about the one that’s still to come. Friends, He’s told us that in this life we would have trouble.

Why are we trying always so hard to avoid it?

If not because still we care more about our comfort than His calling?

Is that a brutal thing to say? Absolutely.

Is it not true?

Look, the fact is that we’ve all tried really hard to make this life go right and feel the same. We’ve all bent over backwards and allowed many hopes and dreams to be broken and betrayed trying to become whatever it is that this place wanted/wants us to be. And yeah, we can go on doing it that way.

But why would we?

This world has made it perfectly clear what belongs here, what they expect here, what they are willing to welcome.

We shouldn’t want then anything from this world but every form and feeling of rejection that we can possibly find or experience.

Not because those things are fun but simply because this life isn’t supposed to be fun anyway.

No. This life is but the time given us to help us find that we belong elsewhere.

And again, what more do we need to see or feel to help us realize that this world, that this life, it simply cannot be all there is?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold