Day 4157 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 11:39 NIV

rescinds the acceptance

Because, as it turns out, this faith brings with it a whole bunch of questions. Questions such as why? For what? Where you going? From where you coming? Who you been? Who do you want to be? Do our wants really mean anything? Should our wants mean anything? Should the wants of the world then if we maybe agree that perhaps even our own don’t? What rules are we supposed to follow? Where would/will said rules lead? What’s the prize at the end of the journey?

Can you even consider it a journey if never you’re found moving?

I ask myself questions such as these all the time. In fact I often find that often my mind never stops thinking and learning and thus asking more questions of both myself and the world around me. Even asking questions of the hope within me. Why does it matter? What does it help? Again, where will it go? Where have we gone? Why can’t we all see just how far gone we’ve gone?

Do we really like this life that we’re living at the behest and suggest of a world so begrudged and scattered and that by and inside every manner of both belief and doubt?

Why have we all such a tendency to doubt as opposed to believe?

Why do we need always to see something before we’ll dare believe it there?

Pretty sure there’s something in the air around here because these questions and the confusions which inspire them again and again to be asked always the same, again and again, it kind of just leans to the fact that this life has gone well off the rails as so often it feels as if those who are trying to understand, trying to improve, maybe even legitimately trying to do good just can’t. Instead everything just continues along what is this song that is sung in the sounds of sighs and selfishness.

And, as an example of the confusion for which we’ve settled, I both sing it myself and yet hate the words.

Because they’re, most of the time at least, all about want and wish. They’re this mix of need and have. It’s like all of life has devolved into an ongoing game of Go Fish in which we all hold so many cards and yet never the one we want most. For, as in the game, we’re all looking for parity. We’re looking for simplicity paired with normalcy. We’re searching for meaning and hoping it matters. We daily hunt for hope and yet always hope it held.

And yet how dare we do that to hope?

How dare we so confine such gifts in life, of life into something we can find, can feel, can have?

Why have we accepted this as being the best approach to these things and the many like them?

See, it’s just nonstop questions!

But honestly, why have we accepted this? Why have we agreed to take this direction at life? Having done so, and found at best a blend of reward and regret, why then do we just keep doing it? Why not change something if what we have is nothing we want? Why not shift our focus if our focus continues to fail in regard to helping us find or feel whatever, however we’d prefer?

Why are our priorities still such the preference considering all we seem to prefer lasts only but a moment, and that often replaced by misery?

Indeed, I’ve learned to prefer a whole bunch of things over and against the other things that I never did. Like most I’ve almost always preferred comfort, rest, ease. I’ve preferred popularity, power, pride. I’ve preferred that way of life that everyone else has chosen to live, living in love with all they can see.

But why?

Is it truly the version of life I want to live? Does this world honestly hold this ‘best life’ that everyone’s looking for? Is best really something that’s best for each of us to define or decide for ourselves? If it is, a lie which sells every single day and is continually being bought by most, if best is best for us to determine for ourselves, why then do we always look for agreement from others?

What is our fascination with affirmation if not but a confused, scared, shameful heart crying out for someone else to tell us that we’re not doing as badly as we try really hard to never think we are?

Why do we have to try so hard to always keep ourselves convinced that we’re not doing all that bad?

Is it not because deep down we think we might be doing worse than we let on?

See, that one really kind of leads into my point for today’s post. It’s that anymore it seems that among our greatest hopes is this idea of perfection that we’ve come to become so convinced we have to see, show, feel and know that it’s all we really seem to seek. We’re all so worried about making sure we look like we know what we’re doing, feel like we’re doing it well that, well, we’ve kind of stopped worrying about what we’re doing.

We’ve become so focused on the outcomes that we pay no mind to the inputs.

We don’t think about the things we’re taking in whenever life’s allowed to remain nothing but this ongoing getting of whatever it is that we can become convinced we want. This is the danger of both greed and gluttony, both of which are listed among the sins from which we’re all called to abstain, refrain, refuse. And yet they’re both sadly things that nearly every day we do inside what is this life that we’ve both been sold and, most sadly of all, chosen to buy and believe is honestly somehow best.

Again, why have we settled for this?

Why have we accepted this?

Why do we continue falling for this idea that within this life all we’re supposed to find or feel is only our feeling good and looking the same?

When did we determine to become so plain as to remain playing this game that the majority of people have made this life out to be?

Because in truth I wake up every single day only to see so very many things that have about as much to do with life as a coffin does. So many words that people say, messages that then they share, matters and mysteries for which they care that only steal their air from their lungs and time from their lives.

All while giving nothing back to them in return.

And, again, this is sadly something that we’ve all done because, well, we’re all so dumb that, again, we don’t ever really stop to think about what we’re doing, much less why we’re doing it. No, instead we’ve been sold this idea of life in which being busy is always best. Doesn’t matter what you do, just do something because that will make it seem like you have something to do and anyone who has something to do that they are in fact doing must then be important and working on something the same.

Thus we’ve come to place an undue importance on what all we do, and yet not what we do nor why.

Seriously, ask yourself this one:

When’s the last time that you honestly stopped everything and considered why you were doing, thinking, saying any of it?

Odds are it’s been a while.

And that because that seems one of those elementary kinds of concerns that’s mostly been reserved to childhood. For it seems that kids are the best of us whenever it comes to curiosity. Why we doing this? What does that mean? Are you sure this is the way?

Are we there yet?

Oh, the classic backseat impatience spoken sighfully by a small human in a hurry to get wherever it is that they’re going.

Something we’ve all learned to stop asking because as adults we don’t spend much time thinking about where we’re going. Rather we’ve chosen for a version of life in which we only worry about such worries in regard to dinners and weekends and trips we’ve planned for this fall.

And there you have it.

My point is that nearly all of everything we spend the vast majority of our time thinking about is only everything in this world. It’s dinner plans and vacations ideas. It’s what we intend to do this weekend if it doesn’t rain. It’s where we see ourselves in five years. It’s fears we feel over finances falling short of adding up. It’s where they say the best place is to get your hair done or to buy some new clothes.

It’s all so trivial and temporary and yet we live as if it all means everything that any life should.

Again, why have we accepted this?

Why have we accepted that we’re here for nothing more than wanting more? Why have we accepted that life is supposed to be about nothing but having fun and making friends with those who have fun in some clearly questionable ways? Why have we accepted that loneliness makes you a loser? Why have we accepted that being a millionaire is all that can make you a winner? Why have we accepted that money and job titles are the best measures of a man?

Why have we accepted that women can be men and men then women and kids should be taught this stuff in school?

Granted, not all of us would agree with all of that. But my question then becomes what are we doing about it?

And the answer is often a great, resounding NOTHING!

We do nothing about it. We ask no question, cause no ruckuses, voice no displeasures and seek no repeals. Sure, there’s maybe a few moments of rage or outrage in there from time to time whenever we find that someone else has done something we can’t tolerate.

But what happens every single time?

The rage fades and we revert back into a life spent worrying about mostly only whatever affects us.

Why have we so settled for what is a life in which all that matters most in life is just us?

Truth is that I don’t know and I say that as someone who does know that I have known that life as I spend every single day trying my very best to find anything and everything that’s left of it as I now know that I don’t want it to remain the way of life that I live on my way out of this world.

I don’t want what other people want anymore. I don’t find any worth in all the things that this world thinks are worthy of the amount of time and interest they’re given. I’m not interested in having the things that this world gives us so long as we go along with them a little further in the direction they’ve chosen to go.

Why?

Because this world doesn’t seem to know where they’re going nor what all’s said to await their getting there.

I do.

And I do because the Bible tells us plainly what is promised unto those who continue to live to please the flesh, to love only in lust, to measure treasure only in that which rusts, to place their trust in only themselves believing then that all they do both must matter and that it will, in the end, measure to what everyone else would readily agree was a good way to have lived their life.

But you see, it always comes again to people being the ones who get to decide.

And I just can’t understand that way of life anymore.

Why?

Because I know perfectly well so many of the things that I’ve settled for! I know plenty of the lies that I’ve chosen to believe. I have so many memories that bring me so much misery of such sights and sounds as lust and pornography. The life I’ve lived has not been the life I wanted to live. Thus it seems that I missed the life I would have preferred because my preferences were skewed by a world that showed that I was supposed to agree with this and doubt in that.

And we’ve all gone along because it’s undeniably easier to settle for letting someone else do our thinking, our deciding, our dreaming even.

Indeed, we’ve in this country been always sold this idea of the American Dream, and it’s one so specific and commonly sought that anyone who doesn’t check off its every box is considered a failure. We’re told that you have to go to school, a place in which all they seem to do is teach you what to think and never how. That you have to graduate from said schooling system with firm plans as to what school you want to go to for the next four years and what major you want to study whilst there.

That along the way you’re supposed to get married and have some kids as next comes your career in which you’re supposed to work at one place doing different jobs, each of which is apparently a rung on some imaginary ladder, which is a ladder because it’s supposed to lead you higher and higher helping you earn more per hour until such time as you find that you’ve made it to management and have far more responsibilities than you have time, and because what we do for a living is always considered of more importance than the fact that we are living, our lives and our plans and even our families are forced to become afterthoughts as we’re just so behind at work that we start working overtime just to stay on track.

Yes, we worry ourselves sick over something commonly referred to as ‘staying on track.’

And yet somehow we see not the irony in that and nor then find apparently any questions to ask.

Questions such as who laid the track we’re so worried about staying on? Where does this track go that was laid by someone we don’t know? What awaits us whenever we get to wherever it goes?

Is the track perhaps just a circle, basically then just leaving us chasing our tails?

Friends, my point for today is that it’s pretty clear that we’ve all embraced what this world considers normal. All of us have agreed to have fairly similar goals. All of us love making plans. All of us believe there are boxes in life that we need to check. We’ve all accepted an approach to life in which normal is the idol. We just want to be normal. To feel normal. To so blend in that we feel as if we do belong.

Just talked about that the other day.

But my question for you today is why?

Why have we settled for wanting two-story homes in which we live lives that don’t tell any stories anymore? Why have we settled for wanting 2.5 kids and where is it that we expect to find the half? Why do we worry so much about our jobs and our bosses that the first thing we tell our families whenever we get home is how irritating they are?

Why have we settled for keeping God so far as He so often feels?

If not because this world doesn’t welcome Him nearly as close as He died to be?

What worries me is that we’ve become so used to looking to this world to help us decide what to do that all we do is whatever the world says we should. We accept the common goals, share the common pursuits, make the common plans, have the common hopes.

But what can be so amazing about something that everyone else can find or believe important?

Where is there any rarity in our doing daily the same things that everyone else is doing? What is to be proven so special about the prizes and promises that so many promote and pursue?

Do we really want nothing more than to end up having the same thing as everyone else in the same place in which everyone else ends up?

Again, I’ve read the Bible from front to back and, well, no, I don’t want to end up where it’s promised that most here are going to go.

Why then live my life doing what most here are willing to do? Why agree to spend my life wanting what most folks continue to want? Why allow my plans, priorities, pursuits to remain in any way aligned with a world so out of line that most here still deny the Christ?

What I’m getting at is that this world isn’t our goal. That the way of life that we’ve been told is normal is just that. It’s normal. It’s common. It’s standard.

It’s boring.

It’s empty.

It’s pointless.

Why continue to settle for it?

Sure, doing so has always allowed us to win some prizes and have some fun and make some friends. But friends, please do understand that whatever we find in this life is the same as what we will lose. And the issue then is that most folks are trying really hard to live their best life.

What then will that leave them to find when this life is over and the rest of forever has begun?

Please don’t live to leave your best behind.

Let us rather do as Christ has asked us to and store our treasures in Heaven as we affix our eyes unto forever’s horizon in what then become lives in which we spend our time not trying to find anything in this world but rather only to lose whatever we already have so that we’re truly ready to go whenever He says we finally can.

Will it make sense to most? No. Will most consider us losers? Yeah.

Does it matter what people think?

And if the answer to that isn’t obvious, then I don’t really know what to say.

All I will say is that all of us have settled for long enough to allow this world to lead the way we live our lives. And now if we’re good with whatever it is that they’ve helped us find, fine. But if we’re not then we should understand that we have to do something different if we’re ever to find something else.

And to do that we have to at first rescind the acceptance that we’ve all given unto a world that will continue asking that we agree to let them continue to lead.

Again, He’s told us where this world is going.

Don’t see how it makes you a loser to want something different than the best this world has to offer and the wrath that they still can’t see is coming.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold