Day 4159 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 11:14 NIV

feels for the fringes

And that only because we are still physically in this place in which thus too are our eyes which then will always beg that we believe in what we can see as is seen inside this scene of this sea of a society to which we once tried to belong and amongst whom we still walk along. Only struggle then becomes that while we may walk together for a time it’s a walk with an entirely different appreciation for time, for life, for the fact that our life has here but only so much time left before we leave toward what comes to become our most blessed of belief:

A home.

Something that, like most, we’ve all sought to find within this time in which we have lived like many still will live in what will remain for those most a life in which this world is fit for everything everyone may want or hope to be within it. All of us have tried really hard to finally hold what is that feeling of being at home with all the comfort and security that a home is supposed to offer continuously. And indeed, many if not most of us have in fact had many a day spent within that feeling as if we fit and did so perhaps rather well.

Just seems there comes a time for some in life in which you finally find that all you have to do to feel as if you fit is nothing at all you want to do anymore.

Because it all starts to become a burden so heartbreaking that you finally wonder whether or not it might be better to just break away.

From everything.

Which, oddly enough, is exactly what Christ asks of us. To go and sell all we have to those who have but what they’ll lose and to, once through, come back and follow Him unto what is that hope of a treasure stored in a place where nothing here can tarnish and none from here can steal. A hope made so undeniably hopeful because, well, here we have all had things both tarnished and taken. We have had possessions ransacked and ruined. We’ve all experienced that feeling of helplessness as we’ve looked upon the mess made by another who cared not that we were their sister, their brother, mother, father, friend.

No, down here it’s becoming that even those who are family will turn to enemy rather quickly, taking both possession and peace away simply because they like not something we have to say.

And it’s stuff like that that makes me wonder why so many are so willing to stay.

What it is about this place that has so many still thinking that their best lives might be lived here? What has this place that makes a life lived up to a grave seem to many the best place to live it all? What does this place have to offer that continues to make so many think they’re really living at all? What is it that is done here, won here that has so many holding all that is here so dear as to deny the cry of the Christ from the cross to lay down this life that we’ve lost to a trust in what rusts?

What will be left of us when we do leave and then this place is not anymore around us, before us, about us?

Yes, what will be that life we see in which we see not any reason left to put ourselves first? What will it be to finally feel nothing for our feelings of fear and fornication? What will it be to at last finally see the sights of life as it was meant to be?

Will we even recognize it?

And if we don’t as it’s said many won’t, as the same most will have by then spent this life not looking for life elsewhere, how then could we then claim that it mattered in what our confusion will contend a moment made at the end of a life in which it didn’t?

Because you see, the simple reality is that to find something you’ve to at first begin looking. Now, granted, some people sometimes stumble upon some things. I think of electricity, not really something that ol’ Benny was looking for necessarily as he probably didn’t have any idea what it was seeing as how it wasn’t anything that anyone had had knowledge of before. And yet there’s some reason for his being in that spot with that kite and key.

Sure, he stumbled upon the power of electricity but it was at first his curiosity as to the lightning that made him wonder what it was.

So can we say that of it he knew nothing of?

I don’t think so. Rather I think that he, like we, knew that there was something to know. Something new to see, to feel, to find and/or figure out. In fact that undertaking has been undertaken by a great deal of folks throughout our history in which they’ve come upon many incredible discoveries of both scientific and even social advancement. But again, even Newton had to have had some reason to look further into why that apple fell from that tree.

And, well, as of today it’s now you and me who are left to deal with yet another tree from which fruit fell leading to, well, what is a daily fall that’s becoming clearer all the time.

Ah, yes, time.

This has become one of if not the most wondrous weirdnesses within my walk. I’ve such a strange perspective on time it seems, one so strange that not even I know really what I mean. But it’s this almost argumentative agreement with it in which I know it there but every day it matters less. Something that I doubt can be said by most who still live via schedules and plans. And what makes it strange is that in many ways so do I. I’ve in fact come to find that much of my life has become so strictly regimented that I’ve confessed a lot of late that I feel as if I’ve backed myself into a corner from which I’m afraid to flee.

Because it’s comfy.

It’s easy. It’s safe and normal and just profitable and productive enough that I can always feel as if I’m doing something worth being done. Even if I think I know deep down that it’s not really getting me anywhere toward that everything better that know to be out there still.

Where?

That’s the wonder!

And that’s why time is such a strange companion as it both inspires said wonder to grow but that often alongside a worry that of it I’m wasting too much entirely upon such simplicity as taking a walk with my sister or sitting quietly in my room thinking thoughts. Both of which are somehow a greater struggle than they should be for someone of my age. But alas, this fact kind of proves the point that I finally feel as if I’ve long needed proven unto my pride and its complacency.

And that is that within this modern age in which basically everything is all but done for us, brought to us, we’ve become a people who just exist in constant consumption and confusion as we seem to not even worry as to what all we’re doing, thinking, seeing, believing even. No, rather we just continue along walking behind what is a world more than happy to live our lives, define our loves, defend our lusts and deny our loss. Deny us lost.

Even though I would hope that by now we all know we are.

Because I know I am. And I know I know that I know I am because having spent 38 years atop this land, I somehow feel less at home than ever before. Truly, every single day I feel more and more out of place. I look around and sometimes even listen into the goings on going on in a world clearly going under and I just find and feel this worry and wonder as to why none of it seems to matter to me as much as it matters to most.

A worry won because we’ve all become pretty sure that truth is proven in numbers, leaving me bearing the wonder as how wrong I am considering that everyone else, simply because of their quantity upon the wide road toward eternity, seems to think, want and worry about so much that I don’t.

At least not anymore.

And indeed, perhaps that’s the strangest scene to have seen and sought. That place in which my life’s been bought by what is a belief in the blessing that it is to believe we’ll leave to what is only then what all this life was always supposed to be. That in my memories I can see someone that I then know I was while the mirror shows someone who isn’t now who I used to be. That I know the life I’ve lived and at least a lot of the things I’ve said and done within but ever since then there’s been such this change inside of me that now I know that I know not that life anymore.

And for that I’m more grateful by the day as I’ve come to find that living free is far better than that life of my past captivity.

Yet I still wrestle all the time with plenty of things still in my life that don’t seem right, feel right, sound right.

Thankfully I’ve come to experience change personally.

But humanly I still worry as to whether or not I should and even then whether and when I can.

All because I fear that this place here where all of us are is still allowed entirely too much of me. And this truth I see inside the reality that I still worry about so many things still so worldly. Granted, not near as many as I used to. But still, more than enough to make me worry as to what I’m up to knowing now that there are two of me within this one of me. One wants what the flesh does whereas the other seeks to serve only the Spirit. And this war of words and ways is both then won and lost and that every day.

And it’s hard to manage it sometimes.

But what I’ve finally come to finally find is that the better side of life will always win whenever we allow the lost to lose. Whenever we agree to stop trying to feel or seek as if we’re at home or someplace to say we are, that we’ll then realize that we’re not. And too that we’re not supposed to. That just as soon as we turn our eyes from this life and hasten the horizon of the same, only then will everything change in such the way that we find an excitement in waving goodbye to all we’ve wanted and won in life.

Because when we allow ourselves to hope in a promise so big as Heaven being our home and it housing nothing of the horrors and hardships that this heartbreak is known for, oh, we’ll finally feel inside our bones that there is something so much more than everything that everything here that everyone else is looking for and leaning on could ever imagine finding or feeling.

Yes, when we finally find that we’ve been freed to begin our journey toward Heaven, well, everything else finally starts to become everything less.

And who in their right settles willingly for whatever less is?

In sadness that’s what makes this narrow road often feel the mess it both is and isn’t. It’s the difference, the nuance, the nothingness that becomes in us the sum of everything we want here which defines in us, designs in us this strange interest, odd willingness to wonder as to what all isn’t at the obvious refusal and rejection of what all is. And the weirdness that this world will think of us will slowly become matched, if not outmeasured, by our feeling the same of them. Because what we’ll find is that these two lives, one lived in and for the world and the other lived in but for the same never again, they’re lived together for a time.

How much?

Who knows!

But the simple fact is that those few of us who know that Christ knows us, we’re the ones who will come to feel increasingly frequently that we do not fit.

And what’s maybe oddest of all is that we’ll lose our desire to.

It happens slowly as, well, we’ve lived a life seeing life but one way and so it will take some effort and patience to wash all of those years and fears off of us. Sure, Christ works far faster than our frailty and foolishness ever could. But still, we’ve all memories and misunderstandings through which to work and walk as we learn to talk about things that this world doesn’t even want to think about. And slowly but surely we’ll become so different from the majority amongst whom we once sought, and perhaps that quite successfully, to fit that we’ll finally find we just don’t want to anymore.

Because, again, whilst we for now walk alongside sinners and thieves being ourselves the same, that Jesus found us and has begun to change us leaves us looking toward a vastly different outcome whenever we’ve all come out of this world.

For some will be welcomed home where there is unending joy and peace promised to be waiting whilst others will be turned away from the same toward what is instead that place in which joy and peace are not only not promised but in which they simply don’t exist.

And no, that shouldn’t be the outcome that anyone wants for their lives.

But, again, what you don’t look for you simply cannot find.

And the sad truth is that most here aren’t looking for peace. They’re not looking for joy. They’re not interested in reason or responsibility or righteousness reminding us of the necessity of repentance from a life lived sentenced to being so much like this world that much of us is only everything we were never meant to be. Yes, those in Christ slowly come to see all the many things that we’ve said, done, thought, bought, believed that only led us to lives lived in chains and captivity to what is a world so lost and lazy that so too then were we.

But you see, that becomes one of the single most beautiful words in all of human language in this life spent chasing behind Christ will crosses finally in hand.

Yes, were is what I want so much of me to be. I want my majority in fact to be what I were, once was, thus am not anymore. Because, well, what I was hints that I’m not that any longer. And that means that I’ve changed, turned, become something else. Something better I hope! But still, were signifies a shift of sorts in which we’re not of the sort we once were.

We’re different now. We want different things now. We do things differently now. We’re now who we once weren’t as who we once were isn’t who we wanted to be.

And this change, this movement, this shifting of a life out of the obvious darkness around us unto, into the Light who is the Life that laid down His for us to do the same with ours, it’s something that becomes so addicting that you slowly start finding that you’re offering it new pieces of yourself and the life you’d long told yourself you were supposed to both live and love.

Yes, in Christ everything changes right down to every hope we have and where we hope it had.

And that because we no longer dare to deny hope its right to extend beyond this life into the next.

No, in fact the next life begins to become the only life we think about. Or at least it has for me. Sure, I still think, wonder, worry about certain things here as I do understand that some things here matter still. But still, I just feel daily this deepening to my desire to be home.

Because I look around me all the time and all I seem to feel and find is that I’m not there because I’m still here where all that He promised isn’t.

And, well, call me an idiot, a bigot, a Bible-thumping buffoon, doesn’t matter to me. I just personally cannot see any reason to still agree that this world can or should be believed to house and hold what is the best of life when it also has and holds so many wars and worries and pains and problems and doubts and divisions and darkness and wickedness and woe.

No, this world seems less and less like home all the time.

Leaving me and time to continue our love/hate relationship as I know that here we have it but that, thankfully, we’ve less of it here all the time.

And I personally cannot wait until such time as He returns and takes me home to that place that I’m looking for and forward to. Doesn’t mean I’m good at it as, again, there’s still plenty here that I let get in the way. But still, there’s that hope in that our promised home never asked us to find it anyway but rather to simply walk in the faith that it is there and His having gone before us means that He really knows the way to get us there to where He’s said He’s gone.

To make ready our place.

And that we’ve now that place promised, well, seems then to relieve us of our feeling as if we need to find one here.

And, well, I’ve discovered that that’s the greatest hope and deepest joy that we could ever find or feel within this world as, well, like you I’ve tried to feel as if I belonged here in what’s long been a life I’ve fought to make comfortable and successful and special.

All things that I don’t care to try for anymore.

No, while what I’ve had has had its benefits, I’m looking still for something better. And while I don’t know where everything better is, I do know that it isn’t here.

And that makes it far easier to know where to look.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold