Day 4161 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 11:16 NIV

hastens the horizon

Because there exists this beeline in belief that desires, demands, determines to decide upon no relief until we see what all there is to that in which we believe so very deep that we know it’s there if even we know not where to go nor how to get to wherever all of it is. No, when you believe in something said something becomes eventually a longing the longer said belief asks that we believe for whatever it is that the something seems. And the simple fact is that these lives we live within this world so lost are in fact really long.

So long in fact that many have fallen away from every hope held still just out of sight.

Sadly most in fact have exchanged every better hope for what is here a better life. They’ve traded away the trying for what only our souls seem to know for what more our eyes can see and hands can hold. They’ve given up on going further into the fog of the future, afraid that their inability to see what’s waiting equals a chance they’ll probably miss it. Indeed, many here have taken such a reliance upon themselves that they buy now every lie that sells that tells them still that all of this is all on us.

And so this makes sense the great and continuous falling away. For yeah, if it were on us to both figure out what our hope is and then find on our own wherever it waits, we’d be in trouble. And that because we all know how easily distracted we are. We all know how quickly we give up. We’ve all of us books made of lists that say that we will walk away from anything and everyone who and that doesn’t match what we want it/they to be. So many things that have turned our attention away from the plain path of a simple trust.

So many that now we seem almost as if we seek always for more of only the same.

Yes, it seems daily within this place that we’re now a people who wish to be distracted. That we want for our lives to be so busy that we haven’t really any time to believe. That we hope our every hope is truly here inside what we can hold as then we know that our every hope we really can have. Because we can see what’s here. We can watch others living according to the messages which are mainstreamed into the mainframe that is our frame of mind. We witness on a 30-second basis the search for all of this life’s best offered unto us through algorithms having learned our rhythms and started feeding us rhymes that now all but lead our lives.

And this ever-shortening attention span has left our hands holding the only window to hope through which we care to look.

Leaving us then to find that all of life is best to be lived for only all that’s here as is had only in whatever it is that everyone else is doing.

That’s what the vast majority of people here seem to honestly believe. That everyone else already has it all figured out. That such celebrities as influencers and politicians are the pinnacle of all human potential simply because they exist on platforms paved in preference and pride. That to do something that’s trending is so triumphant because all the world will maybe see it. That to seek out by the hour the newest virtual virality that’s sweeping our nations off of their knees and back to their phones is truly the best thing we can know in this life that I contend we don’t.

And I say that because none of that stuff matters. Not the politics. Not the platforms. Not the performances that all trends and triumphs seem to be. No, it’s all meaningless as it all gives nothing to us. May make us feel important or special or even loved, but friends, when you stop to think about it and realize that that sure does seem to be the outlook held by most down here, that’s pretty messed up really. That we’ve equated such realities as love and hope and feeling as if we’re worthy of it with thoughts scrolled through by thumbs attached to hands who have no idea what else to do with themselves.

I honestly worry that this world is running out of life in a hurry.

Why?

Because what do we believe for anymore? What is it that people are moving toward? What is the goal of getting noticed or gaining followers? In fact, why do we call them followers when the truth of the matter is that social media has us all so stagnant and stupid that we only post the same stuff all the time because we know it’s the kind of junk that our fans and “friends” seem to like? And truly, if all we post, all we share, all we say is only everything that’s always the same seeking to keep our followers finding what they like within what we share, then how is it that we can say we’re getting anywhere?

If we never do anything new then to where are our followers following us except right back to what we already did as whoever we’ve already been?

Again, as I’ve made mention of several times within this recent line of posts, if you have truly fulfilled all your goals and really found all of your hopes inside whatever it is that you do every day, then good for you! I seriously mean that. If this life to you is really all about fans and followers and your finding your way to both get them and then keep them coming back, then perhaps you are on the right track to finding your best life.

If you believe that everything this life is ever meant to be is found or felt within everything that you can see, then you should keep living your life through your eyes so that you can find what you think life is.

Because that’s what all of us should do. In fact, I believe that every belief is in fact life and thus too that life is a matter made up of belief. And I believe that because what would life be without belief? And too, what would become of any belief if had not we the life with which to seek it? No, I am firmly convinced that life and belief are eternally inseparable because having either without the other only empties the both of meaning.

And that just doesn’t make any sense that we’d be here with such this ability to believe in whatever it is that we do and not this life use to find whatever it is that we believe we’re here to.

And that’s because every belief is for something better, isn’t it? Every single one of them ought to be. Everything we believe in is held inside this hope that has us thinking of all the things that will improve just as soon as we lose all that better isn’t by our finally finding everything that better always was. Sure, there are beliefs that we have that do seem decidedly more heavy, scary, worrisome then. But friends, even our every fear is a belief in better as it finds for us the opposite side of what’s best and ignites in us a desire to avoid all that best isn’t.

So even our worries are wins for everything better as they too inspire us to move toward whatever better is by encouraging us to move away from everything that we don’t want to find or feel.

But even fear is seemingly starting to become something to which we’ve started to numb. Indeed, I look around at what is a world that seems only less worried all the time. In fact, I dare say that our list of fears and worries is slowly being replaced by lives given unto complaining and complacency. And I say that because we seem not all that worried about the worthlessness that is both our complaining and complacency.

Both of them worthless because they get us nowhere but rather inspire us to stay right here inside what is a life that is not going at all right and, rather than working to do something to make things better, just invites us to become bitter over all that’s happening that’s keeping us from finding and feeling all the better that we only at best seem to but halfheartedly believe in.

Halfhearted because if we truly believed fully in better still being a possibility for us and our lives, wouldn’t we try?

Wouldn’t we move? Wouldn’t we work on some things? Wouldn’t we sweep up a bit, organize some of our thoughts, maybe even try that whole idea of taking some of them captive so that they no longer do the same to us?

How many of our thoughts have held us as if captives to their lies?

How many lies have we believed in within this life?

Why do we still seem to delight in so many lies such as there being here in such a dark and broken world some ‘best life’ that we can live? Truly, what if there is? What if the very best that life can offer is found here? Does not that still ask that we believe? And should not that belief in there being here a best life that we can live inspire us to live for it? To look for it? To move toward it?

Indeed, where is it?

Where is your best life? How do you define what is best in your life? In what ways would your better be bested or your best be bettered were you to actually have all you hope to hold within this place? If you were living right now everything that your best life is, what would that look like? Would it still fit here? Would the world still be what it as of today still is? Would those around live and talk and think and walk as they have, are, will?

What all would change in regard to the world we see today?

Or does your best life not ask that anyone else do anything better? Does your best life allow for everyone else to do whatever their own mix of belief and doubt has inspired them to or not to? Does your ideal existence count for the existence of someone else whose idea of perfection is the utter opposite of yours? Does your greatest hope allow room for the fact that another’s greatest hope is that hell is a joke and they thus free to do whatever they please?

Does your idea of a best life fit within a world in which Christ doesn’t?

Mine doesn’t.

My ideal life is one in which there are such things as peace and rest and joy and meaning. My ideal life is one in which nobody is ever hurt, lonely, scared, ashamed. My ideal life is one in which we’re not worried anymore and that about anything. My ideal life is one lived in a place in which there is no hatred, no division, no darkness even.

Yes, my ideal understanding of life is one lived in such a perfect love that calm can exist.

It doesn’t here.

Nor does peace, neither love or healing or even hope. No, I am truly convinced that hope does not exist in this world as, well, why would we ever agree to any hope that has such limits as this world has? Sure, this world’s limits seem to us, from where we stand, to be basically limitless. Again, these lives we live here are really long and thus seem themselves to be rather unlimited as is seemingly proven in that we’ve all already lived saying, doing, thinking, learning, losing so many things with still apparently time left to learn, see, say even more.

But still, one day we won’t be here anymore. And that fact, as has been proven by all those who’ve already left, it just makes me wonder what we’re doing whenever we allow hope or joy or love even to exist within the confines of this lifetime that we have for but a while longer. For what’s to come of everything we come to have here? As the writer of Ecclesiastes wonders, who will get all that we’ve lived to gain whenever we’re not here to have it anymore?

And too, where will we go when we can’t stay wherever we are?

Isn’t that where our hope should be? Stored for now safely away inside everything that we can’t see? Housed in a home that we’re not yet living in? Kept in lives that we’re not living?

Friends, hope is meant to call us toward it not be shackled to wherever we want to find it as is then found in only whatever we can imagine it able to fit within.

What then are we doing hoping for the opportunity to live our best lives in this place we’re all leaving behind? After all, wouldn’t that then mean that we eventually leave our best lives behind?

And sure, some would say that living your best life is just some sort of tagline that’s meant to inspire everyone to enjoy this life in whatever ways that we might. And yeah, again even the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that within his own search for wisdom he found that there is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and enjoy this journey spent through triumph and toil.

Problem is that we’ve all sat aside the toilsome part of the picture.

We work for nothing anymore. And that said in that we both do whatever work we do as if for ourselves alone as is proven then in wages won within dollars made that we then spend upon all the things that we’ve thus equated to be worth all our time and effort given unto gaining the money with which we bought them and too that once we clock out and cash our checks and buy our little prizes, we sit on our couches and listen to tv as we watch only our phones scrolling through all the things that we add to our lists of things we want to do or need to have if we’re to have something closer to our best life.

That’s it!

That is our life.

It’s 9-5’s and date plans. It’s Monday Night Foolsball and weekend dreams. It’s hoping only to make it to the weekend through a week lost to working a job we hate for a boss we’re not too fond of either. And that because the both ask that we do stuff.

Oh, how we hate anyone and everything that asks that we do anything!

All because we’ve all become apparently pretty certain that all we’re here to do is have fun and feel good and buy things.

That is what it seems that most people have chosen to believe as the very best way to spend this life.

For only everything worldly. Wants and wishes and rules and vacations and binging the newest hit show and going nowhere while we’re at it. All because all we’ve all come to want and wish to have and hope to go and someday see, it’s all here.

Our every hope has been forced to fit on this side of life’s horizon.

And then we wonder why we feel such things as shame and boredom.

Friends, it’s because we believe in nothing. And, well, why would God ever try to help us feel anything more whenever we all but refuse to believe in everything more that He’s told us is waiting outside of this world and all that most folks here keep on wanting?

For if we’ll not take up our crosses and follow He who used His to die to this world, then it’s apparent that we still love this world and His Word has told us that anyone who loves the world has not any love for the Father in them.

And that easy to prove in that, again, if we’ll not take up our crosses and follow Him who used His to die to this world, then it’s apparent that we don’t care to be wherever it is that He went on to go as we’ll not go through what He went through to get there.

Why would He reward that? Because isn’t that kind of like baking a cake? If we feel as if we know better how to blend the batter and that a little less flour and a bit more sugar would probably make it better, then we’re going to be stuck eating whatever comes out of the oven. But the reality is that the recipe was written the way it was written calling for whatever it calls for for a reason.

And that reason is to end up with a good cake.

Problem is that anymore very few know how to bake and we’d all rather just have the cake and get to eating it than have to wait for someone else to bake it.

Look, my point is that we’re impossibly impatient, famously foolish, amazingly arrogant and brazenly brutish. We have indeed become so very stubborn and stupid that we think we can get everything we want, even the very best that we believe this life we live here has to offer, by standing still and doing nothing other than asking that everything come to us and that in only the way and measure that we want.

Friends, when did it so happen that we ourselves found the blueprints of our existence? How do we have any idea as to whatever the best is? Don’t we have to believe in it? And if we do, because we do, shouldn’t we then be constantly moving toward it?

And if we don’t, as sadly most won’t, what then does that say about our beliefs other than we’re not too worried about finding them?

It’s clear that most folks here agree with that song that says that Heaven is a place on earth as most people on earth are looking only in and on the same for the very sum of everything they seem to believe that this life is meant to be. But if we spend our entire lives looking only in, on, to this world to offer us all we want in, for, from this life, then isn’t that saying that this world is our prize?

The promise is that God is so very kind that He will give us whatever it is that our hearts desire. The problem is that many continue to take the devil up on his offer to give us all the kingdoms of the world if we’ll just bow down and worship him instead.

And that is why most will leave here to find an eternal life spent dying and dead.

It’s because most will continue to live here as if there’s here something still worth finding.

And God will let them think so because He wants for us all to decide for ourselves what we walk away with. Many will have had their reward within this life lived within this world.

But blessed are those who believe rather in the call to store our treasure elsewhere.

Why?

Because one day we’ll be elsewhere and it would be pretty awesome to find our treasure there waiting for us.

The Bible says He is.

The world clearly believes otherwise.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold