Day 4163 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 14:2 NIV

ponders of a place

One in which what’s here isn’t. A hope where all that’s held isn’t so hollow. A joy met at the end of a journey taken hoping that the joy we find doesn’t fade so often. A place in which peace doesn’t exist in pieces ever-fractured by our own failures and a fallen world’s foolishness. A meeting of meaning and finally learning whatever it always was. A learning of life and why we had one. A receiving of an outcome that we’d long since come out of this world and, in so doing, come out of our minds trying in hope, in patience, with purpose and intention to find.

Why?

Because it sounds more amazing by the day, does it not?

Indeed, I think often of what Heaven might be like, though being always careful to never travel over that line in which I allow it to become something that can actually fit inside my mind. No, I just wonder where it is, what it feels like there, what all of what we all want gone isn’t found or felt anymore, then too the finding and feeling of all we’ve looked for along the way but never managed to find. Yeah, I wonder what it will be like to be home and there at rest from whatever it is that the rest of this ride there will bring.

But then that seems always to bring the realization that there’s still more war through which to walk and worry. And the hard part then becomes that peace is something we all want always in a hurry as we’re found so often feeling little if any. And, well, there is no way for us to hurry this life nor His coming back to lead us toward the better of it. There’s nothing we can do to actually get through the storms faster or to the end quicker.

Rather we’re all here within this world for however long He’s decided we need to be.

And this then leads me to another wondering:

Why are we still here?

I mean, if the ultimate goal of faith is for us to find a willing mind and shattered heart, the heart broken by all we’ve become and the mind then willing to become something better that we then never dare to ever again imagine our being the ones to define, then what more is there to find? What more is there for us to do? Most burdensome of all, what more need we see, hear, feel in what is this world racing toward hell?

Why endure more of the tragedy that this society has become?

After all, Jesus left a long time ago to go and make ready our place with Him where He died for us to be. Seems then to make sense that we feel the hurry, the hope, the growing desperation to finally let go of what’s not our home as it has no hope, no happiness, no peace, no substance anymore.

No, this world is hard and hollow thanks to our having become a people who follow our hearts and allow them to determine our hopes as often for things that we can have, can hold, can know.

Why do that to hope?

Why force hope to fit within this hole? Why insist our interest exist alongside all the detriments that exist around us here? Why should we want for joy or peace or contentment or rest even to be assumed within a world in which there’s an ever-present tension and turmoil? Indeed, why ask any of our every belief to be able to be found or felt within a place that feels colder, lonelier, emptier by the day?

Why does this world feel so cold anymore?

Well, I believe that it’s because this world’s become what God knew would be the line by which we could begin to finally believe in the outermost intention of everything He invented that was always intended to be something we never need try so very hard to have to always imagine was always something better.

That He put us here knowing what here would hold so that, having learned to hold so close all that is here, some of us might come to find that holding tight to this life lived within this land was only a loss of everything else that life could be. I believe that He allows us daily to see through finally opened eyes that nearly all of life is not anything that any life ought to be. I am truly convinced that we’re all still here because we need to see what’s here and reach that place in which it so breaks our hearts that we finally learn to stop breaking His.

Yes, we walk within a place that’s long since been proven but the perfect backdrop for a belief to begin, to bud, to blossom, to burgeon.

Why?

Just look at everything that continues to happen!

Every single day we’re offered innumerable reminders that this world isn’t our home. We’re shown sights and sold stories that grow only gorier by the day. We hear of hardships and witness wars and worry over their both coming always so close to our doors. We are literally here watching both a world and the humanity which lives upon it all but fall apart.

And yeah, sometimes it does hit close to home. And yet I think that’s the case because, again, we’ve all lived as if this world were our home and we just need then a bit of help to realize otherwise. And sure, His having told us what He tells us here should be enough to inspire in us a blossoming trust in the treasure in which He asked us to seek our pleasure, our peace, our purpose even. But so clearly so often it isn’t as rather we remain a people at best only half-focused on Heaven.

And I don’t think any of us get anywhere close to focusing on it even half that much.

Instead we spend the vast majority of our time worrying about only all that’s happening in this life. We’ve literally devised all these devices that have become in us directions to vices that do as all vices do, all without us realizing what’s being done. For in truth all vices are meant to squeeze, to control, to hold in place whatever it is that you need held in place.

And yes, such windows ever-opened to the world as our phones, our laptops, our smart-tvs and infotainment systems, they control us. They hold us in place, worried almost always about only all that’s happening here. They’re literally squeezing the life out of us as they ask of us as much time and attention as we’re willing to give to them.

And we give them more time and attention all the time.

So much so that studies are beginning to show that we’re losing our minds alongside then our ability to read, our willingness to think, our worry then over wondering as to what else there might be that we can’t see shown inside a 30-second movie played in scrolling fashion amongst billions of others just like it. Yeah, we’ve become willfully inattentive thanks to all the inventions that were intended to keep us glued to the things that fit ironically in the palm of our hands and ask always our heads to be hung low as we allow ourselves to want only to know what someone we follow had for dinner and who someone else thinks might be to blame for the latest tragedy that’s just broken headlines.

And on that, you know, people ask all the time why bad things happen. Why does evil exist? Why do people hurt other people? Why is this world so broken? Why are we so feeble and prone to failure? Why is there so little peace and yet so much war? Why is hatred easier to find than compassion? Why, if God were there in what He’s said a place that’s built in love and furnished with peace, why would He allow this place to become what it’s become?

But you see, it’s all these questions that folks trudge through trying to allow themselves to remain hardened inside their disbeliefs. It’s questions like these that allow minds to remain unchanged as they insist the challenge to not come unto us but rather invite us to remain always the challenger who exists as if we’re the ones who deserve the answers. It’s in truth nothing more than but one more proof that we’re so bent by pride that, again, we need this ride to be however long it is because we’ve just let far more of this world into our hearts, our eyes, our minds that we might ever want to imagine.

Even still, let’s look at them. Why do bad things happen? Maybe it’s so that we can imagine better things that haven’t happened yet. Why does evil exist? Perhaps it’s so that we can finally begin to imagine what righteousness really is. Why do people hurt one another? Maybe so that, by seeing the antithesis of love, we can learn how to love the way in which love was meant to be offered. Why are we all so prone to failure and thus living always feeble? Maybe it’s so that we can start to learn that continuing to lean on us is a really bad choice when it comes to where to keep putting our trust.

Why is the world so broken as to offer always more war and thus too the hatred with drives it, rendering then peace and compassion so constantly hard to find?

Maybe it’s all so that we finally can find reason enough to turn our eyes toward Heaven and ask the Lord thereof to help us let go of all that’s here and walk forward storing our treasures up there.

Yes, I believe that a loving God would allow this world to become whatever it is that this world so clearly wishes to remain. Why? Because how better to help us begin to imagine what love is, what He then is, than by allowing us to see, hear, feel what all love and thus He isn’t?

Indeed, I believe that this world will come to be but one of two diametrically opposed outcomes which then defines, determines, decides the direction that rest of this forever ride will go once from here we’ve gone:

This life in this world will end up being either the closest to hell we’ll ever have to go or the nearest to Heaven that we’ll ever get to be.

And how we live this life, the prizes and pretentions upon which we lean and for which we look for however long we’re here where we so clearly still are, they are what will form the justification for what is His nearing determination of our eternal destination.

In short it will read like this:

Just how much of the world was allowed to remain in us as compared fairly against how much of it we sought and fought for His help to rid ourselves of so as to make more room to know more of Him who came to overcome this place?

And that unto the promise that we’d both have trouble here but that He shared in it with us, taking the very worst of it for us, so that we could have here the hope of that place He’s gone ahead to prepare where love does exist and peace is easy to find and rest so commonly known that there are no wars, no worries, no wounds.

Rather everything in Heaven is to be forever again as all of this was always meant to be.

And I think it will prove a sight so amazing to see that we instantly forget the sum of everything else.

And I think He allows for us to believe in something so much better as that place He’s here said He has prepared in which there is no more of this now new but by then old way of things so that we can begin to come to terms with both how things really are here and, once that tragedy begins to be seen, find inside a growing willingness to distance ourselves from what this world is and continues to ask that we both remain and become. And that because this world will continue to, for now invite and coming soon demand, insist that we go along and do whatever we’re told so that we can fit in.

God lets us see what this world is becoming so that we want nothing to do with feeling as if we belong here. And He opens our eyes to see these increasingly frequent sights that serve only to break our hearts so that we can turn our eyes and hearts to Heaven where all that we see, hear, feel down here doesn’t happen, isn’t heard, will never ever be felt again.

But you see, the problem is that we always see life through these jaded eyes that fall incessantly back upon past assumptions. Those being that maybe things aren’t that bad down here. That perhaps we’ve not really done anything so wrong as to need salvation. That we’re doing pretty okay for the most part and thus don’t really need to change. That this world is our home and that we should try to feel as if we do belong. That the people around us are mostly good and thus we’re probably safe listening to them, learning from them, leaning on them, living like them, following behind them then.

Yes, I think that many still believe that this world is a good place to plant our roots and live our lives and store our treasures and find our hopes and have our goals and seek our purpose. And yet this then leaves us at best but sifting through the wreckage that’s piling always around us to find, feel, hope we can the substance of something better.

But friends, continuing to look for better in the same place that continues to ruin most things, that is the literal definition of being insane!

And no, I know we don’t want to admit how bad things are nor that we’ve ourselves had our hand in causing the collapse. But the truth is that while this world isn’t perfect in many ways, those imperfections allow us the perfect line to imagine perfect by. All the noise here allows us to imagine calmness, tranquility, the simple quietness of His coming promise. All the hardships and hassles help us hold tight this hope we have in Heaven being a place of rest and recovery. The trials we endure offer a test to retire from when this life is finished.

Yes, the struggles of this life help us learn that sometimes peace has to be fought for, fought toward.

Indeed, perhaps all that’s bad and wrong and wicked within this world is merely there to help us imagine good, righteousness, reason, reality and the reward of a place that is unlike this land in every way.

A place that is the same as the one that Jesus here came to tell us about and buy our ticket to enter someday.

And yeah, the hard part for us will always be the waiting as we want not the weight of wondering what might be and why it takes so long for it to be whatever we hope it is. We’re a people of violent impatience always asking for everything to hurry up and be awesome. But friends, if we don’t go through the kinds of things that make better whatever it is, then however will we know what it is whenever we do finally find it?

Yes, the promise is that He’s gone to prepare us a place where there is joy, where there is rest, where there is peace. And yeah, the problem then seems as of today still to be that we’re still here inside of this place where there is no peace, no rest, no joy, little love and even less hope of there ever being more.

But we need this world to be what it is so that we can finally begin to imagine what Heaven might be.

And, well, once you start down that path of pondering that, what you’ll slowly find is that your mind does turn toward the sky as you wonder more and more as to what more is on the way. Indeed, as this world continues to be what this world’s so clearly become, a place in which there’s more darkness and division than hope and healing, you’ll feel your heart start seeking for those treasures of Heaven that nothing in this world can take away.

Yes, you will grow to know what it means to set your mind on things above as you come to find that all that is below is, well, below.

It’s less than. It’s less important. Less impressive. Less meaningful and thus less deserving of all the stress we’ve all given it.

Indeed, this world isn’t where we belong as it’s filled with a society that shows us every day even more things that ought to help us see that here we just don’t anymore want to be. And thankfully He’s given us eyes to see what this world’s become and ears that can hear the call of Calvary asking that we take up our crosses which help both us die to this world and too this world die unto us.

Doesn’t always make it easy as this world fakes a form of friendly that continues inspiring many to keep at least part of their hope and treasure and pleasure and purpose stored here.

That’s why we’re still here rather than home in that place He said He’s prepared for us to be.

It’s because we’ve all here still things we need to let go, walk away from, realize aren’t what they ought to be so that we can finally begin to see, to believe in whatever better has always been.

Yes, we’re here still to learn more about not trading His promises for something quicker, easier, closer. And, well, it just takes some of us longer than others and He’s so loving and kind as to give us all the time we need.

Doesn’t mean everyone will make the best use of all the time we have.

But He’s patient with us until He finds there’s just no reason left to be.

And that reason is that some will never care to ponder of a place other than this we’re in for now.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold