Day 4167 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Philippians 1:22 NIV

tries toward retirement

And that even though we’re most days both tired and torn inside what is a world that’s trying to tear itself apart more and more everyday. Anymore it seems that so much of all we see is but a sea boiling in doubt and disbelief, a general refusal to relinquish our assumptions choosing rather to stand upon such presumptions as our pride and its preferences still meaning something. And they do. This is what makes this road so hard and that’s too why it so often feels so much longer than forever contends it really is.

It’s because we are living in a place in which pride and pretense and preference and opinion do count for something. In fact, to most they’re all that mean anything.

Meaning then that unto most they are everything.

Yet thankfully there exists not one common mindset shared amongst our humanity. Now that’s definitely not to say that any of the others are in any way common as the road remains wide and densely travelled which leads unto destruction and the density thus then means that many are still travelling upon it. And so no, such mindsets as this being discussed by Paul here in the opening of his letter to Philippi, it’s by no means common.

Because unto most to live is not Christ and thus to die is nothing of any kind of gain as rather unto most they seek still to gain everything within this world in which Christ is still mocked, denied, debated, rejected. That is the common mindset, and yes, it makes this life into an absolute misery for any who seek to follow His way and live in accord with His will as was written in His Word for His people who are here at His pleasure and thus spending themselves seeking only the same.

And that misery met by our meeting so many who’ve not yet met Christ, or at least don’t walk or talk as if they have, it is a burden so heavy that, yeah, I think many of us are all but aching to leave.

As I’ve said a bunch here lately in what have felt more of those posts in which I’m just finally getting some things off of my chest and out of my head (the thoughts always stay up there, just more in terms of finally sharing a few more of them than usual), I don’t want to be here. I’m tired of seeing what this world is choosing to willfully become. I’m sick of the sights we’re shown just trying to watch a show with our family. I’m fed up with hearing the foulness which somehow finds its way into every song, every movie. I’m angry over all the arrogance and animosity.

I want to feel at peace in that place in which it’s promised. I want to know the fullness of He who is the Love that gave us said promise. I want to be where all things are as they were always meant to be. I want to see what He sees, hear what He says, feel what He created us to feel, be what He created us to be.

And looking around I just can’t say honestly that I can believe that any of this is any of that.

Granted, it could be argued that not everything here is all that bad and to that I would agree. There are good sights we get to see, amazing stories we get to read, entire plans filled with what are hopes and dreams that are for things that do uplift, encourage, inspire perhaps. Yes, this world is not all bad.

But friends, the scales are leaning that direction more by the day. And it’s just honestly a truly heartbreaking thing to see as it feels this failure, this disappointment, this sense of letting Him down even further than we all already have. How? Because when you believe in better, even if in whatever measure of all the uncertainty that every such improvement may for here and now remain, you too feel it your duty to do whatever you can to make better happen.

This is at least part of the weight that we carry within our wait within this world which we increasingly, thanks to our growing in the knowledge of His promise as is being met all the time alongside what is a world which only continues to make such things as peace and joy and rest and healing seem all the more needed all but every day, simply just find ourselves coming to terms with the fact that most here don’t want better.

Most here don’t want to improve anything, not even themselves. Most here are in fact paying so little attention to basically everything anymore that it seems as if more and more are just all but quitting altogether. So many people have stolen into their phones, their computers, their affinity for algorithms and playing their game as if they stand to win something if they could just figure out the right time to post something or the best filter to use for the photo.

I hate that version of life.

Why?

Because it isn’t a life. It’s nothing but a gross digitalization of literally everything that real life still offers to be. It’s manmade lights and man-centered delights. It’s putting people on a pedestal, usually only ourselves, thus only further convincing everyone that everyone is who we’re here to serve and satisfy. It’s making mankind both our god and thus our goal.

And if that were truly the case, then where does that leave us to go?

If the entirety of our every life’s purpose is to be truly proven in pleasing man, then we have then arrived at our final destination because we are seemingly so increasingly pleased and thus impressed with either ourselves or someone else that, again, most folks now exist only on apps and in their algorithms.

All while real life is just outside our window, waiting there for us to care that we’re missing basically every opportunity to enjoy and appreciate all that He calls us to honor and care for.

That is why we’re here, you do know that right?

God created man to tend His creation. It all started in a Garden in which God created everything according to its kind as was determined in His mind in which only love and mercy and compassion are constant. And He made man to both care for and too enjoy all that He’d created. We’re basically farmers that don’t need to know how to grow anything as literally He’s all along provided for us everything we could ever need.

Just asks us to appreciate what all He does and to do that by respecting what He’s done.

Guess that was too much to ask.

In fact, it was literally one single request that man chose to reject that led to all of this mess that we see and hear and feel today.

And as of today that mess has gotten so bad that, yeah, for what I pray are a growing many to die is gain because hopefully more are coming to believe that to live is Christ and, well, it’s getting to the point in which it almost feels as if you can’t simply live a life here anymore.

Rather anymore it feels as if all you do is only done unto the disappointment or disapproval of someone. Again, the whole technology thing. Sure, it’s technically given us all the ability to be better connected than at any other time in human history. We all have so many opportunities to meet new people, make thus new friends, learn new things, improve then in untold ways.

And yet we use all of this ability to rather just argue and put one another down or to study the lives of those around trying to figure out how we could be more like them.

It’s all either comparison or competition, and personally, I’m over it.

What we’re living through today is neither the life I grew up living in the world in which I feel now immeasurably blessed to have lived it nor is it the life I know He’s promised in what is that place that this place so clearly isn’t. No, as someone said once, “the further advanced we get, the further behind we fall.” And that all because, as another said, we’ve all now become those who are “so preoccupied with whether they could, (that) they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

No, we’re all just gone inside this ongoing desire to have more and go bigger and reach further as in doing so it feels to us as if we continue to grow but that in only terms of fans and followers.

That’s all that to so many seems to matter!

And yet it’s also somehow ironically also what serves to make serving Christ matter more.

And that’s because as this world continues to crumble, our sharing of the Gospel only means more. Our being here as if cities on hills and lanterns on tables, it means more as the world around us grows darker and more deranged. This calling we’ve come to embrace to live such good lives amongst the pagans that, though they accuse us of doing wrong, they may see our good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us, (slightly paraphrased of course), only continues to mean more as the number of pagans lost inside an increasing array of varied paganisms continues to grow.

Indeed, there is anymore so much idolatry and idiocy being praised and applauded and approved within this place that those of us who do follow Christ and thus live that thus increasingly different way of life He calls us to live, we’re only to stand out more and more.

And yet the problem then stands to at least plausibly become that we’re not dumb to what this world sometimes does to those who stand out a bit too much thanks to their going what many consider a bit too far to show the world just how different they are.

Yes, we all know that this world killed Jesus!

Kind of puts a damper on our longstanding hopes for acceptance!

But what’s weird is that while that realization hurts a bit at first, and proves rather strange as you watch Scripture be fulfilled within it as friends and family begin to distance themselves as you welcome Christ to begin to close the distance between you and He, eventually it shifts into this almost childlike excitement as was once spoken by all of us within that, “oh yeah, watch me” sort of sentiment.

For this world both tells us we can’t/shouldn’t be different and offers increasingly to hate us if not harm us should we try anyway.

And yet, at some point, you just find that your willingness to please a fallen and still falling mankind is all but gone and you’re left holding only the hope of one day going home.

A hope that, as unto Paul here, leaves you rather burdened by the belief.

Because, yeah, in Christ we do believe we have a place that He’s prepared where there is peace, where there is joy, where there is rest and healing and literally then nothing of everything less than that we’ve all felt down here.

And yet we wake up still every single morning to see that we’re still here where every aspect of His better promises are still absent.

We are not home yet!

And, well, we just want to be. I want to be. I literally say it all the time, “God, I just want to come home”. And yes, come home, as in to go home as if then I know that my home isn’t here.

Because it isn’t.

No, instead this world is now just my office. This is my workplace, my jobsite, the spot in which I clock in every morning to keep writing these posts and praying they make some kind of difference to someone out there, all while knowing that they probably don’t as this kind of thing isn’t pushed by the powers that be. I understand the rarity of my faith. I realize that what I believe is unpopular. I appreciate that who I am and what I’m trying to be is nothing at all like all this world asks us to do and wants us to be.

I love all of that more all the time as the more different from this world that I become the more hope I feel that maybe I’m finally doing something right.

But still, while to live is Christ, getting to leave this world is gain because only then do we get to go and be with Him who died for us.

And thus the hard part for us who do believe in that hope is that every single day we’re shown and told so many sights and sounds that only serve to remind us that we don’t belong on this ground. As I’ve said just recently in another of these posts, it is a truly strange thing to feel so increasingly out of place in what is the only place you’ve ever been!

I have literally been on this earth for a little over 38 years and I feel today so confused and heartbroken and dejected over what all has become of life here that I most days can’t even bear to go into town. Because whenever I do, all I can see are the ruins of the world I used to know. I see the ghosts of all the hopes I used to have. I drive past empty parking lots where life used to be lived. The Burger King where I had my first date has been long since replaced by a CVS. The place where I got my first job spent years thereafter boarded up and is now a different store.

It’s all just fading away, the entire life I used to live in the world that used to exist.

And it’s hard to watch! Not because I ever imagined that anything here would last forever. But simply because I didn’t really ever realize just how quick we are to forget and forsake anything and everything.

And I don’t want to be that kind of person who can’t appreciate anything. I don’t want to live this now-normal way of life in which nothing matters anymore. I can’t accept that all of this is worth nothing more than taking a picture, making it fake via some technical filter and sharing it for all the world to only argue over.

That’s all stupid to me. Dudes literally stopping whatever they’re doing to whip out their phones and snap a selfie to share for the boys to see how cool they look in their new $50 hat.

What is that?

What is this?

Where did life go and when can I go to wherever He’s at?

My guess is that of Paul here. That I can go home when only my work is done. And thus that I’ve opened my eyes to still this life in still this world, I reckon that means that I’m not done. And so I keep writing. I keep praying. I will keep hoping that some of this matters somehow and that only if any of it somehow accomplishes anything of everything He put me here to do and has left me here to get done.

The problem is that I’m done with being here. I want to leave. I wish more every day to go home to that place in which everything hard and heavy that this world’s become isn’t allowed to come and thus will never again be whatever I have to hear, have to know, have to see. No, I just want everyone to know Jesus so that He can hurry back and get us so that we can all be done with all of this that is being done but shouldn’t be.

And there is an increasing number of things being done in this world that should not be done!

I suppose the issue is one proven in my patience’s difference of opinion with His. I want to leave and yet that I’m here only seems to say that He’s said I’m not ready to yet.

And so today I’ll try harder. I will do my best to do everything I do better. I will work hard at everything I work at as if all of it is done unto the glory of the Father. Because we’re told that everything we’ve done here will be judged by and against the same. Did it honor God? Does my life glorify Him? Do the words I say, the thoughts I think, the things I do, do they all magnify Him?

And if not then yeah, I guess I do still have work here to do.

We all do because we’re all here.

Just know that the promise is that one day none of us will be. The only difference then is where we’ll go and the outcome we’ll find once there. For those few who have truly lived as if to live is Christ and die is gain will gain eternal life when they’re finally found before the Christ who tells them that they’ve done well what all He gave them to do. For the many who aren’t those few they’ll find that to die isn’t gain as they’d lived instead as if to live was anything and everything other than Christ and thus did with their lives none of what He created them to.

And why then would He tell them they’d done well when they’d done nothing of all He called them to?

Friends, we’re all still here for a reason. Maybe it’s to know more of Christ in what is a life in which our faith is still in its infancy. Maybe it’s to help others know more of Christ in what is a life in which our faith has finally matured to the fighting age in which we’ve taken up the whole armor of God and are fighting the Good Fight of the faith.

Either way, there ought to be some signs of Him in us, and they should only increase in both number and frequency.

Are they?

Truth is that He’s giving us all this time we have to be ready to leave this world.

Some of us are doing just that.

What makes this life sad for those few is walking through a world in which most aren’t.

That’s why we want to leave so badly. But knowing where it’s said many will end up, that explains why we’re still here. Because He wants that for nobody. So we’re here to tell everybody what we all have to do if any of us are to be saved from the worst side of what He’s said is coming.

And to do all we can to ensure we avoid it too.

Because His wrath brings with it not life but a retirement from this version of it. So again, what are living to look forward to? Staying here or going home?

Should be easy.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold