Day 4170 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Corinthians 5:5 NIV

revels in the unraveling

For comes within it the realizing as to the distances and discrepancies designed and determining both between where we are and where we’ve the chance to be but also then those dividing who we are from who we were made to become. And the distances and differences are so disastrous that it demands of us a choice chosen as to just how frozen we become to what are basically only two different beliefs as are believed by all who live what is a life within this world in which we all have.

And those two are that either here is home or that we’re not wherever it’s meant to be found.

I was just thinking about this in decidedly different terms last night as I found myself wondering once again through this curiosity as to why this world works this way in which it both thinks it does and has indeed come to convince us all it should. So many things just continue to become questionable as I grow up and get older and find this boulder on my shoulder that is this belief in how things really ought to be. And that’s because the weight of this faith’s asking me to wait in this place in which faith is not given to anything later on, it’s caused me to long for what isn’t yet amongst a people enjoying all that is already.

And it’s a right curiosity to find yourself increasingly disinterested in everything that so many others are increasingly invested in. It’s as if my mind’s just made up its mind to continue to find all these questions as to why things are the way we all but forced them to be. I honestly fear that we’ll all fail to ever come even close to finding the reason we’re living until such a time as we’re not. And that’s because, well, here we are in what is a world that has been set up for us all to follow all of these rules and friendships and fornications that only seem to turn our attentions from the unbridled freedom in which we were made and yet to which we’ve all been called to turn and return.

An issue made obvious in that, to us, we can’t think of a freer freedom than this we’re feeling that’s left us feeling as if freedom is only a matter of setting us free from consequence and thus responsibility.

Both of which are things we all obviously know and understand the value and validity of considering our fascination with rules and laws and courts and cops and politics pointing us always in the way that only roughly half of us want to go. And too we expect others to be responsible and will in fact happily hold them accountable should they fail to meet our ever-higher expectations.

Indeed, why do we expect so much from others and so often so little from ourselves?

Is it not because our minds have their own version of freedom and responsibility and reason even?

Haven’t we all come up with all of our own little rules and plans and priorities that seem to us the very best of everything we could be doing or wanting or worrying about?

Why is being an adult so very different from being a kid?

Shouldn’t it in fact be both easier and more enjoyable to be an adult than it is to be a child seeing as children are limited in everything from strength to understanding having not yet had the time to build the both into whatever they’re to eventually become? And yet isn’t childhood for whatever reason the last place any of us remember having pure fun and feeling ultimate freedom?

Why is that?

Why do we have all of these rules and guidelines telling us what to eat and what not to wear? What would actually happen if someone wore white after labor day? What if you brazenly chose, willfully, purposefully, intentionally to bake a cake at 375 degrees instead of 350? What kind of chaos would come if you drove 40 in a 45? Why is the music that they made available on 45’s so much better than whatever it is that they’re making today?

Why do we call today ‘today’ and not nowday or hereday?

Why are days measured in 24 hours rather than 23.8?

Why can’t 1 inch be the same as 25 millimeters? Does the extra .4 needed really make a difference?

Just how big is .4 millimeters?

Why do we have yards but yard sales are often in garages or driveways?

Why do some drive on the opposite side of the road and do they then get wherever they’re going backwards?

If a plane flew upside down could it land on a cloud?

What would happen if we hopped on a bike today and tried to pop a wheelie at 40?

See, seems we’ve lost or confused or just blindly accepted some things along the way.

To where?

Don’t think that any of us really know. And I say that because all of us continue to do different things in different ways for different reasons in different hopes of different outcomes. Life here has truly become so unmitigatedly unmanageable that most seem to have just given up on trying to make it better altogether. Something proven in that nobody reads books anymore. Nobody sits outside and tries in vain to count the stars. Nobody knows whose following those who aren’t on social media, nor what they’re doing as they’re not. None of us know how to feed ourselves but rather trust companies to produce all our food hoping that both they’ll keep doing so and that so too can we continue to afford it as they seem pretty content to continue charging more for their convenience.

Indeed, we’ve embraced so much convenience that we’re now inconvenienced by the truth.

Why does the truth hurt? What happens if we’re offended? What is the measure, the weight of an opinion? Why do we all seem so worried to wonder?

Afraid we might find what we’ve been missing all this time since we retired our bikes and stopped taking naps and now only eat snacks all the time instead only once and that just before we went outside to burn off the calories and sugar?

Why do we have to count calories?

Who decided what a calorie is and how much it’s worth in regard to how we’re supposed to count it in what are then lives in which we’re accountable for even every grain of rice we consume?

Friends, can’t we see or at the very least feel that we’re the ones who’ve been consumed? That this world has swallowed us whole and left us in a hole in what is a life in which we all try to hold to this idea as to why we’re here that’s always leaving us feeling as if we have to balance faith with reality?

Why is faith considered foolish to so many whenever everybody believes in something?

When did we agree to make everything so confusing? What is our fascination with rules and those both tasked with ensuring they’re followed and yet who don’t seem to follow them themselves? Why do we trust more a rich guy in a suit than we do some dude in a t-shirt?

Do the clothes really make the man considering how it’s men who make the clothes?

Seriously, what is it with all these rules and adages and colloquialisms that all but define for us what we’ve all come to agree that everything in this life should be and thus determine how we often live whatever this life thus cannot ever become?

How can we become like Jesus when our freedom is only felt on the weekends?

Just how free are on those weekends whenever church starts at 9 and so we’ve to leave the house at 8:15 if we’re to get there on time?

What is time?

Why is the church nothing but a building now?

Do we really need three songs for worship or might we be able to fit in a fourth should we be finding ourselves feeling a little extra thankful? Or might our gratitude only mess up the schedule and throw the third service behind?

My point is that to literally everything in life there’s anymore some rule, expectation, normalized behavior or befuddled belief. And sure, maybe some of them are good and reasonable. Some of them may even encourage us toward righteousness and responsibility. But what I think we’re going to look up to find one day is that God’s nowhere to be found because we’ve spent our lives creating all these ideals of what we think life should be alongside billions of others who see things differently but who mostly don’t do anything any differently.

I guess what I’m saying is that we’ve lost our curiosity and, in doing so, we’ve hamstrung what our every hope ought to be.

For right here we read that God made us for a pretty specific purpose and even gave us of His very Spirit in order to continually lead us unto an ever deepening understanding of it.

And what is that purpose?

To live forever.

To love so deeply that we wonder where it comes from and why we do.

To imagine what’s still to come as opposed to worrying only about all that’s already here.

To look at what’s here and how we handle it, manage it, beat the life out of it and wonder why it is that so many still assume that everything here is the best there can be. To sit down with who we’ve become, a people who pay so much heed and give such increasing credence to the calling and cadence of culture, and ask ourselves why we see more use and reason in their rules than His freedom from them.

To measure the success we’ve had here as is often measured in fans, friends or fortunes and wonder why we’ve settled for being only rich and famous when righteous and faithful are both still options on the table.

Why do we still sup upon the crumbs which fall from the tables of those presidents and monarchs and other oligarchs which lord it over us that they’re of more power and importance than us rather than seeking for only our place at the table that He died to prepare in the presence of such enemies as those we’ve elected to ruin us with only more rules and regulations leading often to wars and rumors thereof?

What is it about Heaven and forgiveness that isn’t enough that still we want all this other stuff like nike brand tennis shoes and coffee but only green cups?

Is our purpose truly best proven in our possessions or preferences? Should our eyes be able to recognize a logo better than they can the Lord of lords? Is hope the reward of those who show up to its gates wearing all the sponsorships they accepted from companies they paid for their wants and wares?

Does He care if we have a fast car that gets us to church quicker than our feet can?

Does He maybe care that we’ve forgotten that the church is supposed to be everywhere our feet are?

Friends, we’ve managed to so overly complicate everything that He literally had to invent death just to help us see the simplicity of life again. For again, His purpose for us was always for our to live forever with Him basking in the fullness of His beautiful and bountiful creation. It’s just that we’ve now this problem in which we crammed His creation into all these rules and expectations that only serve to constantly turn our hearts and lives away from Heaven and storing up our hope there as rather we serve now our hope to anyone who says they know the quickest way to 6-pack abs.

And we seem to like living like that!

A fact proven inside just how badly we handle boredom and how frustrated we get whenever we have to wait more than 3 minutes for a drive-thru to bring us our food that would take us upwards of an hour to make if we knew how to cook rather than just eat.

Life has crumbled. Hope lies bleeding in the streets having been trampled by all of us out here hunting down trophies of triumph and toil. Joy is a missing face hung on a poster next to all the other missing childish things that we’ve all agreed were somehow best left behind in exchange for a worry over deadlines and a fear of losing our jobs if we don’t meet them. Wonder is wounding somehow as we’re all afraid of imagining something better, probably because we can all see that better isn’t what this world is becoming.

What is this world becoming and why do we just keep going along with it?

Why do we give more weight to worldly rules which have to do with things now destined to perish than we do waiting in the wonder as to where we’ll go when we’ve finally left this rotting ball of dirt in the dust?

When did we stop shaking the dust and decide that it’s best to let it just pile up around us, within us?

Why is this all we want from life?

I mean, don’t you think it’s pretty clear that we’ve lost the plot when that excitement to grow up and finally be big is replaced by our being big and only wishing we could be a kid again?

And why can’t we?

Again, this question hit me just the other day: Why is being an adult so very much different from being a child?

Aren’t we called to a childlike faith? One that wanders in wonder as to whatever might come? One that looks up at the stars and doesn’t worry so much about counting them as imagining rather what’s even beyond them? One in which we have no comprehension of time other than it getting dark and our parents asking us to be home by then?

Why aren’t we then heading for home considering how dark it’s getting down here?

Friends, God created us to be His, made us literally in His image which is one without limits such as time or space or experience. And yet we’ve all chosen to unanimously agree to so very many limitations and man-made legalities that we know nothing of hope, of freedom, of reason, of love, of justice, of purpose, of truth, of life.

We know so much about this world and what all is expected of us here that we have no wonder left as to what all isn’t here nor that one day we won’t be here anymore either.

We’ve lost our fire. We’ve lost our wonder. We’ve sat aside our curiosity and sold away our every ability to imagine something more.

Why?

What have we gained having gained all this world unto our worries and wants?

It all just makes me think of this line from one of my favorite songs from my all-time favorite band:

“To want is to buy but to live is to die and you can’t take it all.”

We’ve all lost so much of ourselves and our souls and our reason for having and being the both that we don’t seem to have any care left as to what all we’re missing nor how truly simple the path is to find it.

Easy?

No.

But there is nothing that is not simple about a childlike faith.

You know, just the other day I had to run something back to Hobby Lobby and as I stood in the return line the lady in front of us had a little baby, just months into this world. And he just chilled there in her arms looking up at the lights, completely mesmerized taking in these yellowish bars of luminescent glow. And there was something about the tiny shifts of those tiny blue eyes taking in with such wonder something that we all take for granted that left me wondering what all we’ve left behind as we grew up and gave away every such youthful amazement.

And what scares me is that I don’t know. I don’t know what all I’ve lost or forgotten or learned but only the wrong way. I don’t know how mixed up I’ve gotten things. Don’t know how lost I am in things that I think I have figured out. Don’t know how confused I am because sometimes I actually don’t think I am.

Indeed, if any of you think you stand take heed lest you fall.

Friends, the more we lose our sense of wonder the more we’ll settle for whatever we can see. The more we set aside our curiosity the more we’ll agree to allow society to lead the way. The more we embrace whatever it is this world wants for us to be the less we’ll be the people He created us to become.

And what’s truly sad is that it is such a struggle now to wonder, to imagine, to allow ourselves to be bored enough to have a thought that’s not about all we think we have to get done.

What do we have to get done and is our getting it did really more important than sitting for a second in just a simple appreciation for His having already done everything He did that is still the only thing that can do everything we both can’t but really need someone to?

We’re going to die here.

I’m just starting to wonder if we’ll ever be able to wonder as to what all life is supposed to be before we do.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold