Day 4177 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Titus 2:13 NIV

works through the waiting

Not only because that’s simply what we’re here to do, a fact rather easy to prove in light of all we’ve all the ability, the opportunity, the understanding and (hopefully) willingness to, but also because, well, what else is there to do? What else are we to give all this time we’ve been given to? What more might mean more than our doing more than we’ve already done, becoming then something more, (hopefully) something better than we’ve been before? Honestly, why would we still have a life if not to live it doing something within it?

Doesn’t make any sense.

And yet it sadly seems increasingly obvious that many here do find themselves of the ability to find sense in the senseless. So much so that there are a correspondingly increasing many who have managed to make careers, find fortunes, even find fame and friendships within the doing of nothing. At least nothing all that good or meaningful or even productive.

I mean truly, do we need more influencers at this point?

And no, I’m not knocking anybody as everybody has the right, the freedom to do whatever they’ve determined to do and decide they should. I have no doubts that there are more than plenty who would look at my life and think it silly, stupid, pointless, worthless, empty perhaps. And the odd thing is that we’re all right and still wrong. And that because we’re all still here learning what it is to live a life as this life goes along toward wherever it is that it is going and whatever is there waiting for us to get there to wherever it is that all of this is going.

Problem is that we seem to be vastly losing, rapidly too, the ability to consider the wrong we do. Instead we’ve clearly begun to become what is a people so prideful that we’re all usually pretty sure that we don’t get too much too wrong. There are even some, and probably more than we might imagine, who probably haven’t much left within them of that ability to see all the flaws and failures and follies and fornications found both within them and thus about them.

And we can surmise this sadness within the serious lack of shame we see amongst society anymore.

Nobody seems to feel bad about anything. Nobody appears as if they’re not pleased with something they said or did or perhaps even thought. None of us act as if we’ve not got our acts together and thus need to get our acts together. Rather I fear that we’ve gotten so very good at acting as if we’re good people, trying to please or impress those who too are here playing the same role, that we might have actually started to think that we are.

That we are good people.

It’s like that guy who always tells the same three jokes because those are both the only ones he knows and he knows that people always laugh at them. If given enough time and just enough chuckle, chances are he might start thinking that he’s actually funny.

All because he doesn’t know that everyone laughs at those three jokes just to make him feel better about the fact that he’s at least trying to make people laugh in what is a world far more interested in making us cry.

So he’s a pretty good guy who’s always there to at least try and lift the spirits of those who secretly cannot stand to hear the one about the monkey in the bar anymore.

Sure, it was funny a time or twenty but by the time you’ve heard it thirty times, the punchline feels something more in line with a punch in the face.

Why?

Because we get bored. We figure things out and then, once we have, we kind of lose our ability to know what to do. We are so used to having always something to do that we don’t know what to do whenever we think we’re done.

And the problem for all of us who are still here is that it’s so easy for us to think that we’re done!

It’s easy for us to look at our lives and the relatively impressive amount of success we’ve found inside and assume that we’ve done rather well for ourselves. It’s easy to measure all the things we have and see within the haul a treasure that seems to indeed have and house all we need. It’s easy for us to reach management status at work and then become a jerk who lords their power and importance over those who were just considered fellow inmates stuck in the trenches just last week before we got the promotion.

It’s easy for us to reach all these points, prizes, milestones in life and become quite convinced that we’ve made it and thus needn’t do much to go much further.

But the problem is that no matter what we have or manage to achieve or seem to believe that we’ve truly accomplished already, there’s still life to go. Thus there’s still more for us to know. There’s still something for us to learn. Definitely still something for us to lose, pride and ego and vanity most notably. But my point is that within this life there are no finish lines. Nothing here is ever truly done.

We all just reach these points in which we’re done with whatever it is that we’ve been doing or trying or thinking or believing and we determine to do either something new or nothing at all.

And I fear that the vast majority are starting to fall for the ease and simplicity and, honestly, the commonality of the doing of the nothing at all.

Why?

Because we all know that doing things is hard. We all know that doing anything asks more effort and input than doing nothing ever did. And while we can be or become convinced that what we’re doing is meaningful, is useful, that it thus does make sense, again we’ve just found time and time again that we get bored with it.

Usually whenever it stops being fun or the progress/results begin to slow and thus become harder to see.

Indeed, we want things always to be easy. We want always these measurings of our progress because within them we see these assurances of our success. We want to watch the pennies add up in the bank accounts that are both our lifelines and, sometimes, our landmines that have exploded only to leave a giant gaping hole where all our hope that was our savings used to be.

We give so much weight and worry to these things that they’ve become all but the only things that we do while we wait.

In fact, to some at least, such things as personal progress proven in such preferences as adding 10 pounds to our bench press or doing a little more at work to impress our boss so that we can look better whenever it comes time to consider raises, these things are the reasons people get out of bed in the morning.

And I’m not saying that such things are inherently bad or wrong. I’m just simply asking how long they can matter before we realize that not much here really does.

I know that probably sounds strange, and yeah, felt pretty weird to write it. But the honesty of the humility that this faith affords me tells me that nothing I do really means much of anything. In fact, the vast majority of everything I do these days is so pointless that it’s impressive.

Why?

Well, take working out for example. It’s an endeavor scientifically considered to be a healthy thing to do, at least when done properly and safely. And that’s because such things as lifting weights or going for a walk or even just doing some simple stretching every night before bedtime, these things help our bodies remain capable and productive. They build muscle which makes us stronger which helps us to better endure the struggles and strife we’ll face in life.

And yet one day the body will be dead and then it won’t matter so much that we could lift so much.

Or perhaps my little lawn care business. For the moment it offers me all kinds of amazing things such as extra exercise as I push mow 15-20 yards a week, a bit of sunshine and fresh air while I’m out there in the 100+ degree heat, I get to help make things look nice and take that extra work off of someone’s plate who probably has plenty of other things to get done, and yeah, it helps me to make some money that I can use to help my family do such things as buy groceries.

But one day the grass will all be gone as this world is passing away.

Or this thing, this getting up at 6:30 every morning, something a night owl like me never liked doing nor then wanted to do as often as I do now, to write posts that, honestly, I think only like two or three people ever actually read. I do it because I believe in it. I believe it’s something that I’m supposed to do as I consider that I have the ability, the opportunity, the willingness and the want to do it.

One day the internet and social media will be gone for the rest of forever and by then every single letter of every single word of every single sentence of every single paragraph of every single post will vanish.

So why do we do any of it? Why do we do anything? Why is it that we all get up and get dressed and go places or try things or fix things or question things?

Why do we do anything?

Because we’re here. And, well, since we are there simply has to be a reason why. And yeah, all of us have quite different ideas as to what the why might be. But still, despite whatever your guess may be, all of us seem to agree, in different ways, that there’s a reason for us being here.

And we’re all just trying to figure out what it is before we’re not.

And that because we all know perfectly well that we’re both running out of time to figure out why we’re alive so that we can leave this world having fulfilled the reason for which we were upon it but also that, as of this morning, we still have some time left upon it within which we all feel this need to figure out why we’re here.

But unfortunately that’s a question, a curiosity, an uncertainty in so many ways that is indeed so very big that so many of us have resorted to just sort of not really asking it anymore. Or, at best, we ask it in regard to other things that are here such as our jobs, our hobbies, our houses, our cars. And again, it’s not that those things aren’t important or are wrong to have or worry about.

I just seem to be failing to find myself able to worry about them as much as I know I once did.

Why?

Because as I get older, and thus closer to dead, I feel this unrelenting need to rid my life of all that doesn’t help me to live my life for the very simple, and I believe very few, reasons that I consider I have one.

Indeed, I think that the answer as to why we’re here is as simple as God having chosen for us to be and that so that we can see all that He is, all that He does, all that He did and learn from all the above all about the fall of all of us so that we can, having lived in and of and for and from the world and its many deceptive perspectives, turn our attention back toward both Him and Heaven and give ourselves more fully all the time to the fact that while we’ve here a life, perhaps it’s not the only one we’ll have.

I believe that this life is meant to surround us with what is more than enough to live a life and to do so quite happily, quite successfully, maybe even quite impressively.

Why?

All so that we can have it all and still feel empty.

All so that we can try out so many answers to that question asking why we’re here only to find that none of them come anywhere close to meaning enough to amount to a life. All so that we can do so much, have so much, know so much, grow so much that, no matter how much we have or big we think we are, that we still look in the mirror and wonder what it all means and what all more there still is.

Yes, I believe that God created this life and its purpose to be an enduring mystery that we cannot solve on this side of eternity as I know that He has placed the concept of forever, of faith, of He who is our Father inside every human heart as what is but a seed so small that it’s overlooked all the time and that by everyone.

And I believe He did it so that we could all eventually realize how equally tiny, minute, miniscule the purpose of life really is.

Not small in terms of importance or value or worth or meaning but rather in regard to the simplicity, the singularity.

Small in terms of quantity, not quality.

And this I say because I know that this faith is why we’re here. It’s that we’re here to so as the Bible calls us to and work out our salvation with fear and trembling. To grow every day in the realization that Christ died to save us, and that because we’re sinners who have done far more wrong than we’ve ever thought we got right, and thus to find in Him and His humble sacrifice a humility that allows us to also grow in an ever-unfinished appreciation of the fact that we have been forgiven for all that we’ve done that we shouldn’t have ever even considered.

Yes, I am convinced that this life is our time in which to find that though we’ve found all of these possible answers as to why we’re here, that none of them helped us in anyway whatsoever when it comes to the fear, the honor, the respect due unto only our Father and, once we find that truth, to seek the rest of it, learning daily, hourly from it why He chose to do it.

For I contend that the reason we’re alive is to find why we’ve still the hope to go on living even after all we’ve lived doing.

Because, let’s be honest, not much of all we’ve done nor continue to do is worth being given more time to do it.

Much less a forever.

But that the concept of forever does remain an idea at least in the minds of at least a few, doesn’t this seem to say that maybe there is more to all of this than all we can see, more than all we can do? For none of us know much of eternity. None of us know what Heaven looks like outside of some vague ideas in regard to streets of gold and gates of pearl. None of us know what Jesus looks like despite all of man’s attempts to paint Him in images found everywhere from museums to Sunday school classrooms.

We know far less of everything there is to know than we know.

And that’s why I believe that the point and purpose of this life is to grow inside the promise that forever isn’t the reward of those who did enough or knew enough or grew enough or could lift enough. No. I believe that forever is the hope of those who know that within themselves and all their various endeavors there is no hope.

Yeah, I think we’re all still here to come to terms with, and will be here until we do, the fact that this faith and thus this life in which such a gift has been offered unto us and thus entrusted unto us is for something so simple as getting over ourselves and getting to work denying ourselves.

In fact that’s, albeit entirely elementary and obtuse, the entirety of the Gospel truth.

For the cross tells us that we’re lost, the nails prove the danger in staying there (wherever our own version of lost may so happen to find us), the grave testifies to the loss of what is the life that all of us have lived all this time in which we’ve all been trying to find some reason as to why we are still alive.

And He who hung up there with those nails in His hands before He was lain within that bed, He says that He did it all because we both needed it done but couldn’t do it ourselves.

Not and manage to survive.

Do you see it yet?

The purpose of this life, the meaning of our time spent living it, it has nothing to do with us as we can do nothing to ensure it, to insure it. We are all but unwitting victims of time and experience. The thing that will separate those who go on to keep living forever from those who don’t is whether we see ourselves as such victims or if we rather humble ourselves unto the point in which we can see the victory won within the waiting and the work we’re called to do while we do.

We’re all here to do something and something is indeed what we all choose every day to do.

But in the end, which is coming soon, it won’t matter so much what we do but why we did it. What’s the point we want to come from it? What’s the prize we hope to find at the end of this ride?

Is it a good life? A successful career? A huge family?

Or is it trying to give God all the glory found in both what we accomplish but also in what we can’t?

So many of us seem so convinced that Heaven has a checklist of things we need to have done and won by the time we get there.

And yet Jesus asked us to wait quietly with the hope that He’s coming back until He comes back.

And to tell those around us why we’re so happily content waiting for what so many are entirely too busy to see is so very close.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold