Day 4181 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Colossians 3:3 NIV

decides upon the death

And that of even all that is because along this line you’ll come to find within this time that we call life there’s so much that isn’t what you’ve long thought it was that because you did you do start to agree that the part of you that still tries so hard to see, to know, to hold, to have is indeed better off left to a dirt nap. Because there’ve come entirely too many times within every single one of our lives in which our hearts and/or our minds thought and felt that they’d figured out the reason, the purpose, the very promise of life.

Only to all of us stand here still today still looking through things for something that will perhaps not let us down this time.

Or, and it would in truth be a feeling finally even better, perhaps something that we won’t let down this time.

Because, at least for me, that’s been the story of my life. And it’s become such the tagline that my mind finds only all the time all of the ways in which I surely disappointed someone. All I find that I’m able to imagine is just how far I’ve fallen from every better that every opportunity I’ve ever had was trying to afford me the opportunity to do, to see, to be. My life, in its most basic entirety, it’s been a failure to find what was that way of life for which I was made.

An entire life traded away for the one I that I’ve lived instead.

And no, I don’t know that everything I’ve ever done has been all bad. I like to hope at least that there have been some good choices chosen within the mix. I pray all the time that I am doing better in life as I am trying to. And I ask God plenty often to help me to improve, to grow in truth, to do this thing every day in which I share the truth with whomever it is that may happen to need it. I want to do my very best at everything I have the opportunity, the ability, the desire left to do.

But that’s what’s becoming a great oddity in life.

It’s that we live within a world which offers unto us all so very many things in which to delight. We’re sold some new desire every single day that we grow to dream of having or holding or being or knowing every single night. This entire life has become something of a buffet line in which we all just continue lining up to see all the shiny new stuff that’s held daily before us. Treasures beyond our wildest beliefs! Truly more than the eye can see, the hand can hold, the mind can know.

There is more here than anyone could ever have or experience or understand even if we had 10 lifetimes to try.

Problem is that we’ve got but the one and it’s the one that we allow to become so desperately distracted by what are in truth quite impressively few desires that we in many ways come to despise those things which we don’t know or can’t have or won’t become for whatever reason we’ve decided not to. And sure, often times within these lives those reasons are entirely out of our hands. For example, I’ll never in my life own a Ferrari as, well, I imagine it’s pretty hard to afford one on lawn care money.

But the good news is that I never wanted one.

And yet that good news, as has spilled over to encompass an ever-growing number of other things, it’s become some of the oddest news that I’ve ever read.

Because it’s become what is something of this book that I’m getting to help write in the words of a belief that has me convinced completely that so little here matters that nothing here is worth having.

That’s the oddity that I mentioned above.

It’s that as time goes wherever it’s determined to end up, and I go the other way as I know in my heart that my soul wasn’t created to be so accustomed to time and other such life measurings as it’s so sadly become, I find that I want less. That I’m interested in less. That I’m impressed by less. That less is in fact becoming so impressive to me that I find myself seeking increasingly ways in which to care more about less.

I’m in fact so amazed by the idea of less that it seems to have quietly become my life’s goal to have it.

And that despite an entire life spent trying always to have more, to know more, to be more.

Anymore I feel every day that something new doesn’t matter as much as it once seemed to. Things that I once wanted or dreamed of seeing or hoped to become, even things that I got to have and thus have had the opportunity to see, even things that I got to be, they’re, to me, fading so quickly in matters of importance that it’s almost scary. I find that I’m caring so little these days about so very many things that I’m kind of worried for the things that I do care about still.

What will happen to them should that day come within which I don’t care about them anymore either?

Because, chances are, it’s gonna happen. And I say that as someone who believes with every breath of me that I know, at least somewhat, what it’s like to die. And that I say because of the way in which my life has unfolded in recent times. Because, in recent years, I’ve grown more willing to face my fears of letting go of all I know I’ve known both in life and of the same. So much about me has in fact gone through change that who I am now sees who I used to be as someone I don’t care to know.

Let’s just say that the old me and the new wouldn’t be very good friends.

And that’s because who I am now is only who I am now because I once hated so badly who I was that I agreed to change pretty much everything.

So much that I’ll even be walking through a grocery store and get smacked upside the face with the reminder of something I’ve changed when I happen to walk by something I used to like and find that I now feel nothing of even a passing wonder. And that’s so very strange to me because I used to be so convinced that everything I had, everything I wanted, everything I enjoyed was all such the amazing, impressive, enjoyable something that I’d have never found any reason to let it go.

And yet I did.

From movies I used to watch to music I used to know every word to, it’s gone now. The foods I used to eat, the sports I used to love, the lust I used to have, it’s now nothing to me. The things I used to do, the dreams I used to have, the plans I know I made once, they’re all ended. Honestly, if it wasn’t for my really liking the name my parents gave me and, as of yet, God’s, like Saul, not told me to start going by something else, my name itself should be something different in light of how different I’ve become.

I even look so different that I once sat across the table from a guy I spent nearly every day with in high school as we were pretty good friends and, half way through our little 8-10 person mini reunion, he asked those gathered if they knew where I was because he thought that I was coming.

I’ve become a stranger to those who once knew me.

I’m a stranger to the me I used to be and the person I used to be is a stranger to me now!

Thus I died.

And I say that with such assurance, such passion, such gratitude because I have the proof. Again, so much of me has changed over the years that almost none of the life I used to live is anything or any part of the life that I live now. Even this daily Bible post thing, it was never anything even on my mind or in my heart from my life’s start until about 11 years ago. Yeah, for the first 26 years of my time on this earth, doing this every day wasn’t anything I would have ever considered doing.

Now I feel as if I simply can’t stop because I don’t have any idea as to what else I would do with all these thoughts that His Word is inspiring me to think.

A Word that I too didn’t ever read for those same first 26.

Much the same as exercise and its contrast with my old life of extra fries. I used to spend my time doing nothing physical beyond walking, and that entirely out of necessity simply because the living of life demands it. I did nothing. I was impressively lazy. And I grew impressively depressed because of it, and that got so bad that one day something in me broke and I got up out of my custom-made hole and decided it was time to know if I could feel something of alive again.

So I hit the gym and haven’t looked back in 8-9 years.

And I don’t at all miss the 130 or so that I managed to lose along the way.

And, again, nor do I find that I seem to mind not eating all the things I used to love more than anything. Like I said, to this day I’ll walk by something in the store that I used to store in our cabinet and I’ll think nothing of it. Don’t want it. In fact I don’t really have cravings anymore, something that also catches me by surprise from time to time. Why? Because I used to crave stuff all the time. My diet was once so wild that I ate literally everything without ever giving it a second thought.

Nowadays I eat literally the exact same thing for lunch every single day and have what are maybe four or six different dinners that I fix.

And even that is something entirely new compared to the old me!

I never cooked anything back in the day. Didn’t know how. Didn’t really care to as I never felt the need to. After all, McDonald’s was just down the road that I knew the damage I could do there if ever I got hungry. (my personal best, at least that I can recall, was 2 double cheese, a 20 piece nug, 2 large fries and of course my personal favorite Dr. Pepper, think I got 2 of those too). But the point is that I didn’t need to cook. Didn’t care to learn to.

And yet I did. And now I cook every meal that I eat. I honestly don’t remember the last time that I ate out. Don’t remember the last time I ate anything fried. Can’t recall the last time I drank soda pop. Pretty sure it’s been at least 10 years, I think more like 15, since I’ve had a single bite of chocolate!

Chocolate chip cookies were arguably my favorite thing growing up.

There’s just so much stuff about my life that isn’t what my life used to be about. So many things that I know now that I know I’d have never cared to learn before. So many things that I now do that I know I wouldn’t have done back then, a fact I know to be a fact because I know for a fact that I didn’t do so much of what I do now. And also because I now know that I don’t do so many things that I know I once did. Such as playing video games and eating junk food and stealing sports cards and watching pornography.

Yeah, that list got a little crazy didn’t it?

Kind of got a bit extreme!

But so too did my life. And one day I looked up to find that there was a monster staring back at me in the mirror. Don’t remember the exact day nor date. Think it actually happened slowly over time until such time as I hit my knees asking God to please come and help because I didn’t like who I’d become and yet couldn’t manage to do anything about it on my own.

And it was then that I opened the Bible and started to learn that we’re not.

We’re not alone. We’re not lost. We’re not losers. We’re not failures. We’re not forgotten.

We’ve all just lived a huge portion of our lives trying so very hard to prove otherwise!

Indeed, all of us have done all we could to prove that we could do it on our own. We’ve all of us tried so hard to come to own all we’ve learned to want. All of us have tried so hard to hold so tight to all we have because we’re afraid of losing anything. All of us have sinned so much that we started to hope that God had forgotten us because we knew that in our lives and our choices made within them, well, we’d clearly forgotten Him.

But that we’re still here only says that He’s not yet let go of that hope that we too shall come to know that He wants for none to perish but rather for us all to come to repentance. Because He knows that what we’ve all lived isn’t a life. And that because He’s the one who has defined sin as earning the wage that is death.

And yet He created us to be alive.

Proving the predicament in that we’ve all learned to live for that which demands our death in what then are lives that we need to lose and utterly let go if ever we’re to know anything of everything that He created us to be and now has to call us to turn around and seek to become.

Can you imagine that?

That things have gotten so bad within our lives that the One who created us to be like Him had to come upon this earth to be like us with was the express intention to lay down His life by taking up our cross? That He who created life chose to die in order to open the eyes of those who’d taken His gift of giving them a life and lived it for only all that demanded they lose it?

Friends, we’ve lost it!

We lost the plot! We missed the point. We failed to realize the reality of righteousness and responsibility. We’ve all so sat aside the purpose of this life that Jesus Christ had to die just for us to have the chance to realize the trouble we’re all in!

And that He did only now says that if we don’t do the same then we’re only still doing everything that we’ve always done, which, again, is everything that caused Him His death!

If we don’t change, if we don’t move, if we don’t lose what is/was the lost way of life that we’ve all come to find and been so known to live, we will die without Him.

And if we die without Him, without knowing Him, without anything in our lives, our hearts, our minds that show anything of even any passing interest in His divine existence having come only on the other side of dying to our far shallower and much sinnier version, why would He then welcome us to spend forever with Him?

If we don’t care to know Him now within what come to become lives in which we grow daily in the delight to do what all He calls us to, then He’s no reason to think we’d care to know Him then either.

Yes, I believe that it really is that simple.

Why?

Because He said it is. Told us that if we’ll not take up our crosses and follow Him then we’ve then no part in Him. Told us that whomever won’t gather to Him shall be scattered from Him. Told us that He will tell us that He never knew us should our lives and how we determine to live them show Him nothing of any proof that we knew Him.

It’s fairness in perfection!

If we don’t spend any time within these lives trying to know the fullness of all He is and all He did then all He is and all He did can never mean anything to us as we simply cannot know what all we don’t care to know.

And so, yeah, He will turn folks away from Heaven because they spent their entire lives here, or at the least the vast majority of them, thinking nothing about Heaven and just how narrow its gates must be.

So narrow in fact that the only way through them is to die to everything we’ve ever known of what is a life within a world that killed He who is the Way through!

Friends, we cannot continue to live like this world if we truly hope to be welcomed home by He who came to overcome this world via the dying hereto through a grave that now calls our name and promises that if we’ll share in a death like His that so too shall we share in a resurrection like His.

Because, well, doesn’t it stand to reason that the only way to be resurrected unto a life so very perfect that we get to live it forever would be that we die to this life so far from perfect that God has said He won’t put up with us much longer?

Makes sense to me.

And thus I change everything. And yeah, a lot I’ve already changed. As I mentioned above, I’ve already changed so many things that who I am now wouldn’t really get along with who I once was.

And I don’t have the words to describe nor explain how thankful I am for every single change that He has helped me to make because the life I live now, it feels better in every possible way than that one I once lived.

But I’m still here and thus I’m not done yet. I’ve still things to learn, things to change, things to lose and more than a lot to agree to let go. So let’s get on with it! Let’s do this!

No, seriously, let’s do this. Let’s do what He hints toward here, or rather reminds us of having already agreed to have already begun. And that’s to die to what is that life that we know we’ve lived as was lived apart from Him. Yes, let’s strive with the time we’ve left to close that distance and plug that gap. Let’s run into the grave every single day with crosses on our backs and an offering of ourselves in our hands. Let us lay before Him the sum of everything we know, of everything we are and ask Him to help us rid ourselves of all we were never meant to be.

Even if it means that we get rid of everything.

Why?

Because is it not better to lose the life we’ve known if done in the hope of finding in the doing so the life we know we’ve not yet known than to hold tight to what we know and thus miss, forever perhaps, all the more we don’t?

I’ve already missed enough of everything better that I could have had or should have been. And I don’t want to miss anything more of everything better that I still can be. Problem is that better is always found only at the loss of everything that is already. We have to let go of who, what, where we are if we ever hope to be who, what, where we’re not.

So let it go. Lay it down. Wave goodbye and walk away.

And then keep walking.

For this life is but the shadow of death.

Let us then get on with it so that one day we’ll be done with it.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold