Day 4184 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Titus 3:4 NIV

everything changed

All of the sudden the life you’d been living didn’t seem quite so much like a life worth living. The words you’d been saying sounded different, many of them words you didn’t like the sound of anymore. The thoughts you once thought are slowly replaced with things you never knew you could or should think instead. The things you have start to become just things you have rather than prizes you prize. Your eyes begin seeing things you didn’t see before, even amongst and within things you’d seen before.

Everything begins to become so different in Him that you begin to think you’ve gone mad.

And maybe you have.

Indeed, there are so many days these days in which I catch myself doing, saying, thinking something that I know my old self would have never said or done or thought back when I was who I’m not now and who I am now wasn’t who I thought I could be. In fact there are an increasing number of things that I’ve become and am becoming that my old life, my old mind, my old eyes and ears and wants and fears would have never in a million years been able to believe was so possible for me.

Yet here I sit a million years removed from so much that it’s been my greatest joy to have had removed. So many things have lost their importance to me. So many thoughts I don’t care to think. So many treasures in which I find no pleasure. So many plans that went up in smoke because I both lit the match by making mistakes that kept my ideas from coming my way but also because God allowed me to mess up as much as I must have to have let my life get so bad that when He came for me carrying a sword and a tree, He found me so broken and lonely that I was willing to do anything.

To try anything.

To lose everything.

And in so many ways it seems now that I have. But of all the changes I’ve made thanks to His having helped me to change in all the ways I have, I have to say that I think my favorite of them all is that I now get to say that I have in fact lost my mind.

I have gone mad.

I’ve lost touch with reality, at least the version this world sells and accepts. I’ve found this delight in this opportunity to sit inside such a wonderful mix of failures and faith that it feels as if every single day is something of a whirlwind in which there are so many thoughts to think that I’ve so many words to say that I can say something all the time about this faith of mine in His goodness toward me.

So much to say because, again, everything changed.

I know I’ve talked a lot of late about all the change that has taken place that’s taken away so much of who I know I knew myself once to be. Talk about diet and exercise, the things I used to collect and how I stole some of them because I couldn’t afford them but wanted them more than I had the means to make it happen, talk about the people I tried so hard for so long to please and impress and how none of them are around anymore.

That’s actually one of my favorite changes!

Because I spent so many years in tears trying to find the reason why it felt that I was suddenly so alone, a heart felt ripped apart by this distance designed in disinterest amongst those to whom I was once interesting enough to keep around. Why did all my friends walk away? Did I really change in some kind of way that they just couldn’t stand to see? Did I say something that I should have known better than to say? What is it about the way that I was living my life that made them all, and I mean all, decide to turn toward a life lived without me?

Why did it all get so lonely when at one time I had more friends than a man could count?

Why did I get so lonely and so broken by it that, as I talk about all time, I turned online looking for love from those who don’t know me and too couldn’t walk away?

Because I spent many years staring at screens watching, hearing, learning things that opened my mind to a new version of love that exists only in lust which knows nothing of love at all. And it was there whenever I needed it, wanted it, felt that hurt of being alone and sought for an easy way to soothe it. Satisfaction becoming the drug that dulled the misery that I chose to make out of a life that all of the sudden wasn’t going my way.

If I only knew then all I’ve come to know since!

For it’s not that the friends walked away but that they were only needed for the time in which I had them in life and I eventually reached the part of this story in which our paths were supposed to go their separate ways as we’re all here to do, to see, to be and become different things. It wasn’t that I was lonely that I turned to lust for the decades that I did. It was because I was dead inside and thus was willing to give my life to all that kept me there.

It’s wasn’t because I was fat and unhappy and entirely unhealthy that I decided to get up and get in the gym and completely change my diet.

It was because I was dying and didn’t know it until the goodness of God helped me to see the failures in me failing to be who I always had this feeling I was supposed to have been.

And as the veil grew thin between where I was and who I would come to become, I got to learn something of humility that’s continuing to help me see that everything that I do and all that’s done to me, all that’s done for me, it all has little if anything to do with me. Rather anymore I’ve come to believe that everything that happens in life is happening at such a time in which we need to either see the reminders of the goodness of God whenever we’ve started to doubt in the same or it’s because we need to be reminded of the wickedness of man so that we can again begin to close the distance between us and Him.

The good days are reminders that He’s good.

The bad times reminders that we’re not.

And I can say with all honesty that that’s honestly not a realization that I’d have ever had had I had had the friends around who used to keep me who I was. I wouldn’t have started reading His Word if He hadn’t led me away from those more interested in reading the sports pages. I wouldn’t have started writing these posts had I not chosen to go to a college none of my friends chose. Wouldn’t have learned who I was to someone specific had I not been asked to be a worker at their wedding without being invited to be a part of the best man considerations.

A wedding I didn’t attend for a best friend I apparently didn’t have and wasn’t a good enough friend to in all the times in which I tried to be.

I’ve learned so many lessons in life the hard way, the long way, the scary and scarring way.

Why?

Because I’m becoming convinced that that’s the only way we can learn. And that’s because who we’ve become is a people who always expect for things to unfold in a certain way. Mostly we expect things to always be easy and go smoothly and make sense.

What sense does it make to walk away from everyone and just about everything you’ve ever known into a life that’s nothing much like the one you once thought you wanted to live?

For I was once convinced that by this time I’d be married and have kids and be working in some school teaching either math or phys ed to a bunch of teenagers. Thought I’d have my own place, far more money in the bank, plans for vacations and dinner dates on the weekends. Thought I’d still have all those friends around and that we’d still be hanging out from time to time.

But everything changed.

In fact it seems at the moment that all that didn’t is that I still mow grass for a living and I love listening to 3 Doors Down and my mind never stops thinking.

And I still wear clothes and sleep indoors.

Other than those I can’t think of anything that hasn’t changed and/or turned out immeasurably differently than what all I expected my life to be.

And I wouldn’t trade this life I know now for anything.

Because everything changed.

My plans aren’t the same now. My hopes and dreams are for impossibly different things. I am literally out-of-my-mind excited at the thought of she who is perhaps my last remaining friend from the old days, a friend I hadn’t seen or talked to in the 20 years it’s been since high school, just moved into the same neighborhood that I moved into last year and asked me the other night if I’d like to start going for walks with her from time to time.

I never once imagined that I’d be at a place in life when something so simple as going for a walk would become one of the single most exciting, hopeful, humbling ideas that I could imagine.

And yet here we are!

Because everything changed.

Life narrowed just right until God got me to the this point in life in which the little things finally mean everything. I’ve lost so many friends that having one I grew up in the same neighborhood with, and didn’t do right by at the time, having shown back in the same neighborhood again (a different neighborhood completely) has seemingly brought with her one of those rare second chances in life, at life.

And why?

Because God is good. And, as His Word promises, He works all things for the good of those who love Him.

Problem is, and it’s the one that keeps almost everyone from ever coming to see that promise unfold within themselves and inside their lives, that to see it and feel it and know it thus happening demands you lose your mind. You have to be crazy, in this world’s opinion, to believe in this stuff. This world thinks that people like me just make it all up. That the entire Gospel is nothing but some fairy tale told to make fools feel bad about having fun and enjoying themselves.

No, the Gospel is the power of God to be gracious enough to offer unto us forgiveness in place of fury and welcome rather than wrath.

And, well, call me crazy but I’ll take the forgiveness and welcome please!

Make it a double and super-size that sucker!!

I want all of Him that He’s willing to give.

All because all of Him is what I know He gave.

And how do I know this?

Because everything changed.

And that just doesn’t happen in life. Rather around here I know we all know well that life of patterns and plans, routines and ruts, commonalities and normalities being the formalities that we cannot see as being so fatal as they are. Fatal because they keep us stuck in place.

In patterns, plans, ruts, routines that find us living the same life over and over and over again.

Where is there anything new under your sun? Where’s there anything novel in your life’s novel? Have you anything to which to point toward as something that has assured you that you yourself are new?

What hope have you my friend?

Or has anything so changed for you that you’ve gotten the chance to learn what real hope really is?

Because the truth is that hope is something held in something we cannot here have. For a hope that’s had is no hope at all as we cannot hope to have whatever we have already. That would be like having a million bucks and still dreaming of being of millionaire. Or suiting up for the Steelers and still dreaming of being a professional athlete. Or owning a business and wishing you were your own boss for once.

A hope that we have in something that we have is something akin to driving our car to the store wishing we had a car to get there.

And yet this is the normal view of hope that this world holds. People all around us are spending their lives hoping for things that they can have in this life. And granted, yeah, I still do the same sometimes. But in Christ I’ve found a hope that I know I can’t know fully here. Thus in Him there’s no finish line. Thus for me there is no far enough.

Rather I can always grow. I can change even more. I can lose even more than I already have, and having lost so much of who I once was and all I once had or hoped to have had by now, I find nothing but the most excited of all possible curiosity in that opportunity.

Why?

Because He’s helped me to find this belief in everything better, oddly enough at always the expense of all I’ve always had the ability to believe was more than good enough. Indeed, Christ’s having shown up when He did, both back then when He took my place on my cross and every single day ever since as shows up in the flight of a butterfly that you’d have never noticed before or the ways the sun’s rays dance through passing storm clouds or the quiet symphony of nature’s orchestra cheering you to sleep from the field behind your house, a sound you didn’t hear for a decade spent living in the city, it’s all so simple and beautiful and moving that good enough isn’t a thing to me anymore.

Good enough is just an excuse we use to quit.

And I’ve done so much of that in my life thus far that the fact that I haven’t quit doing certain things like this daily writing thing or the working out all the time thing or the not eating like a child thing, that I haven’t given up on all these things that demand my very best every time I try them, knowing so well that I once would have, it’s all Him.

Truly, I cannot remember all the times that I used to tell myself that I was going to start working out only to try a pushup, realize I couldn’t do one and then just quit. Or how many times I told myself I needed to eat better only to be in a hurry and stop by a drive through on the way to work. Or how many times I said I was going to start reading the Word only to spend that time playing video games instead.

But then everything changed.

All of those things that had always been on my heart started to take place as the way of life I’d come to live and had fully chosen to accept started falling apart. The friends all walking away freed me up to reconsider so much of what they’d taught me to do, who they expected me to be. The gym gave me the freedom to work on myself as if I was worth the work. The kitchen taught me how to stop being a victim to food that isn’t food as much as it is convenience.

And writing these posts every day has gotten me to reading His Word every night and the both have so changed my life that my only remaining fear is stopping.

Because I remember that life. I remember those days doing those things that I used to do and how within them I didn’t do what I’ve come to do since. And, well, I just like this new stuff a lot better! I’m impossibly happier, immeasurably healthier, hopefully humbler, and indeed filled with so much hope that I spend my days here bothered less and less about what happens here than I ever knew I could.

And not worrying about what happens here or how the world tells me I should feel about it, it’s a kind of freedom that just can’t be found or felt outside of faith.

Why?

Because faith changes everything.

It turns our attention toward Heaven as we slowly learn to eagerly await a Savior from there. It redefines what we define as treasure and where we feel it best stored. It gives us something to do whenever we get bored as the Word remains always ready to teach us something and prayer gives us the endless opportunity to lose a weight or worry we’ve been carrying.

Christ truly came into my life and turned it all upside down.

And while it hasn’t always been easy to understand why He would, I can finally see that my temple had become tarnished by thieves who only took away everything that I could have been.

And that I was the worst of them.

And there’s just something about coming to see yourself as your own worst enemy that inspires you to put your faith, your trust, your hope in another.

And, well, who better than He who’s shown you and me all He’s willing to do and endure so as to never let us down?

For the goodness and love of God our Savior has appeared. And while it completely upends everything we’ve ever known to the very point of helping us to become excited, thankful, hopeful in letting go of everything we’ve ever known, even to the point of helping us to change basically everything we’ve become, losing everything leaves you with everything to gain.

And that’s what I’ve found in Him.

It’s the ability to gain a friend who I never thought I’d see again who I’ll hopefully get to a take a whole bunch of walks with. It’s the opportunity to do upwards of 300 pushups every Monday morning both to start the week off right and to remind myself of how much He’s helped me to keep believing that I could even back when I couldn’t do one. It’s the butterflies I watch sail through the breeze as I push a lawn mower in the 100 degree heat.

It’s even in the angry little dog that bit me yesterday as I was mowing his owner’s yard.

It’s in how nothing hard or painful or upsetting or disappointing bothers me much anymore. And how the little blessings seem so much bigger and far easier to see than ever before.

Friends, my point is that until we meet Him, we’re missing life.

Not because we’re not living one without Him but because without Him nothing in life means anything.

And I know we’ve all felt that exact emptiness, that hollowness before.

But thankfully when He who is to come came first to our heart’s door, well, everything changed.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold