Day 4189 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Corinthians 2:5 NIV

With the help of humility

For as it turns out such is the only hope for humanity. And that’s simply because conventional wisdom teaches us that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And thus the shortest, quickest and so too the easiest path toward everything better that we’ve never become is a straight line in the opposite direction of this we’ve so clearly chosen culturally. Indeed, the very best way for us to ever find, feel, be or become anything better is to make a b-line back to all we’ve left behind.

Because it should be easy enough to find considering all we’ve not found ever since and, on top of this, that we’ve hopefully found plenty of reasons as to why what we’re doing now simply isn’t working.

The fact that not much is working pretty much being the only real reason we should ever really need.

Because life was never meant to be whatever this is that we now call a life. In fact I find that I’m found most days with this obviously curious/worried/confused look upon my face as so many of the things I hear and see just don’t seem to make any sense anymore. Rather it feels as if everything that’s going on has all of us going under in what is this common search for the best our lives can be. And indeed, this pursuit of our lives perfected makes all the sense in the world.

Why else would anyone look for anything else when everything else that isn’t best is only then less than the best we believe the best can be?

No, we’re all capable of understanding the concept of perfection, even if entirely unable to actually make it happen. The problem comes in that we keep on trying because this vanity inside just keeps on lying telling us that everything we’re ever meant to become, all that we ourselves would consider to be our best, that it’s all in us and, once we find it, that it’s then on us to prove it or share it or elsewise hold it high for all the world to see all that our lives have finally come to be so that those around us can glean from us all they need to make their lives the best we think they can be.

See the issue?

It’s that there’s entirely too much ‘we’ and ‘us’ and ‘me’ in that mess.

And while we all love us because us is made up of me, thus giving every me (such as you) a place to feel as if we belong in the general goings on that we all gather together every day to share in this hope that they’re going somewhere better. And yeah, that again seems to make all the sense in the world for if everyone who is a me or you, all 7+ billion of us, are all down here seeking for our very best life and truly doing our very best to it find, then yeah, it would stand to reason that we could trust one another to help us all get there.

Yet here we are in what feels a world not improving but rather losing.

And that rapidly.

And that everything from compassion to kindness to sanity.

It’s literally amazing to me, impressive in the absolutely most depressing way possible that so much of what’s happening and nearly all of everything that everyone else is doing is doing so little to help any of us get or do any better at all.

For how can, again, 7+ billion people with access to all the technological advancement and scientific knowhow ever known to man manage to become so pleased and impressed with only themselves that we now have digital apps that allow us to create romantic partners with what’s basically a glorified spreadsheet of facts and opinions that we ourselves put into it?

We’ve literally become so selfish, and apparently pleased with the process and the results, that we’ve chosen to lean upon ourselves to teach computers how to love us.

Up to the point in which heartbreak comes not in two people growing apart but rather in an update causing an app to restart that accidentally deletes the significant other that someone had spent so much time and effort creating so perfectly that they could talk about anything and never have an argument.

Because, well, why do we need to argue when we all know best what’s best?

I’m telling you friends, we’ve become so deluded that it now literally takes an act of God to even help us see just how high we are on ourselves.

Which thankfully He did act in His sending Christ to literally die on our behalf thanks to our having all become so stinking lost that we’ve all apparently thought it a great idea to beat the life out of the One who gave us life.

Not sure why we still look to ourselves whenever in need of a good idea.

But alas, we do! In fact we only look to ourselves for both ideas and ideals and never once see that these things only accomplish turning us into our own idols. Indeed, our gods have become our stomachs and, wouldn’t you know it, but just like a stomach which processes that which was put in it, so too do we now live this version of life in which we’re constantly moving from delight to delight trying still to find those which will add up to whatever it is that we think is best.

Leaving them one by one in a great big steaming pile of misplaced hope that our every past is now forced to hold.

It’s called regret and it’s something that I know all of us have felt.

As to why we keep doing things the same ways that led to those things that even we agree were mistakes, I’ve no idea. Guess we just understand that in the process of digging for gold you’re probably going to have to sift through some dirt.

Problem then becomes that we seem so impressed with ourselves that we never think anything of us or about us nor thus anything we do or decide we want to or resolve not to is ever anything dirty or stupid or worthless. No, to us, everything we do makes so much sense that it can’t possibly go wrong.

Wish someone could explain to me why it is that so little seems to go right anymore.

But I’m honestly just tired of waiting and so, unfortunately, I’ve just had to move on.

So much so that I find it usually best to be alone because so much of what society does irritates me so badly that I literally just about can’t take going into town. Truly, just the idea physically churns my stomach because I know that if I go I’ll see so much that’s so broken and foolish and dangerous and deceptive and dark that it will truly break my heart.

I just can’t understand how all of this is all that we’ve managed to come up with!

Anymore it’s all nothing but weed stores, overgrown medians, honking horns, adult video stores, tattoos, facial piercings and people dealing in and with all of it as if it’s supposed to be this way. As if what is is normal. As if it’s somehow acceptable. As if trash being everywhere and people all but wearing it to the store is okay.

All because we’ve so chosen to each go our own way that we’ve all now become the only ones in our lives to whom we look and upon whom we lean to tell ourselves what life means and what little that apparently requires us to do or be or hope to uphold.

We’re doing less and less all the time and somehow still managing to find ways to underwhelm even that!

And we’re the ones who know what’s good from what’s bad? We’re the ones who should be allowed to decide for ourselves whatever and wherever and whoever our best is? We can honestly look at the world as is run by men and think then that it’s a good idea to trust in us?

Friends, this world’s trashed!

And, well, so are we. And by that I mean in that many of those around us look forward to the weekends whereupon they look forward to getting smashed and too that all of us are now equally lost in whatever lust has stolen our trust and told us, convinced us that it’s somehow the best idea we can have to keep looking only to ourselves to find everything we ourselves have never managed to find as of yet.

Not because we’ve not all spent all our lives up to now trying to find it.

It’s just that we keep looking with only an increasing passion in the one place we’ve spent the last 10, 20, 40 years looking.

As if we’ve this hope that if we could only figure out some way to stare harder in the mirror the dork looking back at us will somehow manage to finally tell us the secret to not sucking at the living of a life.

Ain’t happened in, again, 10, 20, 40 years.

But somehow we’re just not sure where else or to whom else we might try looking.

And as for that Jesus guy, yeah, He’s definitely the last One we’d ever any of us look to as He lived a life completely empty of everything we like. Even made so many people hate Him so much that they finally just killed Him so as to get Him and His help and healing out of their way of continuing to only ruin their own lives.

A reality we still can’t seem to see despite all the chemicals we’re pumping into our bodies trying to shed the pounds or escape the weight of our problems.

Problems we somehow have and weight we’ve managed to put on despite our knowing always what best to do with and in and for a life.

Again, not sure how that works out but, here we are!

And where we are is so absolutely willing to rely only on ourselves that we look to, listen to, learn from nobody else. Rather we’ve become convinced that we are our own sources of all that we need to know, need to do, can ever hope to be. That we ourselves are the goal, the well, the library, the lab, the school, the church, the court, the everything.

We are literally our everything as we believe so highly in ourselves that anyone else who comes along and tries to sell any other idea as to what we could or should do with or in our lives, they must be spreading lies because we’ve got it all figured out.

Mankind is awesome, just ask us!

Indeed, most days we’re all so filled with pride that our eyes literally cannot see that we make any mistakes. Sure, sometimes regret still manages to pop up from time to time, always only after we’ve done something dumb, something done always because we think it stupid to think we before we speak or to take a second and reconsider the doing of whatever it is that we’re thinking about doing.

No, we don’t need to do that. We don’t need to second-guess ourselves. Again, we know what we’re doing and it always, usually, works out.

Again, just ask us.

But friends, that’s the problem. It’s that for all our lives we’ve always only asked us. At best we’ve asked those who look like us. But either way, the downfall of life as we know it has been continually continued because all we seem to know is to look to man to lead the way. To look to man to know everything. To actually believe that man, despite all the obvious flaws and failures and foolishness, can somehow be the source of all that could ever be best for us.

Yeah, we think that man, though now destined to die thanks to having lost our minds and lived these lives running away from He which gave them to us, we think that it’s still us who know what’s best to do with and in a life.

That those whose now shared promised punishment is that all of us will die know best how to live a life.

Do you see the dumb yet?

We’ve chosen for a path that will end with all of us in a grave and yet every day we continue to give all of our time and trust and attention to only us who are promised that this life will end because we’re not good at living it. Because, like it or not, agree with it don’t, sin is real and the wage it wins is death. And, seeing as the Word says that we’ve all sinned and fallen then short of the glory of God, we all, as sinners, are now promised to die. Something we’ve seen happen to everyone we’ve ever known who has already come and gone from this world.

I can literally drive past five or six graveyards just on the way to the store, all of them filled with people like you and me who, at times at least, probably thought they had it all figured out.

Only to reach the end of the line at which they lost this life that we’re all still here living as if we can be the ones to figure it out.

Or mostly that we all already have as is seen inside the utter lack of change or humility seen inside of how we live.

Indeed, do you realize the lack of hope there is to find in this most arrogant of way of life? For if we think we’ve already found the very best way to live this thing, then what hope have we left for anything better? If this world as it is or as we will sadly watch it slowly become is the home of all there is that we might need or prove able to know about how to live our lives the very best we can, that means then that our lives’ best will have been lived in this place in which we’re all promised they’ll end.

Thus meaning that so many people are seeking so hard to find their best life without the humility to appreciate the fact that everything that we find, feel, do or see within this world will come to an end.

If then our best is found here, what does that leave for us to look forward to whenever we leave?

Sadly we’ve all come to live this life actively trying to make sure that we leave our best life behind. And again, to some extent that does make some sense as, yeah, these lives are long and they are lived within a world that does offer us so much that seems and feels and sounds so amazing that you would have to be at least a little bit crazy to turn it all down.

And to a people of pride, humility would obviously seem crazy.

But, again, there is only hope in humility as hope is something that expects something better but only later. And, well, humility is what helps us to start at the bottom and slowly, patiently, perhaps even painstakingly make the climb to that point in which we find what is that life that really is so perfect that it literally cannot be lost.

That’s the purpose of the cross.

It’s to help us see that we are so very lowly that we will die because, well, the way we’ve lived our lives has left us deserving to. But that, even though we do deserve to die, and are in fact all promised to, that if we humble ourselves to sharing in His doing so early and willingly, then so too shall we share in the outcome that He found in doing so.

And that’s eternal life as met within the grave that everyone in this world continues to say you’d have to be crazy to run toward.

Friends, you’re only crazy if you don’t considering the promise held within.

Because it’s a promise we cannot find. It’s a goal we can’t guarantee. Eternal life is nothing that we can achieve, and yeah, many have tried. But despite science and technology, the very best of human intelligence and ingenuity, having given us the concepts of cryogenics and cloning, everything here still dies.

In Him we don’t have to do it twice.

But only in Him.

Why?

Because He had to come become like us so as to save us from what we’ve come to become. Thus He isn’t like us. He had to put on the sinful flesh that we still wear around like expensive suits and armor to keep us safe. He had to take upon Himself all of our failures and flaws, not refusing the things we still refuse to agree we have or are. He had to become human, humbling Himself to do so.

All to give us the hope of becoming like Him all the way to the point in which we too can live forever.

But only if we lose this life in which we all know so well how to find that age-old lie that tells us that we know best how to live a life. Or that some celebrity does. Or that some influencer might.

None of us do because all of us die.

And, back to that whole graveyard thing, when we do we stay that way.

He’s the only One to ever walk out of a grave.

Pretty sure then that it’s only Him to whom we should look and upon whom we should lean and from whom we simply must learn how to live this life if ever we’re to find that promise He’s given us of our living forever with Him.

And yeah, may here will continue thinking that that promise is foolish because the path toward it too humbling. Others here will go ahead remaining convinced that they can be the ones to solve the whole death dilemma. But friends, we’re all going to lose that battle in which we’ve all tried to prove that we alone know what best to do with and in a life.

He showed us that the best thing we can do with a life lived in sin is to lay it down and walk away. To walk humbly within His will for our lives. To deny ourselves and take up our crosses and follow Him in what becomes a life of losses of all that’s here with the hope of there being something else waiting for us whenever we leave.

Man doesn’t understand that because man looks only at all that is already. But as for me, well, I can see more than plenty of all that already is to know that, honestly, it’s nothing I want. In fact I absolutely refuse to believe that this world is the prize nor then that I can here live the very best of life.

A great many seem to clearly believe otherwise.

Why then would I look to them to help me figure out how to find what I know simply isn’t here?

Because, contrary to common consensus, life isn’t lived here.

It’s lost here.

How we lose and what we lose it for is all this life is for. But don’t expect to find many who would agree with that.

For it’s found only with the help of humility.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold