Day 4192 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Job 34:14-15 NIV

Framed by fragility

Humanity’s lack of humility has left us without an ability to see just how much we’re not and thus how small we are. And I think that perhaps this was always bound to happen as ever since the very beginning of our each living we’ve been within what’s become a world in which we’ve so much opportunity and access and excess that both time and chance would seem to suggest that eventually we’d all come to find ourselves having done so much, learned so much, loved so much and lost just enough to stumble upon this belief that we have some kind power, authority, responsibility even to live these lives however we determine to live them.

And considering how we’ve all done exactly that, to what has long been a fairly decent degree of success, again, time and chance continue to suggest that maybe we do have some sort of say within the way things go and thus a responsibility to ensure they all go okay.

Because, well, for the most part they have. Now sure we all have days that happen to go bad. We all try things we think we’ll like only to realize the heaviness of disappointment. All of us have talked ourselves into doing things that we became of the belief that we had the ability to do only to so utterly fail them that now in the aftermath we don’t even talk about them.

Which is strange because, well, we not only talk about everything but some of our favorite things to talk about are ourselves and all the glory we’ve gained in the stories we could tell of all the either impressive or maybe just simply humorous moments we’ve come to believe we alone have written within them. Indeed, there are times in which we don’t even seem to mind being the punchline so long as our slipups and stupidity might find a laugh from humanity.

Problem is that we find nothing funny about being so weak, puny, honestly just pitiable as we’ve seemingly tried really hard to forget we really are.

And we’ve tried a lot!

We’re talking everything from make-up we paint on to try and hide what we consider to be our flaws simply because someone else told us we should look another way to saying things that we maybe don’t honestly agree with just so that some other human will agree with us and our wishing always to be friends and have this ever-swelling community of others upon whom we can lean should ever we need to learn whatever it is that we never seem to come upon the realization that we ought to know.

All because we’ve all become so fake and foolish that we see no issues in doing whatever it is that we’re doing. Rather we’re all apparently convinced that nothing bad will happen no matter what we do. That we can literally do anything we may ever want to and will never be made to face any kind of cost or consequence. That we can literally mock and belittle and do our very best to all but fumble and befuddle everything from laws to logic and no harm will come of it.

A fact we tend to believe because in fact we all have and, yeah, not much has ever happened in the outcome that would inspire us to come to our senses and stop being so stupid as to break the law and overlook the necessity of logic offering us such gifts as common sense and personal dignity.

Both of which are things clearly waning in both importance and thus noticeability amongst a clearly still falling society.

Truly, if you want to see just how fragile humanity really is, just go to literally any place that people are and there I promise you’ll see every form and dysfunction of our human fragility on full, unashamed display. And I mean everything from mental confusion to social delusion. It’s all there basically everywhere we look!

This is why I personally despise having to go into town.

It’s because it’s anymore like going to a museum of our culture’s collapse offering displays curated of really questionable clothing choices, obvious failures to care about personal well-being, an almost utter absence of foresight and so much filth and foulness that it’s honestly getting to the point in which it’s somewhat dangerous to let children anywhere near it.

For their minds are still forming and thus have at least some passing chance to end up better than whatever this is that the rest of us have become.

But, alas, from commercials on tv peddling drugs for everything from obesity to std’s and ol’ Micky D’s pumping out what probably hasn’t honestly been really food for decades at this point, they don’t have much of a chance either. For they too, like we were, they’ve had this world’s worst forced upon them. Honestly, we’re literally to the point in which we’re all literally handing kids smart phones and basically letting them figure things out on their own without much if anything in the way of adult supervision there to ensure their innocence protected.

After all, we’ve all lost ours and so I guess we all just agree that theirs will be gone too at some point.

May as well lose it early as this world clearly ain’t in any kind of hurry to get its act together!

Because it’s becoming clearer all the time that perhaps the weakest part of us is our mind. And that because it’s the part that thinks the thoughts that continue to convince us of just how smart we are or how brave we are or how important we must then be seeing as how brave and smart we’ve come to be. Indeed, I doubt there’s a human alive who’s not been, at least 800 times, so utterly impressed with themselves that they just couldn’t help but tell everyone else how awesome they thought/think they were/are.

Which, sure, there’s that version of ‘awesome’ that we’ve all been throwing around like beads at naughty gras ever since we were kids who grew up in a world in which everything was totally tubular dude which refers to something that we find to be extremely good or excellent. But there’s also that version of something being awesome that’s rather defined as being simply “extremely impressive or daunting,” something that “inspires either great admiration, apprehension, or fear.”

And yeah, I think it should be easy considering all we daily see and hear to agree that we’re awesome in more of that second degree.

And not the admiration part.

No, the apprehension and fear part. Because, honestly, so much that’s befallen our humanity should cause us pause as we look for reasons why certain things have become so normal as they are. And, again honestly, we should probably be far more afraid for our society than we seem to be.

Because not much seems to be getting much better all that much quicker. Rather it seems that most days find such things as mental illness and hatred and even a simple lack of personal hygiene all but overtaking all the scenes we see on literally any city street. Again, I loathe going to town because I know that what I’m going to see is going to leave me only afraid both of and for humanity.

Of because people are losing their minds and there’s no telling what you might find someone else willing to do at literally any given moment.

For because, well, I think this passage here should help spell that out.

It’s because while we’ve all become so high on ourselves, and plenty of other things thanks to our world deciding it’s a good idea to just make legal things that may prove lethal if ingested in quantities large enough to even further impair our general sense of, well, sense, that we thus have too become all but convinced that we are as the tempter said we could be. Indeed, within this world we’ve found a version of our being free that’s left us with this insatiable ability to always imagine ourselves right in whatever we’re doing.

Even such things as doing drugs and covering our bodies in tattoos and piercings and using our one mouth for both praising and cursing and thinking nothing of the needed separation between them that’s clearly then missing inside our hearts from which all of our words get their start.

Indeed, we need nothing more to understand the fragility of man than to listen to the words we say and the messages they, at least try, to convey.

These days we speak in so much slang and silliness that it’s almost makes you wonder if we really are convinced that it’s better to be funny and filthy than to just be quiet.

Again, we like to talk about everything and most folks seem to measure not their words used whenever saying whatever it is that their minds probably have little control over either.

Anymore I hear so much that shouldn’t be said that most days I just end up so incredibly sad as to the state of who we’ve become. So much course language and worthless joking and petty provoking always just looking for either a fight or a friend made over a laugh.

Because we think that nothing we say or do is bad.

We’ve taken our understanding of freedom and used it as what’s basic anarchy in which there are no rules, no expectations, no ideals nor exemplars there then to reach for. Rather everyone’s just dissolved into a world made of their every personal delusion and we cheer one another on because it’s funny or something.

Friends, there’s nothing funny about what’s coming!

Sure, most here live as if they honestly believe that the only thing coming is football season and thus plenty of cookouts and probably even more drinking, after all, it’s Saturday am I right?

No. I’m not right. You’re not right. We’re not right. So little here is right that God has promised us a day of vengeance in which we will all come to know what it’s like to feel and face the wrath of Him. Why? Because we’ve given up trying in life to be anything other than idiots. We put no thought or care or concern into anything anymore. Instead we’ve all just seemingly accepted this outlook on life in which if it doesn’t go right just do something else or throw it away or don’t worry about it.

Yes, our shared cultural ideal is to just not worry about it.

Friends, we’d better start worrying about some stuff.

Because one day we’re going to find out just how little we are and how weak we’ve then always been. And that upon that day in which God will take our breath away and ask too for our souls back. And that’s because literally everything we are is only ours on loan. The breath we breathe is breathed of an air we didn’t created in just such a way that would make it fit to breathe. The water we drink, and of which we’re roughly 60%, it’s not something we invented. The many ideas we have and the thoughts we think, or anymore don’t, they’re almost all given us from another, probably someone around us as we listen to men more than we listen to Him.

Indeed, even these bodies we use and abuse, giving them over to everything from ink to substance abuse (and yeah, junk food is a substance we abuse), they’re but dirt and patience.

The dirt being patient while we spend a lifetime doing and saying all we do or don’t until we finally die and it can just simply be dirt again.

For let’s be real my friends, sometimes we’d be far better off in life and at the living of the same if we were just dirt!

Dirt is sometimes a far cry better than whatever this is that we’ve become. Even dirt isn’t as dirty as we’ve all of us been in our many moments of mental, physical, emotional, spiritual fragility.

Everything we have and all that we are is so amazingly weak that it absolutely amazes me the sheer amount of hope and trust and every other such importance that we place so often on and in only ourselves!

As this verse says, if He wanted to, God could in the blink of an eye erase the entirety of our lives. For He’s the power to both number the hairs on our head and yet to also completely forget that we were ever here at all. He can plant and produce, a fact we see He proved in the Garden, and so too can He remove and destroy, Sodom and Gomorrah come here to mind. He can raise and He can raze. He can give life, which He has to all of us, and He can take it away, which He will from most of us.

And why would He take it away?

Well, say you gave someone a new car, a really nice, pretty expensive one, and yet all they decided to do with it was use it to enter every demolition derby that they could find in which they spend hours every day and most every night just slamming it mercilessly into everything they can see.

How would that make you feel to have spent so much time, and money, on this something that you wanted for someone else to have only to watch them mess it up so bad and that so constantly?

Friends, that’s what we’ve been forcing upon Him since the dawn of humanity!

For, in case you didn’t know (and judging from any trip to Walmart, we don’t), all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Rather we’ve come to glory in going to buy groceries in our nightgowns and pjs, or even fewer things sometimes. We’ve come to glory in using our words to wound those around us, or to merely try and make them laugh by saying a dirty word that we can’t seem to get enough of hearing ourselves say. We’ve come to glory in thinking it okay to have a drive-thru window at a store that sells marijuana.

Yeah, great ideas!

And the problem is that they have all sorts of friends that are every bit as foolish and forsakable as they are. But we forsake nothing of all that we’ve become. Instead we pat ourselves on the back! We cheer one another on in this demolition derby we call life.

“Yeah man, back it up and hit it again!”

We get no fill of every thrill and frill offered us from a world that God has said is going to be destroyed because of sin.

And yet despite His clear and obvious patience with us, something proven as easily as our all seeing that we’re all still here with what is then one more day in which we could and thus should try to live better lives as better people, better being found and thus defined by He who is good, we don’t. We just keep doing the same stupid things over and over again, or even coming up with new ways to do even stupider things.

Again, weed shop with a drive-thru.

Friends, it is absolutely amazing that God’s not washed His hands with this mess we’ve made of life. I truly find that every day we’re given is perhaps our greatest blessing because inside of every one of them we do or say or think something we shouldn’t. And thus we’ve all let Him down so badly and so many times that it honestly blows my mind that He keeps giving us more days and so many opportunities within them in which to try to do better.

Because, again, we don’t.

In fact I’m afraid that it’s fairly safe to say that the best of humanity’s days are now behind us.

Sure, my faith teaches me that there is still good to come for some of us as it promises me that one day Jesus will come and get me and take me home.

But it also promises that mankind will go from bad to worse.

And things are already pretty bad.

All that leaves is worse.

Look, I know that this world has made it commonplace to daily call God’s bluff. So many people spend so much time and effort doing so much stuff simply because they want to do it and have fun doing so. But one day we’re all going to find that our having fun was never the point or purpose of our having been given a life.

Rather the point and purpose of this life is for our to find just how weak, just how lowly, just how foolish and empty we really are.

Many don’t think that such things are possible because this world and the way they’ve lived their lives within it has convinced them that no harm is coming.

It is coming.

While we should be thankful that His wrath isn’t yet here, and that we’re still here with what is one more day in which to learn just how small we are so as to turn from our sins and seek shelter in the Son, most here won’t because all their having fun and making friends and finding within the both and their like, all their apparent success in life, it has them convinced that in this life and to this life there is no consequence.

But friends, just because we think we’re too big or important or special or powerful to die, and that only because we haven’t yet, that doesn’t mean we won’t.

For we all will upon that day in which God takes back the breath and Spirit that He’s given us as we then stand facing His judgement in regard to all we’ve done with them.

So what then are we doing with them?

And does any of it even pretend to honor Him?

The sad reality is that most of humanity lives as if the honor is supposed to be all ours to keep.

The scary problem is that nothing in this life is ours to keep. Not even life. For one day God will take back all He’s given us. And He’s promised He will give us the reward we’ve earned based upon the fruit we’ve borne.

This life is but our time to learn to prune the dumb.

And we’re rapidly running out of time to realize just how much help we need in doing so thanks to bodies that don’t care to and minds that don’t think we need to. A lesson He’s promised to help us learn.

These lives are just the time in which He still offers to do so the nice way.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold