Day 4193 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 146:4 NIV

The slow fade

It’s something that unfortunately everyone here will feel at some point as this life is destined to go the way it’s been intended to go which is back to all the different parts, pieces and places from which we’ve come. But you see, the unfortunate thing isn’t that life is designed to unravel the way we’ve come to believe it does but rather that the unraveling is so feared as it’s so clearly become. And we all do fear it, or have, because our lives have become this bag in which we try so hard to fit everything we want to see, hear, do within it.

And the call of the grave at first whispering our name in what is a whisper that grows louder and louder as we get closer and closer is what causes so many to spend their lives looking over their shoulder and under the same.

Indeed, what if I told you that we’ve all chosen to carry this weight that was never ours to even notice?

I’m not saying that death isn’t a weight nor something we shouldn’t notice or consider or spend some time wondering about and perhaps even planning for. And that’s because it is and because it is then we should. But the problem is that we’ve all come to see our lives as either already so very good that we can’t possibly imagine losing them or rather we’ve all these idealized plans within which we all but expect to find the lives that we will love so much that then we’ll not want to imagine losing them.

Either way we’re setting ourselves against that which is inevitable as if we might figure out some way to prove it only merely possible and thus something we could, in theory, avoid or leastwise put off for a time.

All because we’ve all become so conditioned to measure our meaning and material in time that we’re all but blind to the fact that faith only asks that we stop so hindering our understanding of everything as is done by holding it hostage within a clock.

Rather He just wants us to walk with Him and to learn to enjoy, to appreciate, to honor His plan, His promise, His purpose as opposed to ours. But what seems to keep tripping us up is that we’ve again come up with all of this stuff that is somehow supposed to define life itself. All of these plans we have and the priorities they basically force us to make of doing, seeing, having whatever it takes to make them realized, they’re doing such a horrible disservice to our lives.

Why?

Because all of our plans, all of our dreams, all of our things and the many more we’ll likely learn to want, it all just keeps us stuck within this hunt that is a hope for only all that’s here.

Have you ever thought about the true limitation to nearly every plan we’ve ever made? I mean honestly, the entire idea of a plan is something undertaken with a finish line in mind. It’s a path we intend to walk, or at least think/hope we can, toward what is a firm goal, a final prize, a matter somehow completed in life. And granted, this idea of making plans works really well within this life in which we find that our minds have a somehow shrinking ability to believe, to imagine, to expect the unexpected.

All because we’ve all become so conditioned to live our lives not in the moment nor then anywhere near an appreciation for the fact that we have it but rather up ahead in the distance wherever it is that our dreams are waiting.

And yet they’re always waiting on this side of the grave.

And as I continue to say, yeah, there is some sense to that as, yeah, we are assured that we have this life that we are living and will live until we finally get chucked in that hole.

But what I’m really starting to struggle to understand is why we continue to be so adamant that there’s nothing worth considering after it. Granted, maybe all of life is all here. Maybe there is nothing coming next. Maybe this is all there is and thus we would be best to just make our plans and dream our dreams for all these things that we alone think will make our lives mean something.

Where I seem to struggle is that I look around at the world and all the plans people are making and all the dreams folks are chasing and all the time, effort and energy into them all they’re pouring and I just see a life wasting. Not that I’ve not made plans in the past for in fact I have. Made a ton of them. Or mostly were handed most of them thanks to such lies as the American dream and the necessity of a college degree and how there’s someone out there for everyone.

Maybe that works out for most people. Maybe those things are things that folks should focus so much on as it seems so many still do. Perhaps I’m the one that lost out as my life found me only getting to lose.

But somehow I don’t feel as if I’ve lost or missed or managed to mistake all that much.

Definitely not saying that I’ve not missed things as I know I have and that very thought is one with which I wrestle all the time. Not saying I’ve not lost anything as just here recently we went through what was a month or two of these posts detailing the many ways in which this faith will, or at least should, make it look to the world as if we’ve lost our minds. And I’ve definitely made tons of mistakes, to that there is no debate!

But as I get older and that grave’s call gets louder, I look back over my shoulder and somehow find that the worst mistakes I thought I’d made, while still horrible, they’re all almost comparable to the things that I tried so hard to get right.

Indeed, what if our successes are just as bad as our failures? What if they’re actually both equally worthless? What if everything we’ve gone after was the same waste of time and effort as everything that went wrong?

What if all the plans we still make for what is, unbeknownst to us, a coming day which may not come, what if they’re all then just life wasted under the Son seeking, expecting, dreaming for things under the sun?

And again, don’t get me wrong as I do believe that we all should have things that are important to us. I think we should all have goals we try to achieve and thus plans and paths that we make and pave trying our best to find them realized. It is a good thing to seek for basically anything of growth or hope in life.

Guess I’m just at the age in which I’m starting to wonder why it is that we go so hard for what we do.

What will our achieving it prove? What will our having it mean? What can our seeing it allow us to say that we’ve seen?

What don’t we have and haven’t we seen because we’ve been so busy all this time chasing down all these plans we’re still trying to achieve?

For life is what happens while we’re making our plans.

Life is what happens while we’re busy tinkering away on what all we want to try for and what all we need to try in order to get closer. Life is what happens while we’re researching the best way to do something or the best time to go somewhere. Life is what happens while we sit for hours every year in rush hour traffic commuting back and forth to jobs we hate just so we can make some money to save for a vacation we can only afford to plan to take once a year.

Life is so near every moment of every day and yet we spend so many of said moments just letting them drift away as we work away on the plans we continue to make for what are other moments that we can only hope we’ll have.

Moment spent inside a time that’s only measured in this life that we too measure in time rather than tide.

All because time is consistent. Time is reliable. Time is simple.

Curiosity isn’t.

Wonder isn’t.

Worry isn’t.

That’s why we make our plans. It’s because they’re all to us these tiny expectations that give us something to focus on or work on or work for. They’re these ideals that give us something to look forward to. They’re these self-designed finish lines to which we basically know that we can arrive to in life in which or rather at which our lives will finally be whatever it is that we want them to be. Our lives will finally have everything we want them to have.

We will finally have all we’ve lived to have.

And that’s the problem I have with plans.

We have them.

And that means that we can have them. And yet that we can have them means then that they’re things we can have. And, though we’ve all clearly forgotten this fact, a hope had is no hope at all. And thus our every plan for something we can have, plans we then have, it’s all hopeless.

Why?

Because our every grave remains for today open.

One day that will be different.

And what will come of our plans then? What will happen to our every exciting expectation whenever we’re not here anymore to expect it? Where will our plans go whenever we’ve gone wherever it is that most us spend next to no time thinking about?

See, Heaven is the hope that it is because it’s something none of us can find, nor then have, nor then map, nor then make into some plan that’s going to be found by us on some specific day as is held probably 80 years from now.

Heaven is the retirement that we won’t see coming because nobody knows the day nor the hour upon which we’ll leave for there.

The hope should be that we make it in.

The problem is that we’re instead still busy making all of these plans for all of these others prizes and problems that will only be found and thus finished before we even reach the gate.

Why do we live this way?

Why does everything here still matter so much? Why are so many things so important to us? Why do our plans continue to be our priorities?

Is life really something we can truly figure out or finalize?

We sure live as if it is. For again, all any plan really is is nothing but a finish line we ourselves draw into life. Problem is that God never asked us to accept nor to especially so embrace all these stopping points along what His empty grave seems to say is a journey that has no end.

Isn’t that the reason eternity seems so interesting?

For how long is forever?

Maybe our fear of death as is at least one part of what keeps us so focused on all our plans for all our goals and dreams and prizes we hope to find before we die, maybe it’s because we don’t know. We don’t know long forever is. We don’t know where Heaven is. We don’t know what to do in order to that narrow gate slip through.

Except we do!

And that’s because He not only told us how but He showed us too!

Lay down your life.

What does that call have anything to do with all these plans we make? How can we possibly say that we have lain them down when we spend so much time taking them up and making there up all these goals and gifts that we hope to get or give? And again, I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong, wicked or worthless about all of our plans as I do hope that some of them do involve things that do make us better or cause us to live helping others.

But my concern is that all our plans ever really seem to do anymore is only keep us focused more and more on all that’s here.

And it’s not that nothing here matters as plenty of things do. After all, He’s called all of us to look after those who are struggling, to support the widows and orphans, to go into all the world and share once there the Good News of His coming and His coming again.

But you see friends, He calls us to do these things, in part at least, because there is no plan to them. He even tells us to never let our left hand know what our right is doing. In other words to just do stuff. Just live. Just wake up in the morning and live each day as if it’s our last.

Why?

Because one of them will be.

And what then will come of all the plans that we’ve made for all the days that we expected to come still after?

The truth is that then they cannot matter.

So why then do they matter so much now?

You see, my point is that everything we do needs to be always kept in perspective. Is it fun to do this that way, not always. But neither is the point of this life to have fun. Rather the point of this life is to become ready to not have it anymore. And we do that by doing as He’s asked us to within His call to lay down these lives and take up our crosses.

Don’t know about you but that’s nothing that I ever planned to do!

And yet here I sit on one more Sunday morning spent sitting on my bedroom floor having woken up far earlier than I wanted to after the last week spent out in the heat that left me impressively tired writing yet one more post that I never knew to hope I’d have the opportunity to share with what is a world that I know in my heart simply does not care that I’ve been trying to do this for all these years in which I’ve done this thing that was never anything I ever even imagined trying.

I’ve written one of these posts every single day for 4,193 days.

I once planned on being a math teacher.

Instead I’m something of a writer that mows lawns for a living.

All because life is what happens while we’re busy worrying about all our plans for what life doesn’t always become.

So why keep giving so much time and intention to plans that may or may never happen? Why give so much effort and attention to only the things that we want to happen? Why so open ourselves up to disappointment as is only ever had in our having of other expectations? Why stay at a job we hate just so we can save up for a vacation in which we get to go someplace else and not think about it for a week?

Shouldn’t such things as peace and joy and enjoyment be given more than one-week itineraries?

Yet we agree to doing just that every time we resort to making a plan for something we can hopefully enjoy later on.

What about today?

Is every today we have left to have really something we want to spend thinking about a day we might not?

Again, I too have lived like that. I still do sometimes. And that’s simply because we’ve all become so convinced that so much here matters that we spend our lives trying to plot our way toward whatever it is that we ourselves have come to determine might matter most. Maybe we’re right and hopefully we’ll get there someday.

But I guess I’m just tired of so many days being only allowed to fade as I spend my time looking ahead to things that may never happen. I want to live now. I want to be happy now. I want to have peace, however much we can in this place, now. Problem seems to be that we’ve come to think we can plan life, happiness, peace. As if they’re all these things on some list that we can cross off as we get them or feel them.

I don’t want happiness to end once I think I’ve found it. I don’t want peace to ever be allowed to reach some self-perceived perfection of whatever it can be.

I don’t want my life to be nothing but a list of things I wanted to do that will inevitably be left unfinished.

And that’s the problem with planning: There’s always another plan that we can make.

But we can’t make the future promise us the day in which we can finish all of them we’ve already had.

Friends, I know it’s considered normal to go through life with all our lists of all we think matters most and all we believe we need to get done in order to make sure it all means as much we want it to. But I just can’t help but feel that we’re missing out on something truly special, and truly fleeting, by spending so much of our lives doing all of this planning for what may well prove things and dreams that we simply don’t have the time, opportunity, ability to find.

And I think what we’re missing is life.

And I say that because we seem all but adamant that the wrong things fade. And that because we want death to leave us alone so that we can live our lives making all our plans for all the things we hope to have or experience before we leave.

Promise being that we’re leaving.

Why spend our lives planning our lives inside what are plans that, collectively, can never be finished?

For again, plans are things we can finish or at least hope to someday. But this life is something that none of us can or do plan to lose. And that only keeps us focused on everything that we unknowingly will.

Reckon I’m just saying that since we’re all headed back to being dust, this promise just makes me wonder what we’re doing with all this time we have before we get there.

And how much of all we do before then will matter when we’re gone.

And too how much will be left unfinished whenever this world is finished with us?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold