Day 4195 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ecclesiastes 3:18 NIV

Wonderfully unwonderful

It’s a sight there to be seen inside of both every mirror and too everyone who looks into one trying to see whatever might be the reflection they may want to see. But indeed, so often the image we seem to see is but this photo of who we think we be, the person we’ve tried to become, the better we may actually believe we are. And yet because we so often lie to the mirror whilst expecting it to then somehow tell us the truth in return so too then must we fail to learn what the truth really is about everything a mirror might show.

All because to learn we are slow, so slow in fact that everything bad that ever happens in life is only there to help us see something we’d never agree to see otherwise.

For it seems as though our eyes have gotten so used to these rose-colored glasses that we’ve given up on stopping to smell the roses and instead we use our noses as something of flags flung from our face pointed straight upward amidst our days of refusing to admit just how lowly we really are. Rather than embracing humility for its simple honesty and the growth it affords we instead convince ourselves we’re already rich enough and thus needn’t so very much more that we could consider accepting humility nor all the lessons which only it can hold.

After all, whenever the mirror tells us how great we are and we hear that on top of the world around us yelling always about us all that we’re all something special thanks to living these lives so very wonderful that we can actually find inside our lives the opportunity and inside ourselves the ability to worry ourselves over such things as comfort and preference.

Both of which are things that can literally only matter to us as they’re both, and their like, matters which require it be always only us who determine both whatever they all may be and whether or not we ever find or feel our fill.

Which we don’t.

And that’s because this world’s a boat sailing upon the smooth waters of sin and self. We are daily floating by port after port all of which have all random sort of different wares and wins. I mean we are offered so many things that are custom-made to make our lives seem more incredible than they need to be. And we often resort to just sort of buying as much as we can either afford or find somewhere to keep.

Our lives then finding us becoming not but caretakers of all the things we care about, oddly enough ourselves on the very top of that list and yet so too the ones we do the least care taking of.

And that because we think we’re already as good as we can be and thus there is nothing to take care of that can’t elsewise take care of itself. Indeed, we’ve all come upon this lie in life, which we love more than life itself, that has us pretty well convinced that we’re all so very good at whatever this is that we’ve the shared audacity to actually call a life that we can sort of just live to rely on all our plans and patterns to help our self-perceived perfection repeat.

For however long we either want to remain so unchanged or until we hear tell of something else that someone else has done or tried that went for them so very well that they took to their nearest screen to scream all about how everyone else needed to try it out for themselves.

Thus even people have become even more of those ports we pass as we sail through this and around the bend of that.

Each of us living as but inglorious salesmen pitching our lives and all their lies for all their eyes to see just how amazing we think ourselves to be. And that’s, to us, such the reality we want that we want for either everything to agree with it or to just simply leave us alone so that we can proceed with it. This is our life! It’s this seemingly endless lie in which we find that we ourselves are both willing to say whatever it is that anyone, ourselves included, may want to hear but also only ever welcome near the same words and wins that we ourselves so crave within.

We’ve all of us gone mad thinking we matter!

Leaving us all in need of the treatment of Nebuchadnezzar who “was driven away from people and given the mind of an animal; he lived with the wild donkeys and ate grass like the ox; and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven, until he acknowledged that the Most High God is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and sets over them anyone he wishes.” Daniel 5:21

Kingdoms even such as these over which we seem to so easily believe that we ourselves are the kings and queens.

We call them our lives and just the fact that we’ve the audacity to consider them ours is amazing. Because, let’s be honest for a minute, none of us have ever really created all that much of anything. I mean, sure, there’ve been those who’ve invented things like those chrome boxes that toast our toast or the ovens in which goes our dinners or the pulsating reverberation containers that droll out the sound of music and singers. Man has indeed come up with a great many things.

Some women have even taken part in the creation of more people thanks to God having given them, and only them, the ability to be with baby.

Sorry society, men can’t get pregnant no matter how stinking delusional we may become as to have those who seem all but assured as to the otherwise.

Yeah, doesn’t even take eyes to see just how lost mankind has come to become in terms of pride and vanity. The sea has become one drown in insanity! And yet we all just go sailing along as if it’s all okay because our lives themselves are going so great that nobody really even cares anymore as to anything that anyone else is doing as part of the grand delusion is that we are ourselves as gods and thus endowed by ourselves with the ability to do whatever it is we want.

Even the thinking that men can be women and women men and the both of them have within each of them the ability to thus make all of this up as they go wherever they do or don’t.

Promise is we’re all going somewhere and upon our arrival at said destination we will be changed.

For some it will be for the better whereas for others it will only be for the worse.

Issue is that we can only be changed for the better if at first we start at worse and seek humbly to grow from there. And too things can only change for the worse should we begin at what’s better and only watch it slip and slide slowly away.

Either way, His Word says all will be changed when the first are made last and the last become first and none of us then end up being first as even those who thought they were find out the hard that they weren’t and those who knew they weren’t already knew they weren’t because this truth they’d already learned from having heard all He said who went first.

For Christ was the first of us to be changed, enduring here the worst of a life so as to help all of us find the outcome we’ve won so that, with open eyes, we can now turn and try to find that narrow way to the life that the Life died for us to live.

And it’s not the one we have the way we have!

And we can know that because the truth tells us that He who is the Way is also He who is the Life and so too the same as He who came and died all whilst telling us that we needed to follow Him and do as He’s done, carrying crosses and all, if we’re to ever have the hope of finding all He left here for us to have to feel His Way toward.

For to Heaven we’re all blind and that amongst an entire mankind who will, mostly, remain forever the same.

Until that is they’re all changed by their being turned away from those gates having lived to give away every chance they we’re gave to have saved their lives by and through the simple admitting that both we can’t but that thankfully He did.

A gratitude that is itself such the shift in attitude that it too can help change, while maybe not everything, enough of everything that it does change quite a bit.

And, let’s face it, at this point quite a bit of change is really what all of us need if we’re ever to be anything that anyone would ever welcome to spend eternity with themselves.

This is in fact why there exists the promise of hell. It’s because, well, neither does God desire to endure forever those who are sinners who thus sin because they simply do not know/fear Him and nor is He the kind so unkind as to force anyone to do or be or see anything that they simply don’t wish to.

And, well, the issue is that in this world we all live as if we are gods, the truth is ours and Heaven then somewhere in us. And this all leaves us chasing after our own versions of all He’s promised. Thus leaving us measurably disinterested in Him, in Heaven and thus too in our doing whatever it is that He calls us to in order to ensure we reach that place that we think we’ve already found inside ourselves, located via the serving of ourselves to whom we’re anymore all so devoted that we doubt in the necessity of our ever even worrying about anyone else.

For again, we’re to ourselves the kings and queens of these kingdoms we consider our lives.

And we’ve all for so long now adored this lie that, to us, Heaven isn’t necessary as God is only there to ask us to deny ourselves, something we’ve no interest in doing, and thus, yes, our version of all this just has to be better than His as ours allows us to look into any mirror we can find only to find that it always agrees with us.

Who’d have thought!

Indeed, in our worlds we are the fairest of them all. We are the bravest of them all. We are the strongest, the smartest, the coolest and calmest and prettiest and most handsome and most hardworking and most honorable and powerful and thus deservingly popular and important and special and meaningful and amazing and awesome and wonderful of them all.

All because we can’t anymore see how unwonderful we’ve always been meant to be.

And I’m not saying that we discount the gravity of our being what God created us to be for we are all fearfully and wonderfully made. It’s that we’ve chosen to so discount it anyway that we spend our lives making ourselves believe that we’re somehow supposed to be all these other things instead. And we slowly become so many of these other things that our being asked to rid ourselves of it all seems unto us the hardest call ever to ring.

Because it comes from inside a tomb.

And here the tomb is the gravest doom as all inside we can do is die.

A lie we believe because we believe that these lives are ours and thus can’t be taken away.

Oh, they can and they will because they most certainly are not!

For again, though man has invented some passively impressing things, none of man has ever created man.

All we so clearly know how to do is to destroy one. Problem is that every mirror we see only tells us that we’re not doing just that. Rather our every reflection again tells us only how special and pretty and important we are. And we’ve all heard this nonsense for so long now that we believe it. In fact we think we’re so very good at the living of life that surely we deserve to go on living it for however long we like.

And yet we live in a world in which exists tests and torments, trials and torrents which pour pain upon our pride and squeeze thousands of tears from our eyes.

But here’s where we make our stand?

Here’s where we house our hopes? Here is where we gripe and grope, feeling our way always along the hallway that is our way that is so self-narrowing because it worries only about us and what we want and how great we think we are that we actually seem to really believe that we deserve anything good in life.

We don’t.

Friends, don’t we yet know how horribly we’ve messed this up? Can we not yet see all the mistakes we make? Haven’t we heard every wrong word we’ve said so far? Can we honestly look in the mirror and not see the monster we are?

I’ve been at this whole ‘life’ deal for seven months longer than 38 years and just last night I stood again at my bedroom window, mind walking toward tears, thinking back on something I’d done during the day that, to me, wasn’t acceptable. I wasn’t good with it, couldn’t make my peace with it. Had to apologize for it, both to God and to they who I felt I’d wronged.

Today is my 14,103rd day in this journey called my life. And as of day 14, 102 I was still messing stuff up and doing, saying what I only afterward realized I didn’t want to.

What then makes me think I know anything of the greater things like what’s best for me, why I’m here, that I alone can be the one who can manage to find everything that could be the very best for my life?

All I can seem to find are more ways to mess it up and miss the mark.

And I believe that’s humility. Not the messing up, no, that’s our pride’s department. But the ability to see our mistakes, that’s humility having its way. That’s God opening our eyes to see the mess we’re making in, of our lives. That the Holy Spirit doing the work for which He sent it. That’s the very hope of Heaven reminding us that Heaven is only for here a hope because, nope, we don’t deserve to even be able to believe in it.

And yet we do.

At least some of us do.

Why?

Because there has to be a meaning to all of this, right? There has to be some reason for our having been given this life we’ve been living. There has to be a point, a promise, a purpose. Surely this isn’t all so utterly worthless as to be the belief of evolutionists or other atheists who all collectively believe in the grand nothingness that either all of us and all this came from or to which it’s all heading.

Surely these lives are more than nothing that exploded into something and hopefully it all ends in something better than nothing again.

But what my friends?

What does all of this mean? Why do these lives go the way they do? Why do we face trials and carry worries and feel pain and make mistakes? Why are there hard days and harder things? Why is saying we’re sorry so miserable that not everyone is willing or able to do it? Why do we all do so many things we apparently want to only to after we’ve done them realize they were wrong to do?

It’s because God’s helping us to see just how special we aren’t.

He leads us into struggles that sap our strength so that we can see that we are weak. He calls us to carry things that we can’t so that we can learn that we can’t carry the weight of this life. To misery He guides to help all of us find that miserable we are. And we are miserable at living this life!

In fact He gave us this life to help us find how great we’re not at living it, all so that we could come to the point in which we’re not the point anymore. That place in which we don’t matter quite so much. That realization that we really need help, something we can only find and feel whenever life’s not going very well.

Indeed, He tests us to help us see that we’re nothing special. We’re just another animal like a cow or a donkey or a sheep who gets lost, gets rained on, gets hurt, gets hungry, gets thirsty, gets tired, gets crazy. Truly, we’re all rabid!

We’re feral. We’re feeble. We’re frail and foolish and so unable to see it that we’re failures. We have all failed to find the version of life that He created us to live. And so He creates for us all these trials and torments to help us see and feel that this life we’ve settled for making into whatever it is that we’ve made it into, it’s not what nor who any of this was meant to be.

For He created man in a Garden and after six days of working to get it all just right, He actually said that it was good!

Friends, nothing about who we are or what we do or what we’ve done to force this world to become whatever it is, nothing about any of this is good! And I think, no, I know we’d all agree. We can all see things that we know shouldn’t be what they seem. We hear things that don’t sound right. We say things we know aren’t right. We do things we know aren’t right.

We suck at this living life!

The purpose of humility is to help us realize that so that we can finally start learning both how to live a life and that we can’t ever do it right here where life isn’t right.

Because life was meant to be lived in peace, and, well, that’s at best a theory here. Peace doesn’t exist in this place. Rather in this place we have war and famine and anger and hatred and endless division. Here we have sin and shame and sorrow and sadness. Here we find fear and failure and folly and fighting. Here we feel pain and worry and wonder and pride.

And none of those should be so known in life.

Rather they’re all tests, realities that open our eyes and shatter our hearts and change our minds. And that’s because the only way to change our lives is to change our minds by helping them find that so much that is simply shouldn’t be.

For again, look unto the animals in the simplicity of their lives. Do they worry? Do they fear? Do they feel?

I don’t know.

But I know we do and that they don’t seem to and in this I say that they’ve found the better way. For they neither toil nor try, they just do whatever they’re here to.

We all try to prove we’re so much more, but alas the more we do the more we mess up.

Guess then we are different from the animals as it doesn’t seem that they make quite so many mistakes and the Bible doesn’t talk much about God being angry with them.

For He tests us to change us.

All to help us avoid His wrath.

Reckon you could say we’ve all plenty to learn from those animals who’ve only ever learned to be only all He made them to remain:

Unwonderfully wonderful

#LeaveNoSoulUntold