Day 4197 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ecclesiastes 1:14 NIV

The madness of meaning

It’s found in this seeing that all you’ve done and likely then all you’re doing is without reason, without purpose, without then anything of any ability to offer much in the way of a return upon that which is invested in it, toward it, for it. And this realization causes you to sort of begin to undo, to unravel, to all but come apart at the seams you’ve sewn yourself into trying to make do with all that you’ve had to do as is all done under the sun for things under the same. All the struggle, all the strain, all the tears and all their stains, it all means nothing.

So long as all it means is something here.

Why?

Because all that’s here is already gone. All the things we have, they’ve already been lost. All the plans we have, already finished and proven futile. All the hopes and goals and hurt and gold, it’s over. We are all here as what are but the final cars in humanity’s train of existence pulling begrudgingly into the station that is eternity with what is likely so much baggage and disbelief that it’s only thanks to His surpassing patience that we’ve even this new day before us.

One that most will use to chase after more things that they can find within this world that one day won’t be found. For indeed, there comes a day in which all that makes this world all that this world is simply will not be anymore. Rather we’re told that God’s prepared a new heavens, a new earth, a new life in fact for all that is in fact alive or has been as some point in time.

Jesus himself told us plain that such was why He came.

To make all things new.

How?

By bringing a sword upon the earth that is as His Word has always been: A weapon sent to wound so that healing might begin. Because, friends, the closer we drift toward honesty, a trip of untold inevitability, what we’re all, yes, all going to see is that without His healing there is no hope. And that mostly only because we’ve all held hope inside what are things known. And, again His Word, a hope had is no hope at all.

Because, again, all things here will be one day gone.

And yet all of us have, and most still are, sought our hope in things that we have in fact had. We’ve all done that. We’ve all hoped for things that have happened, that did come true, that did come through perhaps to even better results than we could have even imagined or ever deserved. That’s what makes this faith so strange! It’s that He calls us to consider all these things as loss as there’s another glory that isn’t gained in gold nor the glory we’ve all placed in all that glimmers.

He told us that the greatest of glory is found on a path slimmer, one so narrow in fact that none of us can walk it.

At least not as we are.

No, for we’ve entirely too many worries, too many hopes, too many ropes with which we’ve truly tied ourselves to these lives that sell this image of purpose and passion but again only for all things passing. We love those things which are temporary, transient, transparent even. Indeed, maybe it’s just me but I’ve found that if you hold your eyes, their gaze more specifically, in just the right way you can look through things.

All things.

For all things here are hollow. They’re empty already. They’re but cardboard vessels that display a varied number of prizes and profits that the false prophets around us tell us daily we need to place our trust within. And we’ve listened to them for so long now, and found just enough assumed success in doing so that we don’t know what else to do. And, since we don’t like what we don’t know, we don’t do anything else.

Rather we all awake already more than intent upon taking the content we settled for yesterday, shining it up a bit so as to pass it off as something somehow more important to those who we still seem to sadly believe are actually looking at our lives and our living thereof and standing to judge what all we do and why we don’t do whatever they think we should.

Friends, nobody cares. Honestly, I think we’re even to the point in which very few even know you’re there. For the tragedy of reality is that nearly all of humanity has been lulled, culled, coddled into this coffin that is themselves and their plans and their goals and their hopes of their lives being actually only all they want them to be.

This is the entire point and promise of such prescriptions as algorithms.

They exist to pump our eyes and minds full of everything they learn we like. An endless feed of an unending stream of songs and scenes shoved into our souls that this world thus holds thanks to our having given them to them which want them but not for anything good or upstanding or even passingly productive. No, rather this world and the ruler (for now) thereof want for all of us to become only too dumb to realize what’s really going on.

And the easiest way for him to get us to go along is to put in front of us everything we might like the looks, the sound, the feeling or friendship of. We’re like dogs who’ll do anything for a bone.

Not realizing that the bones are ours and our lives then so dry and dusty that we’re all but dead already.

Something we for the most part can’t see because it sure seems that we’re all still alive.

But friends, one day we’re all going to find that there’s a measurable difference between being alive a living a life. Small perhaps, but a difference nonetheless.

And that difference is to be measured by what it is that we’re living for. What are doing all we do for? What’s the reason for all that we say and see? What do we give our ears to hear and our hearts to hold? What all has come to be housed inside our hands and is any of it still there?

Or was it wind?

Of all we won, where did it go? Of the more we wanted, where is it now? Of the plans we’ve made, the priorities they’ve known, will we have enough time to know more of them?

Can we have more time at all?

Why would we want more of what’s promised to run out?

For time, like gold, they’re both scheduled to not be anything anymore someday. For they exist in this place and all that’s here is passing away. Why then do we spread ourselves so thin living, walking, breathing in this worry held and hoped for within what have been lives spent trying to find all we have?

Again, of all we’ve had, where is it now?

Where will it be whenever here we’re not?

Will it matter anymore when meaning is finally found in that one place He’s done paved the way for us to take in order for our to find all we’ve spent all these lives looking for and thinking we’d found only to watch all of it fade?

For the one place in which man has never sought meaning was within the grave and yet within the grave, should we enter in via the Way, the only thing promised to fade away is just these lives we’ve lived to give away to all that’s promised to go away. Indeed, I’m starting to realize that our shared fear of our death here is what’s always kept us from finally realizing what these lives are and why we’re here living them.

Because, as the promise is that this world is passing away, the goal then of this life is for our to find the humble audacity to rid ourselves of our fascination with it before it’s all taken. It’s to die again and again to all that cannot come if we’re to live forever with Him. It’s to take up our crosses and nail daily to them all the losses of all the things we’ve learned to love and hoped to have as we slowly learn that all we’ve had is but a love for all that will be lost.

For nothing here is meant to last.

Alas it takes the strangeness of this faith to help us find the courage to consider it all as already lost.

Thankfully He’s amazingly patient. Unfortunately we’re impossibly slow.

And time waits for no one.

What then are we still waiting for? What more are still we wanting? For what else are we still here searching, sifting through what are already ashes? Dust to dust, right? Why then are we doing any of all we’re doing in life? And, the greatest most horrific question ever asked, will it matter when our time has passed? Will anything of all we’re doing or any of the many reasons why mean anything, be worth anything when we’re not here?

We’ve been talking for a couple of days about how humanity has arguably sunk beneath the animals in terms of, well, everything. For we look upon a society that’s always so busy, always so worried, always so wearied from all of this working that all of us are doing for what are things and reasons that we may honestly not know why. That is this life! It’s become this time in which we’re all spread so thin and worried over so very much that all of our trust has come to be placed in dust.

For all that’s here is but dirt in various disguises.

Sure, some of it shines. Some of it sounds good. A whole bunch of it feels good. Plenty of it tastes good. We’ve all come to find a great deal of things that we think are in fact good. And indeed, there is good here for God has given us all the ability to enjoy, to appreciate, to differentiate the difference between good and bad, light and dark, life and death. And we’ve all been around enough of both sides of all those coins to find that there are those things that we enjoy or understand or appreciate more than others.

Problem is that, again, our fear of death has left us placing all of our hope-filled eggs into this basket that this is life that is passing.

Each egg filled with a hope had in something thus here where we are.

For now.

We always overlook the for now. Because we all overlook the draining nature of time. And we do that in this life because within so many days we’ve all come to find that it’s all still here. Everything from time to all the trophies we’ve won in how we’ve spent some of it, all the memories of all the tears we’ve cried having had to spent some of it in trial or torrent, all the trips we still plan to take and all the friendships we still think we’ve made, it’s all seemingly permanent because, well, it has been found or felt within every day we’ve had thus far.

But no matter how far this road called our life may go, the grave stands in the way saying it won’t go on forever.

And so, again I ask, what is it that we’re going after?

What are we living for? What are we looking for? What are we looking forward to? What more are we still trying to find? How much fuller need be our lives? How much better might be our lives were they emptier and there still emptying? What if we had the courage to consider less as being more? For, of all the more we’ve had thus far, how of much of it still means anything?

Or was the purpose perhaps only in the pursuit?

You see, that’s the dark side of discontentment. On the bright side it brings all these things into our lives that we learn to think we like and slowly then believe we might need to love as without them we come to contend that we might not be able to live. Indeed, discontentment allows for a great and ever-growing content in our lives, our hearts, their minds as the worldly versions of all those things have long proven always able to find more room for more stuff.

We love stuff!

But what I’ve personally come to find, as a recovering stuff-addict myself, is that it’s pretty much always been only the chase that I enjoyed. It’s the thrill of the hunt. It’s the flood of dopamine that rushes over us as we rush the doors on Black Friday. It’s the wonder held in what we’ll unhide thanks to a Saturday spent seeking garage-sale finds. It’s the endless awe won within scrolling for hours never knowing what the next 30-second video might show.

We get so high on things sold so low as to be given us all but free.

Sure, for some of them we need money as even such things as door-busters and yard sale discounts still deal in dollars and cents.

But that we too measure still meaning and value in dollars and cents seems to prove that we’ve lost all sense.

Because, again, what will any of it matter whenever we’re not here no more? It’s like that other passage in the Psalms posits for our perusal: “Surely everyone goes around like a mere phantom; in vain they rush about, heaping up wealth without knowing whose it will finally be.” Psalm 39:6

And indeed, we do all seem as if but ghosts who are one moment here and the next moment gone as we’ve got only so much time in the day in which to waste ourselves worrying ourselves about winning unto ourselves all that will itself be sold one day in a yard sale by those who are still here after we’ve gone and don’t find themselves the same interest or worth within whatever we have, do, will.

My question is how much longer will we continue to put so much meaning in things so fleeting? How many more of our few remaining days will we give unto that same chasing after the wind that everyone else is trying to catch? When might we ever see that we’re again but dogs down here playing fetch with what are our own bones that we ourselves continue to throw at anything that anyone might even accidently hint we might should want?

As always, I’m as guilty of all this as anyone else. For I too have spent a good deal of my life dealing away my life to deals I’ve found and more I’d still like. I’ve given so much time and intention, thus so much of my attention, to what have always proven things not worth what all I lost to get them. Just yesterday I had a conversation with she who is basically, in a manner of speaking at least, my one remaining friend and it left me realizing that I never had all that many to begin with.

And that despite all those years spent in that stent of my trying to be everything to everyone.

Only to still watch everyone walk away.

For they were all but ghosts, strangers in waiting as I prefer now to refer them. They were always destined to drift away, or maybe it was me who did. Don’t know. Doesn’t matter.

It’s meaningless.

For there’s no meaning in the past.

Probably little in the present.

Will there be any when we’ve passed past the present?

Only if we don’t continue to spend the present seeking presents such as pride and preference as those things are too meaningless. They change constantly. We change constantly. We all die daily!

And we’re doing so living for so much that we don’t see it.

We don’t want to see that so much of all we do is meaningless. We don’t want to imagine that all we have or trying still be found one day, hopefully soon, having is without any reason. We can’t fathom that all of this is fading.

For we’ve all been told to live in the moment, a goal given in that one of them will be our last.

Which one?

The fact that we literally can’t know should inspire us to stop going so hard for things that we likewise can’t prove will matter whenever it comes.

What does matter though?

That we know Christ. That we show we do in how we live our lives. That we love those He gives us to love. That we agree to lose all He’s told us will be left. That we don’t let our left hand know what our right is doing. That we do all things unto the glory of the Son. That we stand in the gap and proclaim the Good News. That we give our hearts to the hope that the best news is that He’s coming back soon. That we spend these lives practicing to die so that when the real deal finally gets under way we can then and there stand to say that we’re ready to make it through to whatever, wherever that road leads us to.

Can we say that? That we’re ready to leave everything behind? That we’re good with how we’ve lived our lives? That we’ve loved those around us more than ourselves? That we’ve given more to the poor than we’ve tried to grab for ourselves? That we’ve come to appreciate the gravity found in agreeing that less really is more, that one friend from long ago coming back into your life means more than all the gold in all the world?

For how much is a second chance worth?

And considering we’ve all been given one, why then are we still wasting it, missing it worrying about all this other nonsense beside it?

I too have witnessed enough of what’s done under the sun and I can say that it is never enough. Everything here leaves us wanting only more. Just like Jesus said it would!

“Whoever drinks from this well will thirst again.”

I’m tired of being thirsty friends! Tired of filling my life with things that can and will be lost again. I’m tired from all the things I’ve tried for. For no matter how many I’ve won, none of them matter now.

All that I have left is but this faith and a few more days to try my best to uphold it the best I can.

Anything else is only everything less.

And I myself have caught up just enough of all the wind we’ve all tried to find to say for sure that it’s best left lost.

For whoever wishes to be wise must first become a fool to this world in which wisdom isn’t.

Rather all that’s here is the wind we can only hear.

And that for only now.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold