Day 4198 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ecclesiastes 1:15 NIV

What it is

Is what it shall be as there are things which simply cannot be anything other than whatever they are. And even this reality has managed to find a way to be, at least sometimes, agreed upon by humanity in that every now and then you’ll hear a man or a woman or perhaps it spoken even from the mouths of children that now common concession that it is what it is. It’s something of an agreement as to the impossibility of our changing anything about whatever something is or has become.

But for most of us that agreement is often spoken in something of shame as if a failure found only at what’s then the end of a certain period of time likely having been given trying to change inevitability’s mind.

And we sure do that a lot in life.

All of us find nearly every day here this desire to prove that we’re the ones who can do what reality, what logic, what simple and honest truth and mathematics say cannot be done. We want to be the one who proves otherwise. And indeed, this desire of our pride has led our eyes to seeing so many lies in regard to our own ability that we’ve all actually tried within our lives so many things that could never be anything other than impossible.

All of them simply because our pride and its ego have no idea how small we are nor how little then our every effort might prove to matter.

Indeed, this is something I think that I might be struggling with personally here lately. It’s something of a biting off more than you can chew. Yeah, I’m doing my best to chew what I’ve taken but what I find is that it’s taking all I can give and it just keeps standing there willing to take even what I’ve not available to offer. Because such is life. It’s this strange gap in eternity’s line in which time exists to challenge us to undertake what so often feels this necessity of proving just how much we can do while we have it.

Knowing deep down that one day we won’t offering always to inspire us to push further, try harder, do more than any aspect of life as it was created ever needed us to so imagine or expect might be needed of us. We’ve all of us come upon this shared misunderstanding in life in which our minds tell our lives that it’s all on us. That everyone is relying on us. That it’s our part to do it all, to prove it all, to carry it all, to know it all, to have it all, to be it all.

And sure, parts and portions of all those are in some ways true. For yes, we do have people who are trusting in us to help take care of them, children, widows, orphans. And yes, we do have things to carry through this life such as the light of Christ and the cross He shines best through. And yeah, there are things here that we do need, and things we do need to do in order to have them. Houses don’t build themselves and I’ve never witnessed a meal throw itself together and turn on the burner.

Life does ask us to be participants thereof.

But still, for all of us, what I think we’re all going to find out someday is that all along this way in which we’ve determined to live our lives so often allowing only pride to tell us what all we needed to do and might need to have is that we’ve ended up doing far more than we ever needed to, thus lost time that we could have, should have spent doing something else, and that that something else was walking in the humility that is arguably the greatest gift as is given us all in those things which exist in impossibility.

Indeed, I’ve come to believe that God has set certain things in the human heart to act as if carrots hung perpetually before us to at first inspire us to reach for them only to inevitably realize we cannot reach them. I think He does it to teach us humility. I believe that He allows us to imagine things that we cannot accomplish. I believe that He causes us to become convinced that we can do more than we really can.

Why?

Because He knows how stubborn we are, and, well, sometimes the only way to teach a stubborn person a lesson is to let them teach themselves through such things as fear, failure, exhaustion, frustration, disappointment, confusion, loss of time and the misuse of intuition. Truly, I think that, having learned most of life’s greater lessons the hard way, which is usually through such things as guilt and shame and regret, I think that He allows us to go off on all of our little adventures to and through arrogance so as to teach us what pride would never allow us to even consider we needed to learn.

For pride is what is always there telling us that we can. It’s something of this constant friend, or so we so often assume, that’s always standing there inspiring us to do, or at least try, so many things that we simply don’t need to in life. Pride is like that friend who always finds some way to goad you into doing something stupid, probably at least sometimes through mockery or belittling such as known in those playground bullies who kept calling us chickens until we finally agreed to show them we could climb the flagpole only to reach the top and find there only us so afraid that all of the sudden the fire trucks are screaming down the road to come and get us down.

Yeah, sure showed the bully, didn’t we?

Only problem is that pride is more the bully than the friend. And it’s our having all of us gotten that almost always backwards that’s left each of us up here on what are these pedestals upon which we’ve built ourselves so very high that we’ve all of us spent at least some part or portion of our lives thinking so very highly of ourselves that we know better how to push against the unmovable than we do to walk away from the unnecessary.

For in reality there is really nothing whatsoever to gain in climbing a flagpole.

But there’s a whole lot to lose in everyone getting to find out that you’re deathly afraid of heights as they learn through your tears and screaming.

Guess another of pride’s many problems is that it helps us to become pretty good at hiding the tears and keeping the screaming inside.

Anyway.

The point I’m trying to make is that our ego and the arrogance in which it’s always marinating has left all of mankind with this, what should be, infuriating lack of any real appreciation as to all of our inherent inability and limitation. We think that such things as weakness or fear or losing our hair is some sign that we’re failing at life. That we’re not good enough. That we’ve not done enough. That our lives themselves don’t measure up.

To what my friends?

What is this supreme example that we’re all aiming for that asks us to do it all, to be it all, to have it all, to know it all? Where is this ideal existence that we can witness? Who of us has truly managed to conquer everything? Who of us is able to understand everything? Who of us can count the drops of water it takes to make an ocean? Who among us knows the number of the trees in every forest? Is there any around us who are truly so far above or ahead of us that our lives should be given so often to our trying to be like them?

Who is them who has become they who we too should be as we can only become in doing all this stuff that we’re trying so hard to prove we can?

It sure isn’t God. For never once in His Word does He ask that we do everything on our own. In fact the whole act of His sending Christ to pay for our sins with His very own death was only done because we’d done so much on our own that we’d forgotten Him. Even way back at the very beginning He explicitly commanded us to stay away from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a request given us because He knew what would happen were we to ever come to know what He knew we couldn’t uphold.

For with more knowledge comes more responsibility to wield it well. And with an increase in responsibility comes an equal increase in effort or intellect demanded. And with an increased request for effort and intellect comes a higher demand placed upon we who are but a people of far more limitations and inabilities than we have wisdom and understanding.

Thus the more we seek to know the more likely we’ll find ourselves to be entirely unable to understand it all, to use it all, to take it all and make something better out of our lives.

For with more knowledge too comes more grief as the more we learn, the more we hear, the more we see the more we fail, the more we fear, the more we forget just how small we are.

And there is nothing more grievous than our having all of us forgotten God because we’d learned so much, done so much, achieved so much that we started agreeing that maybe arrogance has a point and we are fairly close to being like Him.

After all, that was the very lie that was told to Adam and Eve that inspired them to take from that tree what’s ever since been passed down to you and me who are now all born unto the burden of knowing right from wrong and still choosing entirely too often to not do what’s right. All because, having learned to think of ourselves as able, we’ve all of us taken it upon ourselves to define for ourselves, by ourselves whatever it is that we want right to be.

Right to the point in which there are here today those who think it not merely okay but commendable to kill babies, to mutilate children, to rape, pillage, steal, hurt, scare, ignore even those around us. Yes, we’re a society in which everyone is creating their own versions of right and wrong which always, ironically, manage to match up just perfectly with all of their ego and inabilities to stop being slaves to it.

Proving that we’d rather move the boundary stone than humble ourselves to staying on the right side of wrong.

How long can we afford to do this? How much further need we go toward what is that life in which we all know of all we can’t do, all we don’t want to do, and yet allowing those things to remain the things that we do anyway just to show we can?

Or try just to show we can.

Because, my friends, there are just certain things that cannot be done. Not that shouldn’t be done, though that’s definitely a point and probably a post as well as there are tons of things that we all do that simply shouldn’t be done. But there are simply things that cannot be done. And that no matter how hard we try nor how much time we give unto trying nor even however many other idiots we manage to coax into kicking against the goads along with us.

No matter what we do there are just some things that will never be done.

Doesn’t mean that many here won’t try to prove otherwise as, again, that’s pretty much the overall goal of life as far as our pride is concerned. For all of us have learned that idea that we could find a way. That we could count that which isn’t there. That we could find what nobody has ever found. That we could create a new sound or invent a new color or convince the world of a brand new word.

But try as we might, and as many will continue, there’s simply only so much we can do with all we’ve been given to try.

After all, all of us have only a limited amount of time with which to live this life.

Just how much of it do we really want to give unto doing the things that we simply don’t need to do? How much more of our time, our effort are we willing to lose to trying to prove that we can be the ones who at some point will have managed to have done what nobody else ever has? What is there left for us to accomplish? What achievement hasn’t mankind achieved?

And, of all the accomplishments we have achieved, how many of them still matter as much as they did back whenever someone did them for the first time?

You see, that’s the thing about life’s tendency to absorb everything into normality. Sure, when the Wright brothers took the skies it blew people’s minds. But nowadays millions of people are in the skies all the time. The wheel rocked the world as it made such things as rocks easier to move. The lightbulb changed lives as it extended the period of time that people could do things without night making it too dark, and dangerous, to try.

There have indeed come many amazing advancements and progressions and “inventions” that have left an indelible mark on the world and everyone who’s lived within it. But they were all things that were inevitably going to happen. They’re all things that God had ordained as being possible for people to do or make or see. All that is done down here under the sun is that which God allows us the ability and the opportunity to do.

Do we really think He’s going to let us do so very much, learn so very much, become so very much that we could rival Him?

We tried that friends!

Tower of Babel anybody?

Yeah, we got a little high on ourselves and determined amongst ourselves that we’d take all of our combined effort and ability and understanding and create for ourselves, by ourselves, this tower which would allow ourselves the opportunity to basically just climb our way to Heaven.

Problem is there is no “our way” to Heaven.

Bigger problem is that we’ve all listened to pride telling us all about ‘our way’ for so long that we’ve all come to believe otherwise.

Down here we’re all of us all about doing all of this our way. So much so that all of us have even, a time or two at least, considered these to be our lives. And, that lie, it’s caused us to become absolutely convinced that we can do within them anything we set our minds to.

You’ve probably heard that old adage too.

But you know where that one leads far more often than our ego would ever be willing to agree?

To our saying “it is what it is.”

I tried. Gave it my best. Did all I could but it is what it is. Couldn’t change it. Couldn’t fix it. Couldn’t find it.

It is what it is.

Friends, sometimes what it is is just lost. Sometimes it’s unknowable. Sometimes it’s entirely too dangerous to even need to be possible. Some things in life we don’t need to know, don’t need to do.

Think back about that fruit!

Can you imagine how much better, how much easier, how much kinder and compassionate and caring our lives would have been had we not been born of those who knew the difference between good and evil? Can you imagine not knowing evil? Not doing wrong? Not messing up, making mistakes, falling short or failing? What would that life had been like had we never known the responsibility borne in that difference between right and wrong, good and bad, dark and light?

Thing is that we’ll never know because humanity has always fallen for this idea that there’s somehow, somewhere something more for us to have, more for us to see, more for us to hear, more for us to be.

All things we seek for with what are our every inability and other such limitation coming along for the ride just waiting to prove the impossible side of life to a people of such pride that we think nothing is out of reach.

Friends, if nothing were out of our reach or outside of our understanding or beyond our ability then we’d never need to know nor thus learn anything about trusting in another. And if we never learn to trust in another then Jesus Christ cannot be our Lord and Savior because if we can do anything and everything that may ever need to be done, then we can save ourselves.

And indeed, as we speak there are those who are trying in vain to prove they’ve the ability, the brain to find a way to overcome the inevitably of death.

But nothing anyone does will ever change the fact that every life lived here will end.

And only in Him can we ever find the promise of our living life ever again.

How much longer do we really want to spend these lives wasting our time, our effort, our focus on this foolishness that finds all of us trying to do more, be more than we were ever created to be or do? Folks, God doesn’t need us to find a way to build a tower in order to reach Heaven.

He just needs us to take up our cross and agree that the only way there is through the loss of us.

And He gives us all these things that we can’t do, can’t figure out, can’t understand in order to help us come to terms with how small we are. Not to make us feel bad about ourselves but to help us help ourselves by getting over ourselves and learning the humility that allows us to look unto another who is far more capable than we could ever be.

We may all want to be the one to prove the impossible possible. But friends, isn’t it just as cool and equally impressive to be the one who doesn’t continue to fail and fall short and look like a fool for trying to do what mankind was never meant to?

Again, God’s proven already that He will not allow us to rival Him.

How much longer will we try to prove Him wrong?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold