Day 4201 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ecclesiastes 1:18 NIV

The depression in progression

Perhaps it’s something that only those who fail to progress properly are promised to find as they feel their mind both grow and slow as they come to know what is the more they’ll only come to wish they didn’t. And indeed, I believe that all of us have experienced that feeling, that reeling in which we’re standing there seeing something that we’ve just recently learned more about only become something we’re unsure about because of what we’ve learned about it.

Wishing that we didn’t know now what we hadn’t known before.

And it’s an altogether odd experience to experience, this realization that you’ve learned something that you both wish you didn’t have to know but also know you can’t unknow. Because that there is no way to unsee something, to unfeel some way, to take back the prior ignorance you had, it leaves you with a burden you can’t escape. It doesn’t go away.

That’s why God asked them to stay away from that tree.

It’s because knowledge can hinder, hamper, harm or hassle a belief up until the point in which we find that we maybe can’t see any more reason to believe. Indeed, knowledge, understanding it for what it is as is shown in the truth of the matter being known, it leaves one forever unable to recover the innocence of the unknown.

How’s that for something you probably haven’t ever thought about?

The innocence of the unknown.

For such, whenever it does, gives way to only to the corruption of the known as knowledge changes they who know it. Now granted, in many ways and at many times this change is positive, it’s progressive, it’s a matter of importance even. For example children are these days systematically rushed off to learning as young as 3 or 4 in order to begin their being taught those things which our cultures or societies have determined they’ll likely need to know or at the very least become cognizant of if they’re to become productive members of said society or culture.

We call it school and for the most part we most of us mostly agree that it’s a good thing as we generally do want always that which is hopefully best for those are tasked with taking over the world next.

And so this schooling, this learning, this instruction introduced unto our collective youth corrupts their former ignorance as to such things as reading and writing and the worlds of mathematics and scientific equations and facts. It hands them things, thoughts, theories (and too the ability to better think about things and theorize why they are what they are and why we need them to be either only that or rather perhaps something altogether other) that they didn’t have just prior.

It changes them. It molds them. It holds them in a hopefully productive and positive eagerness to use this opportunity to learn and grow in what we all hope is only always the best of ways.

But it isn’t, is it?

For not all knowledge is good. Because not all truth is hopeful. Because parts of reality as we’ve tainted it have forced upon us a realization as the decay within us.

And that’s the part that’s hard to know.

It’s hard to see what we’ve become. It’s painful to watch much of what happens in this place. It might even tear the heart to look unto the face of one who’s been hurt or harmed or all but left for dead within the common dread of a people so diluted and deluded as to do so much that some of us can only wish we didn’t know was being done.

And what’s fun is that this detractory side of life as we all sadly come to find in one way or a million others comes at us in forms and fashions and functions that may even find our failure to understand or comprehend or agree with the masses who mostly find whatever the topic or turmoil to be to be just fine.

It’s like football. I personally used to love watching it, even played a bit back in school. I wasn’t much good but I had fun trying what was, yes, was a sport that I truly enjoyed watching the pros play back in my younger days. Back before I learned of all the cancers hidden behind the cameras. Back before I heard of all the controversies and arrest records. Back before I understood the egotistical side of man and how it could sometimes inspire them to think they’re both above the law and thus able to do things which ought to be beneath human consideration.

Yes, I loved watching football until such time as realized that these days it seems as much a league of felons as it does something inspiring for fans.

Unless said fans wish to themselves become felons, in which case the world of professional athletics has plenty of shining examples of folks to look up to who know well how to break the law and do other such nefarious activities off the field.

I for one rather believe that we should all be a bit more able to control ourselves and there hold ourselves accountable to, if no one else, at least ourselves.

Because I’ve personally learned and thus come to know the horrors found if and when we don’t.

For such is what some knowledge not merely allows but altogether insists upon.

Such as my growing still in the knowledge of the Gospel and my endless search for why He’d die for someone such as me. It’s caused me to take an honest account of me. To sit with the reality of all I’ve done that’s caused me to become whoever it is that I both am and too that part I wish not remain. For again, with knowledge comes change. And when the change is met in salvation, forgiveness, mercy and the hope of Heaven itself, well, the knowledge required beforehand is that met within our coming to understand what all we need His mercy and forgiveness for.

And those are things to know about ourselves.

For the more we learn about ourselves and what all we’ve allowed them to become, and that learned alongside an equaled desire to learn more of Him, from Him from whom said salvation comes, it all rather quickly amounts to seeing but a mortal enemy in any mirror.

Indeed, there’ve come times in my life, many of them and they still increasing at times, in which I’ve looked up to find that the person I saw wasn’t the man I wanted to be. I learned of the negative aspects of my failures to be the better that I wanted to be. I could almost literally see a monster living inside of me thanks to all the things I’d done without thinking about them, reconsidering them, second guessing them.

All things I didn’t do because I thought I knew better and thus didn’t need to.

Which is a choice that leads more often than not to the horror of hindsight showing us the sum of our life alongside a wonder as to what all might have gone better had we done better than our newfound humility met in our humiliation has helped us to see.

For if seeing is believing then my seeing my past through eyes opened to and through the truth has left me believing that I am perfectly undeserving of anything good I may have in my life.

Because I know now, and learn still every day, of so very many things that I have done which were not right to do. And this knowledge of my mistakes has inside of me became a kind of grief, a kind of shame that I worry will be forever attached to my name. Not because I don’t believe that He can forgive because I know He can. I know He has. I know He will.

I just personally don’t know how.

I haven’t learned that part yet. I don’t understand it as of now. I both can’t comprehend why He would be so good to me considering I know now how pathetic so many of my choices have since proven to be but nor, having come to see so very many of my past choices as so pathetic and pitiable as I now know them to be, I myself cannot understand, do not know how to forgive myself.

Thankfully His ways are higher and thus His forgiveness undeniably more able than mine.

But even that I still struggle with sometimes.

And that’s because I still find both in my life and in those of those living around me the sight and sound and feel of so many things which shouldn’t be what they so clearly are. This is the grief that only knowledge can bring. It opens our eyes to seeing things for what they are, and sadly, many things here aren’t what they should be. In fact I think it fairly arguable that most things here aren’t what they should be. The life we live, the sights we see, the sounds we hear and the things we fear, many of them shouldn’t be there.

I personally feel as if we shouldn’t be here but that rather we were created to be elsewhere and are thus just here passing through what is a life in which we all learn and grow and thus come to know the lay of life as man has continually chosen to live it.

And that for hopefully the humble honesty to admit that as men we are, so too are we very little of what we should be.

This is the sorrow.

It’s met within our seeing so much of a decaying world having been invited inside our minds, our eyes, our ears, our hearts. It’s realizing that the darkness around us has been granted access to those parts and places which drive us. It’s coming to see the people we’ve come to be and grappling with the understanding that both where we’re standing as who we are, having come to stand where we are as a direct result of choices we made on our own, it’s simply not what nor where we ever wanted to be.

And no, it’s not about hopes. Has nothing to do with dreams.

If anything it’s an understanding that even our hopes and dreams are anymore more often than not only for mere things that this world has to offer and thus will continue to insist we might need.

And it’s this sampling of this world’s many things that brings with it a knowledge of things that we may one day only wish we never knew. For this world offers us so much that’s so morally twisted and perfectly corrupt that, should we allow it in, it will only inevitably mess us up in what are ways that we may never know it has.

Blessed are those who are helped to know how messed up they are as those who are well never there seek the healing they don’t know they need thinking they needn’t any.

But the broken, the lost, the hurting, those harmed by life here be thanks to how they’ve lived their own or rather how another’s living of theirs has negatively impacted their own, those are they who seek for the something better that only healing can bring.

Problem is that such things as sorrow and grief don’t really ever fully heal down here. Rather they exist as something of constant companions once you know them there. Maybe there does come a time in which you finally manage to forget your mistakes. Perhaps there shall come a day within our lives within this place in which we’ll make peace with those parts of our pasts that only went bad.

I just personally haven’t found it yet.

Rather I sit here still well aware of so many mistakes I’ve made. So many words I’ve said that I wish didn’t say. Perhaps even more that I now wish I did. Plenty of things I now know I shouldn’t have done and that alongside some that I didn’t do but would have done if I’d have known then what I’ve come to know since.

That’s the progress.

It’s one won within knowledge and understanding both serving to help us know and understand more and more as we go along toward wherever this life is headed. The hope is that it’s to someplace better and too our being better by the time we get there so that we’re found welcomeable unto wherever we’ve the chance to go.

But the more you come to know about the person you’ve come to be and the more you unfortunately have to see of what this world been allowed to become, well, the more you wrestle with how or why anyone would welcome us anywhere.

The grandest example of this with which we wrestle being that found in faith as, well, why would God (who at first warned us against our coming to know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong and then endured watching us come to learn what He knew we shouldn’t know, as with knowledge comes responsibility) welcome us now having watched us from then onward shirk said responsibility to the point in which our sins have become so many that He sent His Son to die for us so that we might dare turn from them and live again for Him?

Because He’s watched it with the understanding that wide remains the road and many will stay thereon toward their own promised destruction as they think it better to do this their way than to humble themselves unto upholding His will.

Yes, God knows already the remaining number of sins we’ll all commit against Him.

And yet we don’t know how much more He’s willing to take of having to watch us do this our way.

If only we knew where our way went.

Promise is one day we will. Problem is that we seem perfectly adamant to keep pushing that day back and back and further away. Why? Because we don’t want to admit that we already know. We don’t want to admit that we’ve made a complete mess of this. We don’t want to be found in agreeance with anything said or done by the Christ who the world has convinced us is somehow against us, a folly they’ve so fallen for simply because He asks us to stop being the idiots who continue choosing death over life.

Indeed, we don’t want to admit we know that we all deserve to die thanks to how we know we’ve come to misuse these lives.

And so many go ahead pretending they don’t know. That they can’t see. That there’s nothing of such things as immorality or depravity to worry themselves over. That the life we know as is one lived doing only as we please, that it costs nothing and thus owes nothing either.

The horror is realized in coming to know not only what you owe for having been loaned this life but just how unable you are to pay said debt as a life’s death is the only satisfactory settlement thanks to all the sin found within it.

Yes, coming to know that you are in fact a sinner is one of the more miserable understandings that you could ever imagine. And once there, having then your eyes opened to more that is sinful, to more that is wicked, to a greater realization as to the amount of things wrong in and of and with this world, it’s misery compounded.

Because the more you know about what’s been done to life down here and the world in which we live it and that much has forced others to become victims, it literally all but tears you limb from limb.

There are still days in which I avoid looking in the mirror as I cannot tolerate the truth of the monster looking back.

Because I know what I’ve done. I’ve come to learn of so many mistakes I’ve made. And too I’m often grieved by the wonder as what all I could have done better, what all would have gone better had I done better. I wonder as to the pain I’ve caused others. I worry of the disappointment I still bring those around me. I realize that so many times my eyes still see through pride, my life still lived in sin.

And I hate it.

All because the more you come to know the more you know you don’t about all that you’ve done and didn’t do. You learn about all you wish you could change and just how little you can. You look around at a world suffering in sin and try to find ways to break through their grin worn as they do. You understand the gravity of what’s coming and that no matter what you try or how loudly you yell, how much you cry, it probably won’t matter.

It’s like this. I sit here for hours every morning, far earlier than I’d like to be up, writing these posts in some mix of hope that they might help to inspire somebody alongside a realization that nobody ever really reads them and thus the hope of them helping is all but impossible.

I know that this work is likely to accomplish little.

But what else am I to do with what I’ve come to know?

Because the grief of it all is too heavy to carry alone. The misery, the shame, the regret, they’re all things that I’ve met that I pray I can prevent others from coming to know. I want so badly for this world to be so better. But I also know that it won’t agree to be. I know that many here will go on denying God and thus rejecting His call to live upright and righteous lives.

And I know that things will get only worse here because of it.

And that sucks to know. Indeed, I wish I didn’t know what all was coming. I wish I couldn’t see the way things have come to be. I wish I could unhear the horrors known around me. I wish I could unmake all the mistakes I’ve made both behind and within me.

But I know I can’t because you can’t unlearn something. You can’t unsee something. Rather knowledge and understanding are permanent once you’ve found them.

And they both corrupt you.

They change you.

They cause you to want to change, to want to leave. Yes, I want to leave this world. And yeah, those around me often think of me as a rather miserable person who seems to hate everything and who exists then in some kind of perfect unhappiness that they simply can’t understand.

I get it.

I can see how I seem so miserable sometimes. It’s because of what I know.

And that there’s plenty I don’t.

No, I don’t know why things are the way they are and I do know that most of them shouldn’t be what they are. For I’ve learned that knowledge and understanding only exist in truth and that the truth says that we’re a fallen people who are thus destined for the grave and deserving of staying dead once there.

But I also know a hope that says there’s another Way.

Don’t know Him well enough I fear.

But thankfully my sorrow and shame and grief and regret are inspiring me always closer. And so when the world doesn’t understand the misery they see in me, it’s okay because I believe that this path isn’t meant to be easy or comfy or even able to be understood.

It’s meant to make us better.

And of that we know too little.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold