Day 4208 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 23:5 NIV

Here tomorrow, gone today

Such is truly the way in which more things exist than we often care to consider within this world in which we wander not in wonder but rather within want for such worth as wealth and worry. Though, truth is we never really seem to worry about much other than wealth. And for it we worry so much that it can even begin to affect our health and heart and home as all the above can begin to feel left all alone as we’re off staying busy trying to build what can only break once we have.

A thought we clearly never care to consider either.

It’s kind of like that other which says that we can only lose whatever it is we have. Much like you can only fear becoming sad whenever you’re happy or worry you’ll be sick even as you feel well. And we think not about these things whilst we experience their other because the experiencing of that which is commonly considered good has for so long been our goal that whenever good we find, well, good we hold.

Almost to the point in which we either strangle it or allow it to strangle us.

And why do we do this? Why do we cling so tightly to all we’ve tried to find and hoped to feel? Well, because such is what you do with treasure. You treasure it. You enjoy it. You appreciate it for the ability and opportunity and entirely uplifted life that it offers you. This is the pursuit of wealth and why so very many remain here always gone within it. It’s because, as we talked about yesterday, wealth has a great way, a basically guaranteed way of making our lives here easier than if we had it not.

Only problem is that there indeed comes a day in which we’ll have it not. And that simply because whatever we do have is all that we can lose.

It’s sort of like how you can’t feel the horror of heartbreak if you’ve never at first fallen in love as breakups aren’t a worry of those already lonely. Much the same, becoming poor is only a worry of the wealthy as those already poor don’t need to fear their losing of what they don’t have to lose. And yet we all spend our lives lost in this lust for gain, for gold we trust, for trophies that rust, for plans that ruin us in ways that our assumptions would have never wanted to assume.

For we never want to assume the worst.

But the problem for this world and its way of life is that the worst is still to come.

And that because there again comes a day in which He’s promised that all will be changed. It’s going to be a day in which the last are first and the first thus last, those who’ve had will have not what all they’ve had whereas those who’ve had not will finally have what they’ve not. Crowns will be given to those considered fools as they’re taken from those who thought themselves kings and thus were unable to see themselves as fools.

Indeed, as we discussed just yesterday, the hungry will be satisfied while those long well-fed will have their fullness emptied.

For all will be changed.

The worry, at least as far as I alone can seem to measure it, is that despite a warning such as this given all of us so plainly as it was alas we don’t really do anything any differently on this side of it having been given.

Why?

Because we don’t want it. And we don’t want it because we don’t want to worry about it. We’re all rather busy down here building what are what we think are our lives. We are all spending so very much time working away upon the making of our way toward whatever it is that has become to us worth all the worry and work. And indeed, there’s nothing for which we won’t worry or work or walk so long as it promises, or even pretends to offer some passing semblance of, whatever it is that we believe wealth to be.

And indeed, wealth to everyone has become like everything else. For there is nothing in this world that we’ve not sought to redefine so as to ensure it align with what is again what we all consider our way of life. We’re even so bored with what we’ve already won and become that we’ve begun the audacity to begin redefining some things which can’t actually be different from what God created them to be.

What I mean is that they remain Adam and Eve, man and woman, one taken from the other and yet made entirely unique all the way from the top of their heads down to the chemicals which He chose to create that give each of us our own personal dna. Indeed, sadly people these days are even to the point in their losing of their minds, something done thinking they’ve found them inside all these altogether horrid ideas, that they’re trying on genders as one does clothes at a shop in the mall.

All because we’ve become completely convinced that we’re so wealthy in terms of what it is to know what it is to be who we are that we can afford to play around with other ideas that we’ve long wondered about and wanted to experience if we could.

For to some wealth is as easily had in thought as it is to others in dollars.

I myself consider myself wealthy in this way as within each day my mind never stops printing new currency that is thought and theory. My mind truly never stops thinking, wondering, learning or trying not to for a moment or two. It doesn’t shut off, nor even at night. And so, because of this, I personally find that there’s a wealth in thought just as much as there’s wealth in the money that’s brought so much of what all we’ve bought that unto others holds a deeper definition of wealth to them.

That’s the most common currency known amongst humanity. It’s something that indeed we all worry for and want more of. Money is what seemingly makes this world go round, or at least it helps make our lives easier, safer, vastly more comfortable as it continues spinning whether we’re poor or in plenty. But my point is that we can all understand money as it’s something that we’ve all sought to make and worried over whenever we’ve found we’ve not quite enough.

So, though my thoughts are worth more to me than money ever again can be, we’ll stick with money as the example of that which is far more fleeting than we might feel the need to imagine.

But truly, think of just how quickly money always go missing. Within this world in which we’re so surrounded with so much that asks that we pay to have it, to eat it, to wear it and share it, we each have to have both the ability to afford things alongside the willingness to want things. Now the willingness to want is perhaps the easiest thing for a person to do as we all know what it is to want something. We’ve all of us wanted an untold number of things across these years that we’ve been here.

And indeed, we’ve come to successfully have a great many of them.

How many of them have we still?

Another example if you will?

When I was kid, talking 15, 16, I, like most everyone else, at least in our country at that time, I wanted a new ride. Now, it didn’t have to be new to me as I knew we couldn’t afford such luxury as new vehicles. But still I wanted even one that was used but new to me because, well, I was tired of riding the bus and had reached that age reached by all of us where I was more than ready for my first taste of freedom found behind the wheel which brought me the ability to literally go wherever I wanted.

And I worked. And I saved. And I even took my share of the money received from an accident my family was in and used it all to win what was this want that I’d wanted so badly that I couldn’t barely stand the wait.

I don’t have that truck anymore.

Don’t have the one I had after it.

Don’t have the one I had after that.

Don’t have the fourth I had anymore either.

I’m literally down to zero-turn lawn mower as my main means of transportation, which honestly works rather well considering most of what I do is mow a whole bunch of lawns in our neighborhood.

But my point is that all that work, all that saving, all that trying and striving and hoping and buying, it all accomplished things that I once wanted so badly that I couldn’t bear the waiting and yet, since then, it’s all gone.

Was the time wasted?

The effort? The energy? The interest?

I don’t think so as I managed to accomplish what I’d hoped to. And the truth is that along the way my life changed to the point in which I didn’t need a truck anymore.

And yet, here I sit in what is a kind of life quite different again in which having a truck would make many things easier and probably even more successful seeing as how I’ve started a little business and my lawn mower moves entirely too slow to make it across town to mow the few I have that aren’t in our neighborhood.

And so I’m working and saving and trying and striving to get to that point in which I can again afford what will be a new-to-me luxury.

And this is something we all do daily. We pour ourselves into jobs we probably hate trying to earn money through a certain wage that we can then spend upon all those things that we thus trade our efforts and the hours within which we give them hoping we can afford having given them away as we have to that job we probably hate.

This is the life we’ve made.

It’s this existence in which we trade the literal fact of the fleeting nature of our existence for the substance of things that we cannot take with us, even most of which won’t continue with us for all that long along the way. Yes, we spend our every given day lost within this lust for wealth for with it we can afford what we want in life, of life, for life, from life.

And yet we never seem to even acknowledge the many things that we’ve wanted before, that we’ve literally worked for, waited for, wanted more than anything else we could imagine that have since then become but fading memories already taken to wing upon the winds of yesterday.

So many of our treasures have already tarnished, rusted, been then relegated, at best, to the garage, attic or basement from which we’ll one day retrieve them and free them to being the new-to-someone else treasure that they too think they’ll have found in what is a yard sale that we never see coming whenever we’re standing in the checkout line waiting to buy what we’ve convinced ourselves we just can’t live without.

And when we sell it to someone else for a few dollars we’ll find that we really could.

Question is how much stuff have we still that we still can’t imagine not having?

And, even better, will time care whether we can imagine it or not whenever eternity’s inevitability says it’s time for us to leave forever behind all that cannot come with us unto forever?

It’s quite the strange thing to think about. For again, I’m back in that place in my life in which I would like to have a truck. But I also know full well that there aren’t any ’87 Chevys in Heaven as, well, we’ll simply not need them. So am I wrong to want one? Is it wrong to think I could really use one? Is it an evil to have become so convinced as I sit that having one would make certain things far easier, safer for my dad come winter?

Maybe.

Is my wanting the wealth (to me) that is an ’87 Chevy the worst disappointment by which I’ve disappointed He who created me?

I doubt it.

But I think the whole point comes, as usual, down to the perspective that is our chosen priorities. What matters to us and why? What all do we want in our lives and why do we want it so badly as we might? Why do we do all that we do to have all that we have and, more importantly, is it worth it or just another example of our again chasing a wealth that’s pretty much already worthless? Will it mean anything five years from now?

Can it mean anything when, five years from now, we’re perhaps not here anymore?

See, I think that’s the kind of mindset that helps to keep me from wanting more than I should anything here. It’s that, again, I’m daily thinking so many thoughts that are mostly about the Word and my faith and my life and how to better make it all match up and work together. And these thoughts have bought for me an ability to watch my fear of death fade into a daily growing fascination with all that’s been promised us on the other side of that line in this life in which we will lose everything we’ve ever known.

That’s the change that He’s said is coming.

Problem is that most of us are still living most of the time as if it either isn’t or is at least so far off that we can afford to waste more of our time trying to find inside of this life whatever it is that we thus can’t imagine we’ll one day lose.

But friends, we can only lose whatever it is we find.

And, again, He’s pretty much promised that we will.

For in Scripture we can read that we all came naked from the grave and, despite our being buried in fancy suits or beautiful dresses inside ornate coffins in well-kept cemeteries, we’re all leaving here naked too as the clothes they dress us in will get back to dust well before our bodies do.

Point being that we ain’t taking anything with us whenever we go wherever we will.

Problem being that so long as we remain so worried as we all so clearly so often are about all of those things that can’t come with us, we’re thus neither worried nor likely even worrying about the question asked in regard to where we’re going.

All because whenever we’re asked where we’re going our answers here usually involve a trip to the store or a drive to the lake or vacation we’re saving up to take to break away from the jobs we hate to take the trip to that place that we’ll hopefully really enjoy for a week before we’ve to come back and spend the other 51 working away at the job we hate that allowed us to take the vacation we hopefully enjoyed away from it.

Again, as I mentioned yesterday, it’s all become this really strangely vicious cycle in which life here continues to revolve around what we have here to the point in which most of us are seemingly convinced that all of life is to be lived here.

But all those cemeteries say otherwise.

I wonder what all else those people buried within them wanted in this life that they didn’t find before they left. I wonder what came of all the things that they did find. Were they left to their kids? Did they have kids to leave it all to? Were they too busy working away to buy all their things that they never made time to find a husband or marry a wife? Where did their hopes go?

Just yesterday my family and I drove into town to help my sister find some new clothes for the first time in what feels like forever. And one of the places that we went to was the place in which I had my very first actual job. It was also the very same place that I drove at least two of my four trucks to while I worked there. Was the place where I asked a girl I worked with to junior prom. She said yes and we had fun, but that’s not the point.

The point is that it’s now a new store with a different name, a different layout, a different floorplan, an entirely different feel having been entirely remodeled and thus having all I remembered all but removed. In fact the only thing that felt familiar was the doors as they didn’t move those.

Everything else had changed.

Same of the place where I took my only girlfriend thus far on our first date, or well, her mom took us because we were far too young to drive. That Burger King is now a CVS pharmacy. The place I took my date to junior prom, which was just around the corner oddly enough, it’s been since bulldozed and all that remains is the sign that hasn’t lit up the night for over a decade now.

But all of those memories that I still have are wealth to me. They mean something to me. They’re still worth something. But all the places and faces with which I made them, they’re all gone.

I glanced at them all but for a moment or two more and then they vanished leaving only memories behind.

What else are we living to lose?

What all do we love so much that we can’t imagine we will lose it?

How much of our lives are we still giving to all things on this side of that line that He drew in the sand of time which says that all of life as we’ve known it cannot come any further with us?

Friends, one day everything we’ve ever known will be gone from around us. Even our families, something I consider my most valuable treasure, something that I truly hope God allows us the ability and opportunity to continue sharing in Heaven someday as I love these people far more than myself, one day they’ll either leave us behind whenever they leave here or we’ll leave them here when it’s our time to go.

Everything, everyone in this world we will lose or at least leave behind for a time.

Perhaps we’ll be best to have spent ourselves worrying only toward the wealth of what is the promise of Heaven being the forever home of all of those that we give our lives to trying all we can to make sure we get to meet again when we too have hopefully taken wings and flown away.

On that day when we leave behind all we ever had in life, a life in which so much of all we’ve already had is already gone.

For indeed, everything we have, know in this world will still be here tomorrow.

But what if we’re gone today?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold