Day 4229 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Matthew 25:34 NIV

The recompense

It’s a process through which one is compensated for what, at that moment, WAS a matter of loss or harm or hurt or hardship. It’s to make amends and thus to mend that thus which was been broken or battered or beaten, betrayed even. It’s to bring healing to they who’ve known suffering, solace to those sinking in shame, mercy to those melted in misery and freedom to those who’ve simply not known much of it along the way. And that to wherever it is that this road that we all call life may lead.

Which is hopefully toward that promised outcome in which once we’ve come out of this world then we finally get to enter our home and all the rest He’s said awaits within.

A rest that can only make sense should these lives be trying and difficult and worrisome and burdensome and, yes, even miserable. And that simply because one doesn’t rest, one cannot rest from that which is already easy. There’s no break to take from that which doesn’t break you. We can’t comprehend peace unless we’ve been to that place in which peace isn’t. Can’t experience healing until we’ve known enough hurt to appreciate the work it does nor the work done to ensure it possible.

That’s why we need these lives to be hard. We need them to be heavy. To be scary. To at times find us lonely, broken, worried, ashamed, afraid, uncertain. Indeed, we need to be confused so that Christ can come and cut through the confusion with what remains a call unto a faith known only unto a child. Yes, we need that which reminds us just how small we are, just how incapable we are, just how important it is that we are still able to believe.

An ability that is in many ways, and all of them sadly, seeming daily to wane.

Why?

Because this world considers it foolish to believe. We’re mocked and made fun of should we imagine things being better, bigger, brighter. No, this world wants only for us to agree to believe in only what we already see. To assume that this is as good as it gets. To accept that life itself is somehow meant to be best lived, best spent in this one place in which everyone who lives a life will lose it.

Yes, this world wants us to just settle for the inevitable loss of our lives, at best having spent them having plenty of fun and making plenty of friends and enjoying plenty of every other supposed and apparent win.

What is there to win within what’s been a world in which we’ve all known hurt and fear and worry and hurry and heartbreak? What are we to gain inside of this place in which parades are rained on and plans are turned on and we’re turned on and left alone to stay at home as we’re not invited to play in all the games unless and until we learn to do and agree to say whatever it is that the rest of the lost are looking to find, feel, hear, have?

What is there to have in a world that has this outlook on life that has many loving their ride on the wide simply because it allows them to have such passing prizes as fans, friends, followers and fun?

Don’t get me wrong, none of those are inherently bad, wicked or wrong.

Problem is that neither are they the inheritance that we should be so constantly looking for!

But yet we are. We’ve all spent a great portion of our lives jockeying for position upon some societal ladder in which you only really matter if either you know well how to flatter or your wallet’s so much fatter that you don’t need to as everyone else comes to you seeking to make you feel as special as all your money and success have already said you are.

Indeed, that is the grand scheme of basically everything did, done, wanted or won within this world!

We’ve become a people who want for nothing more, nothing else, nothing less than for everyone around us to come daily unto us and tell us all about how great we are. We want to hear only how wonderfully we’re living our lives. We want our every photo to be covered in likes and our every post to help us know what it’s like to be known.

And that by a world that refuses to know Him!

And why is that?

Because His life here was bad. It was hard. It was heavy, literally. The cross that He was made to carry is estimated to have weighed roughly 70-100 pounds. And He was made to carry it up that hill toward His hell after having been already stripped and beaten and bloodied and mocked all the while.

And He had to carry the emotional, the mental, the spiritual weight of knowing what He’d go through the whole time that He was here trying to get through to a people who would only come to Him whenever they needed something.

Because that’s who we are.

We’re a people who only seek help whenever we need it. And, well, we only ever think we need it whenever things have gotten so very bad that neither our ego nor our actual physical and/or mental ability, capacity can prove able to ignore it any longer. This is exactly why He calls all those who are here weary and heavily laden to come to Him seeking some rest, some shelter, some healing or hope or even something that we know not.

Just whatever it might be that He might have that might make our life here not quite so bad.

Things we can only ever seek should we agree that we are indeed weak, weary, worried.

Things we go out of our way to pretend we never are!

Why?

Because they make us look bad. They make us sound puny and pitiable to those who pretend they’re not the same things too. Yes, they make us seem as if we know only how to lose in what is a life in which everyone else always seeks to win.

They make us look like scared little kids who can’t handle the pressures of this life.

But friends, that’s alright because we can’t. We weren’t made to. And I say that because this life we now live isn’t the kind of life that He created us to live. Instead He created us in love and planted us in a Garden so peaceful and productive that our every need was promised. In Eden we needed nothing and knew to want the same as life there was so simple that we could just be whatever we once were.

Problem being that whole “once were” part. And that’s because this world isn’t the Garden as more here grows that knows more to oppose He who created it than there ever should have been and nor then do we ever seem to remember that we too were made for something better than whatever this is that we’ve all come to become.

All because it’s again considered childish to believe in better.

It’s even anymore frowned upon to consider that there might be more to have than this world can hold.

But friends, if we don’t believe in there being things that this world clearly can’t offer then what are we to make of the concept of peace? For that’s something clearly missing within most days spent inside this place. Or what of rest? That’s something else that we’re clearly missing, failing to find, forgetting how to feel thanks to this feeling we’ve all found that has us turning our lives upside down and inside out seeking for always only more ways to do only always more things.

All because we’ve all become completely convinced that life consists inside an abundance of anything this world can offer. And we’ve set our sails to seeking then always more of whatever this world offers thinking that if we just work hard we’d finally have more and then our peace, our hope, our rest would be closer.

And that because as a people we’ve come to consider such rewards as peace and hope and rest to wait for us in something we can either have or accomplish within what’s, again, the one place in which we’ll eventually lose everything.

Yes, this world has convinced us to spend our lives seeking for and storing up any and every treasure we can find inside of this life that time tells us we’ve less left to live than we had even yesterday.

We’re all running out of life and yet as troublesome as that ought to seem to most, no, no the majority of folks are spending their last remaining moments, minutes and memories seeking only for things that stay behind whenever we go wherever we will. And sure, as has become the common belief, maybe nothing happens when we die. Maybe it’s just a forever kind of sleep. Maybe there’s nowhere else for us to go, nothing more for us to see.

But friends, for what does that allow us to hope? Is hope truly such a foolish thing that we should seek it only in those places that are here only passingly guaranteed? Should we truly ask our hope, our joy, our excitement for life itself to be stored on shelves held inside stores stocked by people who, like us, are tired and worried and wearied by whatever this is that life’s come to become that’s caused us to become so willing to consider that there’s nothing more that ever might matter more than whatever it is that we can have in this place in which we rarely have any peace?

Why settle for this?

Why accept that our way of life is the best way of life? Why agree that this broken world is the best place for us to seek after something whole, something pure, something so very good that it knows nothing of bad?

Why is it a bad thing to believe that we’ve still a reward left to come whenever we’ve finally left to go to that place that we hope we can call home?

If not simply because that belief marches stoically against the conventional wisdom that has most here all but certain that all that matters is only whatever they’re doing that they hope will bring them but one more thing that they can have here that can’t bring happiness or hope, peace nor even purpose along with it. Indeed, this world considers faith to be childish because we’ve all forgotten what it’s like to be a child. We’ve forgotten the unhindered joy found endlessly in our imagination allowing us to not merely to believe we were cowboys or princesses or astronauts or broadway musicians but had us knowing we really were.

Yes, when we were kids we could fly. We could see so many animals in those clouds in the sky and as many mysteries painted amongst the stars at night. We believed that we could be anything, even knew what it was like to be happy. We knew what it was like to enjoy things, to appreciate them without even knowing let alone understanding what appreciation even was. We just lived life without all of the weight that’s been since added onto it.

Weights such as worry and pain and fear and shame. Worries found along the way to our thinking that our way of life is the only one that’s ever lived right despite all that still goes wrong, all that we’re still missing, all we’ve already lost. Such as our ability to imagine. Our ability to appreciate. Our ability to enjoy and be happy and believe.

I’m tired of missing those things. And no, I know the way the world is nowadays and so I know that such things aren’t coming back. I know that we can only know happiness fleeting and peace in pieces within this place.

That’s why I thank God for the ability to believe, the opportunity to believe in a place in which awaits all the good that I can’t seem to find here anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I look. I try every day, all the time to always find that which is good in both this place and those around me. But friends, it’s getting hard to see as this world’s just getting darker you see. This is a hard place to be! For here we have fear, we know failure, we find our own folly in so many mistakes and their memory. Indeed, we all know of such things as guilt and regret and how they’re always only met only after we’ve said, done, thought something we shouldn’t.

And we know the misery of knowing we can’t go back and do anything any different.

Again, why settle for such feelings as that, such realities as that?

How is that the best we can have?

No. I for one choose to believe, or perhaps rather have been chosen to be able to believe that the best of life is both behind and before. That life here was as good as it could have been way back when we were but a couple innocent people in a Garden completely unaware of anything other than all of the harmless beauty around us. And too that life will only ever be whatever it was always meant to be whenever we’re not here in what is a world that’s little if anything of all He had in mind.

Yes, I believe that one day we will find what is our every hope, joy, peace, prize and purpose and that they’ll all be waiting just beyond those words that to hear I personally yearn.

“Well done, good and faithful servant!”

“Come and share your master’s happiness.”

“Enter your rest.”

For, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” For, “Yes,” says the Spirit, “they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.”

And it all makes so much sense because this life we live is one in which we struggle to know rest, to feel happiness, to find good. Rather in this world we’re all increasingly tired and torn, weary and worn, worried over so many things and able to do so little about any of them. Life here is a battle! And yet it’s that which makes Heaven so hopeful!

It’s because He’s already told us that it’s a place unlike this world in every way. For there is promised there to be not even any more weeping or mourning or crying or pain or shame or hurt or harm or hurry or anything like them. Rather there’s promised to be there peace and joy and rest and all of them forever met for all of, well, forever.

Maybe I’m a fool for believing in something more than this world has to offer. Maybe I’m an idiot for hoping there’s more to life than all of this that we can already see and know and have and hold. Maybe it is childish to consider that we were made to inherit more than danger and disaster and division and deception and delusion and darkness.

Truth is that I don’t really care what this world thinks of me anymore because I know what I think of it.

And it’s much like what Paul says in Galatians 6:14:

“May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

All because of all I’ve found here, well, it seems that most of the good’s already gone to being but memories, the little good I still manage to find proves always only fleeting, most days find me feeling tired or alone or afraid or uncertain or, more often than any of the above, ashamed. And I’m tired of feeling those things. I’m tired of seeing others feel those things. I’m tired of knowing that those things are so much easier to find and feel than are such gifts as hope and happiness and peace and rest.

No, I know that we were made for more than this. I know there’s more to life than all we can here and now try to find. I know that there’s something better to feel than all the pain and strain and heartbreak we’ve felt.

This is not our inheritance.

This is rather just the furnace through which we have to go if we’re to know what peace and hope and joy and rest might really be whenever it may finally be that we’re finally found by them.

A promise we have because we were found by Him who came to lead the way home.

To be the Way home.

A home where everything will be finally and forever known as everything it was always meant to be.

A promise that’s getting all the time easier to believe thanks to so much of all we see only continuing to be and bring only fear and worry and doubt and shame. Friends, we weren’t meant for those things. Why settle for them?

Especially considering He’s promised us a place already prepared where they’re never to be known again?

Our recompense.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold