Day 4231 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Matthew 25:38 NIV

Invisible opportunities

And they to entertain angels unawares. And that because not everything here is as it seems as even those things that we might find normal or common or perhaps even boring may be in truth divine chances to help us both see and show who we really are unto whomever may or may not be watching, listening, learning about us through whatever we say or think or do. Indeed, what if I told you that everything we’ve ever done mattered more than might have been able to imagine?

Might that cause us to imagine harder?

To believe bigger?

To try better?

To be better?

What if we did try to live this life as if this world were just a great big stadium filled with all of the thousands of people we’ll meet along the way out, each of whom is placed in our path as something of a road map in which we glean from them something gained only should they gain from us something given? What all might we give if we were of the faith to believe that everyone around us was something of a testament unto our performance in this test that is life?

Not that God needs any more information in regard to who we are than He already has as He already knows those who are His from the many more who’ll simply never care to be. But indeed, what if we dared to dream that we might show Him something other than whatever it’s been that we already have? What if we spent our days looking forward to anything that gave us in any way any chance that we could possibly take to show both the world that we’re His and Him that we’re honored to be?

What all might change for the better if we were better able to believe that everyone around us was truly a child of God and thus our true brother or sister?

Sure, we’d still have our little fights and arguments as, hey, we’re all flawed and thus fallible humans who are all collectively down here with at best no foggy idea what we’re doing. Indeed we’d all still see things in different ways, probably even still see just different things. We are all individual individuals trying our best to squeeze the best both out of life and thus out of us. And we all do that in different ways because even the idea of best means something different to each of us.

But still, if at the end of the day we were of the ability to see that we all both came from the same beginning and will, here at least, reach the same ending, then maybe all of this here in the middle might be a little better handled were we to imagine that everyone we came into contact with was truly an angel sent to see where we are along the way to where the Way said we could come.

For shouldn’t that hope that is that home that is called Heaven be so amazing that we did truly want it for everyone?

Do those around you know that you do?

Do they even see in you a hope that you’ve found to be yourself found there someday?

Do any of us do anything as if everything is God’s way of seeing, measuring our progress in such things as kindness and generosity and mercy and compassion?

When’s the last time you did something just to help someone without any thought as to what was in it for you but rather every thought given to what all you could do to just simply help them out?

Sad truth is that I don’t think we think that way all that much anymore. Instead it seems I’ve probably arisen to what is but one more day spent walking in the very same place in which I went to sleep yesterday. And I say probably because, as always, I’m up earlier than everyone around me and I’ve not left my little corner of the house yet and so, who knows, I might walk out of my bedroom here in an hour or so after I’ve finished up this post and find that the world’s changed entirely from the one I knew yesterday.

But I doubt it.

Rather I imagine that in that hour or so I’ll walk out of my door only to find everything exactly as we left it last night. And that’s because, despite all of our advancements and progressions and algorithms, the truth is that there remains to this day still nothing new under the sun.

Problem is that we should all be in the process of being made new now that we’re all under the Son.

And the worry is that, well, if we are we’re sure not seeing all that many signs!

If anything it seems to me that most things, and sadly most folks, are only getting worse all the time. And that it seems as if everyone is getting more detached from one another, distracted from caring about others, disinterested in upholding any of the many invisible opportunities we’re given to stop letting such things as love and light remain themselves so hard to find, well, this seems to say that we’re failing the test.

What test?

That we’re taking every single day in which we take a breath in this place and that in regard to who we are as is to be one day defined by what we believe and that proven in whatever we did or didn’t in light of it.

I really do believe that this life we live is truly a test that we’re all here taking in which God’s just trying to help us see both who we are and who He is and whyever it is that the two have become so very different. Because I also believe that it shouldn’t have ever been this way. Rather I agree with the Scriptures which say that all of this, and too all of us, it all started in a Garden in which they were but two who God had created and that to simply bask in the beautiful bounty that was, is and will forever remain His goodness.

A goodness which was also woven into us when He knit us together within the wombs of our mothers. Indeed, within His Word we can literally read that “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” It’s right there in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Which, as with all of Paul’s letters which make up a good portion of the New Testament, was written to inspire those to whom they were written and sent and delivered and read, was done unto the hope of calling those who received them back to the basics of this faith we all claim to believe in.

What are those basics?

Well, Jesus even helped us in regard to that one too!

“’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37-40

See the simplicity? Love God and love others. And He even said that not only does the doing of these two accomplish the Law and the Prophets but they’re both so alike that we can even do them at the very same time! How? Because, well, if we love God then we’d love those who too are from God, which, last I checked, considering how He created each of us and it’s His breath of life that’s coursing through our lungs every time we breathe, that’s all of us. And too, in another passage elsewhere we read that those who love those around them are then clearly of God as God is love.

Indeed, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” 1 John 4:7-8

What then are we to make of all this hate? Of all this division? Of all of our common disinterest in doing anything for anyone else? Truly, I walk around this world anymore and see nothing but a sea of people sunken inside themselves, mostly seen inside their having been sewn to screens that show them things perfectly catered unto the inherent selfishness that we all managed to inherit from those first of us who couldn’t refuse themselves the same offer that the devil still offers.

Truly, down here we each now live as if really gods thanks to what are kingdoms contained in cell phones that hold now the ability to be our everything, even offering us companionship via artificial intelligence.

Yes, we’ve become so bored with real life, actual intelligence and the necessarily strained and here endless search therefor, there toward, that we’ve opted to turn our attention and even adoration to that which is but a fake replacement.

Each of us leading lives following algorithms designed only to keep us where we are which is as a people lost and losing so much more every single that we let slip by without asking our eyes to look up from ourselves and seek for someone else that we might do something for.

Our every life has been allowed to revolve around we who’re living it for so long now that we know not how to do anything else but rather only everything for always ourselves.

And thanks to that having so clearly become the case, yes, every single day we thereby agree to waste basically every chance we have to show anyone who might be watching anything about whatever it may be that we believe in.

Friends, don’t we get that we’re but billboards? We’re nothing but walking, talking, living, breathing reflections of what we believe. And that’s because everything we do, every single word we say, every thought we think, it all combines into what becomes an entire life in which our every choice is always chosen based upon what we believe in. And that because our faith cannot help but direct us.

No matter what that faith is placed in.

Problem is that, again, our faith has been poured into ourselves alone within this hope that we might really be here to look out for only ourselves and thus put ourselves first and thus eventually just forget about everyone else and never once give any care as to whatever they might be going through or in need of.

Sound familiar?

It should because, well, here we are!

We’ve allowed this place to become the home of what are about 8.3 billion different worlds, each with the population of one.

It’s all just always us. I’ve always been all that mattered to me. You’ve always been all that’s mattered to you. Thus you haven’t mattered to me and you probably don’t even know that I’m here. This is the life we’ve settled for. This is the existence that many are fighting for, designing toward, hoping toward.

Why?

What do we really stand to gain by each of us fading away into ourselves? What do we benefit by taking all that we believe in and burying it in these backyards that are our hearts? What do we have in the way of any chance to make anything ever any better whenever all of life remains all about us and our hording always whatever we have and worrying only ever about all that still we want?

What more do we need than to simply agree to be they who He created us to have been all along?

I’m tired of trying to be anything, everything other than God’s child. I’m tired from all of this trying I’ve spent my life trying as so much of it has only mattered to me and that for but a moment. I’m tired of believing in this idea that life has so much more to do with me than it could ever have to do with those who are around me.

There’s more of them than there are of me!

And so, even in terms of simple mathematics, how can they not matter more than me considering how they are more than me?

Friends, again, this world is holding somewhere around 8,000,000,000 people.

I’m only one of them. That means that in this life, at least as we’ve lived it, we’re saying that we all alone and always by ourselves, that our 1 is more important than their 7,999,999,999.

How is that possible?

It isn’t. We’ve just all managed to forget that fact because, well, we’re really good at ignoring pretty much everything that we don’t want to be responsible for. And, thanks to that outlook having become so shared among us, we now walk in what is a world in which we ignore everyone around us. All because we’ve all become of the ability to see everyone else who has a need as something of a threat to our having all the more that still we want.

I hate that world. That one in which I’m the only one who matters. Trust me, I’ve just recently realized that I’ve, at least slightly, slipped back into spending entirely too much time thinking all about me.

It’s boring. It’s literally the very definition of self-limiting in that it’s literally me limiting my life to focusing only on myself.

And, well, there’s only so much I can do for me.

But for the 7,999,999,999 around me?

Well isn’t that but 7,999,999,999 opportunities to help? To encourage? To inspire? To love? To literally do anything that might in any way show forth anything of all that Jesus was and is and remains?

Friends, that’s why we’re here! It’s for us to at first find that He’s found us and then, once that fact has managed to change everything, as it should, to thus be found in what then are lives changed in which we seek still to do good but now not just for ourselves. No, the example we have in Christ is one of giving, of sacrifice, of surrender and that literally of a life!

He held nothing back.

Why then do we?

Again, I believe that this life in all of its entirety is entirely nothing but a great big test that we’re given in which we’re given the chance to figure out what it is that we believe and to then spend the rest of the time that we have doing things based in and/or on that belief. And that because, as 3 Doors Down said it best, “My friend, this life we live, it's not what we have. It's what we believe in.”

Sadly we’ve all gotten that so entirely backwards that all but all of life as we’ve all come to live it has become all about all we have. Or all we want. Or all we think, and how even our every thought is more often than not only about ourselves.

I guess my point is that my faith teaches me that one day we’re all going to be found standing, kneeling before the God of Heaven and on that day He isn’t going to ask us what all we did to make sure our lives here were better, that we were taken care of, that we were provided for. And I don’t think He’s going to ask that because, well, that was never the freaking point! And I know that because He’s the One who has promised to take care of us, to provide for us, to have ensured all this time that all our lives have gone far better than we sinners ever deserved.

No, He has made us and thus too our lives what are but cups which He continues to fill and overflow all so that we’ve in us, of us, around us and about us more than enough to share with those beside us.

We are here to be His hands and feet carrying His light and the truth of His life and how it promises all of us the hope of eternal life unto all of those who may not know that we have that hope.

What are we doing to let them know?

And, well, how is it that we can think we’re doing anything when almost everything we do is only done for us?

This life isn’t about us. Rather it will be one day measured by how little of us is left thanks to how much of us we gave away.

After all, our example in Christ shows us the same thing as He literally found eternal life only after giving away the life He had here on that cross. What makes us think that we should do anything any differently? No, He calls us to follow Him with crosses in tow so that we too can know what it’s like to give everything we have unto the hope of all that He is and all that He gives.

And what does He give?

Only immeasurable abilities to help those around us know more of Him as should be seen in us and that alongside equally innumerable opportunities to do just that.

How many more of them are we willing to miss simply because we’ve allowed them all to become invisible to us?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold