Day 4240 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 8:14 NIV

No escape

For where can you go to get away from what another knows you know? How might you outrun the One who goes before and behind? Where might you find a place to hide from He who sees the heart? How is it that we remain so convinced and easily so that we can somehow manage to together our lives hold that we know are falling so wonderfully apart? When could we start to just let it all fall if we knew that it would anyway and that upon a day of not our own choosing nor volition but rather in accord with His timing and provision?

What all would we see if we would simply agree to let this life be the misery it’s meant to be?

Alas so many days we give to trying our best to make things better both for us and around us and this makes sense from where we stand as, well, here we’re stood. We’re living lives that are mostly going good and so this allows easily that considering that with just a little planning and perhaps a bit of polishing our place here would be pretty much perfect. And, were we to accomplish this most arrogant of immediate assumption then so too would we need not the hope of hope anymore.

Because we’d have found upon this ground all that was good, a finding thereby alleviating the sense of yearning for something better, something more, somewhere else. I mean, if life at its best was here then where else would we need to look and upon whom other should we lean if it were really you and me who could manage to find it and that mostly right where we are already?

Thankfully life’s best isn’t here and that basically because we’re not at all good at living it.

Unfortunately that’s a truth that’s rarely bought by a people who believe otherwise.

Indeed, to our eyes, our ears, our minds, things down here seem pretty good. After all we all have a lot of fun and make a lot of friends and feel a lot of pleasure and find plenty of treasure, all of which combines so easily to agree with our estimation that we either are already or can be soon the ones who figure out whatever it is that we’re all here to do and commence then the doing of probably nothing other than that. For if we could find this life’s purpose and promise within this place in which we’ve been placed to live it, then, again, we’d need nothing else anywhere else nor from anyone else either.

My hope is that we don’t actually believe that in light of what is a world that is bad and getting worse all the time.

But my grip on reality as is seen among the scenes shown daily by society says otherwise. That people do really believe that they have really found already the best their life can be or at the very least are at least well on their way to the same outcome which they expect to arrive at any day now. And granted, I share a similar expectation as I too believe that so too shall I soon arrive upon what is the very best of life. Only difference is that I’m completely convinced that it’s neither here nor then in me but rather only in He who isn’t here anymore.

And that only because He left through a grave in which He gave us all the promise of our too going where He went whenever we too have entered therein.

Yet that remains the problem.

It’s always going to come back to that whole “dying to self” part. Because, well, all we seem to know of life is to live it for self. And again, this makes sense as we are here and that alive in what is a life in which we can and do continue to find so much that seems to us so good that it seems a counter productivity to refuse any of it. I mean who would do that? When given the opportunity to fulfill our ability to feel good and have fun and experience enjoyment and pursue the pleasure that promises it found so easily, so continuously, who would say no?

Especially when those asked to say no are the same as those who think they’ve either already found the very best of life right where they are and that in however it is that already they’re living it or as close as their next plan which we all continue making with always the express purpose of them proving so perfect that our lives become more of the same thanks to them doing so.

No, this is why He who is the Christ told us plain that it’s easier for a camel to line dance through the eye of a needle than for they who are here rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (paraphrasing obviously as I don’t think line dancing was a thing back then). It’s because those who’ve become rich and fed and fat upon the fame and fun and friendships and fortunes and filth and fabricated fornications of this firmament whose foundation is built daily only atop the same are the same as those who trust in those things to continue to prove what matters most in life.

We will all continue without question the doing, saying, thinking, buying, believing, being and/or becoming of those things that seem to us to be whatever good is.

Issue is, and will always remain, that good was never ours to define. Good is rather only ours to find and that only where He said it is. Jesus told us that there is only One who is good and that said good is God and He too has shown us what is good and that through the love of Jesus laying down His life to free us from all the enslavements to everything we ever thought good was. And He even told what’s now expected of us having seen before us what good really is.

And what does He ask?

“To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Acting and loving and walking all clearly simple ventures and vocations as they’re literally all things that we all do every day down here. Problem is to be proven in both the what’s and how’s in regard to all the above. And that mostly because what it seems we all love to love is mostly only us and that as is done in lives in which we sure act like that’s a smart thing to do despite all the dumb, wicked and wrong things we continue to do and that thanks to a walk that’s definitely more of an ongoing stumbling than anything and that due to all the traps and snares that we’ve actually managed to make Jesus seem.

Because He sure does seem to get always in our way, doesn’t He? What with all of His little riddles and all the confusing parables and all the humiliating requirements of such things as humility and honesty and generosity and they chosen over and opposed to those many things we’ve become convinced that we’re supposed to seek and say and be and have in this life in this world.

Yes, He is most certainly a burden because He becomes for everyone a stone that causes us to stumble as we rumble roughly around His Word, denying often the meaning and merit thereof. He’s a rock which makes us fall as He’s always found in our way of finding more of whatever it is that we’ve become convinced we need to have in this world in which we’re held as but then captives of commerce and culture. He’s a trap as He tries to help us see the better we can be and that only alongside the letting us remain whatever it is that we think is good only to always show us how wrong we were only after undoable things have been done.

And too a snare as, well, He’s made clear that He cares and that so much that no matter what we do inside this life nor how much fun or fame or fortune we find, we always continue to find that it’s never enough and that because we’re all now aware of what is His kind of love.

And nothing here can compete with that no matter how many try to find something to prove otherwise.

No, we’ll all be found agreeing someday that His way was the only way.

It’s just that that day comes at different times for all of us and, sadly, for most us it won’t come while we’re here but only after we’ve left and that for the place He’s gone to make ready a place for us but only one given to us should we have by then given Him all of us. Something that we can’t quite seem to figure out how to do because we’re all of us so spread amongst so many other plans and priorities and promises and pursuits that to narrow our lives down to focusing only on He who we can’t from here see sure seems only the best way to waste a life.

And we all know we’re not here to do that.

And yet every single day in which we continue to do anything outside of Him and without then an appreciation thereof, we do just that.

Don’t see it that way. Don’t know that we can without Him. Know in fact that without Him we can’t.

Why?

Because only He can give sight to the blind and yet He can only do so for those humble enough to see that they can’t see. And, well, that’s not us is it? No, we all see plenty well what is most days a life going quite the same. Plenty well. We see all the things we have, all the friends we’ve made, all the plans we make and the hopeful promises they offer. We see the things we love and those we like and those that still we try to find because we know we’d enjoy them too.

Yes, this world is full of abilities and opportunities and acknowledgements and accolades and achievements and trophies and triumphs and trinkets and toys, all of which offer so much unto a life that the continued amassing thereof seems the only right thing to we little girls and boys who continue to refuse to grow unto the point in which we learn to refuse those things which are but a fuse unto this life.

A fuse He will soon light unto the eternal explosion of everything we’ve lived here holding in both His place and thus in His way.

Indeed, He promises to return soon and that to gather those few who are His and that as He sorts them out through and from those still seeking for the praise of people and the pleasure of their person. Those who go on seated in the highest places and there receiving the highest honor. Those who enjoy being acknowledged by those impressed with them. Those who make their spectacles bigger and their performances more enjoyable. Those who continue seeking the pleasure of the flesh rather than the treasure of Heaven.

Yes, there are here so many snares and traps and things to make us stumble and fall that He too has become of the above all because we’ve come to embrace those versions of those things that this world offers us. We’ve traded all He is and did and does for the chance to be only what we are as is still defined by what we do in what is a life in which is done so much that we shouldn’t, but so much that we couldn’t imagine not doing seeing as how it’s become life to us.

Here sin is life as selfishness the same.

Jesus came to lead another way.

And everyone here will then continue to trip over His trap for however long it remains that we remain focused on this map that is this life that we live in this world that we have but for a time.

That’s the part that I don’t know any of us care to measure.

That all of this running that we’re doing only has us running out of time. And we don’t consider it because we’re instead focused on what all we have before us, beside us, behind us even. I myself get tripped up with that one pretty daily, thinking almost always about the life I’ve lived and how much better the days now gone seem to be when compared to these days that now I see. I miss the world I grew up in. Miss the friends I had, or at least thought I did. I miss the simplicity of not knowing all I do now and that in terms of both faith and thus then too our many failures and falls so short thereof.

Yeah, He keeps tripping me up by helping me up from what are all the settlings and excuses and memories and expectations that I continue to allow for in life.

A life that I still dare imagine going well and being easy and that as lived among a people friendly in a world helpful and whole.

I’m a dreamer, what can I say?

For I know this world’s not going that way as rather inside of every day I see a society only dissolving into screens and scenes shown thereon of a life we don’t live anymore. Of a love we don’t have anymore. Of a hope we don’t seek anymore. Of a home we never really sought to begin with because, well, our holy place is here. This world is our temple. Our gods are our stomachs and our faith is only to them fed.

And we never get fed up with it. We never grow tired of it. We never find the end of all the rest of everything good, fun, exciting that everyone around us is chasing after. We chase it too. We want it also. We crave it perhaps more than anyone else, at least our own personal measure of whatever all of this world’s treasure seems the most amazing to us.

Settling daily for dust not knowing that we’re but the same and thus our every faith as is placed in us or those like us will then keep us from doing anything that matters.

Because living a life to serve only dust is about as dumb as it gets.

Yet when you’re dumb you wouldn’t know it would you?

Problem is that we do and that because knowing of He who is good is inescapable. God had indeed shown Himself continuously in so many ways that we’re all now without excuse for these lives in which so many continue to refuse to turn and repent of and from the lives we’ve lived as if He weren’t there. We know He is. We might be good at hiding it, great at pretending we don’t.

But we know.

Because we know guilt. We’ve felt shame. We’ve experienced the emptiness to so many promises that we’ve made ourselves in regard to plans we’ve made ourselves for prizes we’ve tried to find for ourselves. We know that feeling of disappointment, of despair, of distance then from everything better. Thus we know what better is.

And yet we keep looking for it here.

Stumbling over Him every chance we get as we remain so convinced that His version of life cannot possibly be the one we’re meant to find, supposed to live, called to love.

He came here and died a quite miserable death and that upon a cross, a version of which He literally tells us that we’re now to carry if we’re to be someday found worthy of His admitting that He knew us.

We know this.

We know of Jesus.

But so often we live trying still to find any other possible way to live this life without the humility, the modesty, the kindness, the honesty that He calls us not merely to seek but in fact to be.

We don’t want to be what all He is because He is all we’re not.

But one day we will find that there is no life outside of Him. Problem is that many here will find this out at time runs out and they’re then left to feel it forever.

Yes, we will all know of life as it should have been lived from the start. But if we don’t start embracing the ways in which He trips us up and turns things upside down then we will find out the hard way in that place in which He still isn’t.

He doesn’t want that for anyone. But most everyone doesn’t yet want Him.

We’re all going to come upon Him one day or another and that to only one way or the other.

Which will it be? What outcome will we see?

Him in peace at the end of a life lived in pieces or us in pieces at the end of a life spent in the peace so many think they can find without Him?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold