Day 4244 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 3:19 NIV

Alive in the shadows

Of a life of only sin and self as that’s sadly both the life we’ve bought because such is the lie that sells. It’s that one which tells of a chance to chase whatever we want to have, to hold, to hope to be and that within this place as if this place, simply because it’s where we are, is where we should expect to stay. That all of life itself not only can be found but is to be found inside this ground, this dirt, this earth from which we are but from which the empty grave says we’ll go.

A truth so few seem to know because so many know rather to live as if ever they’ll be here forever.

Simply because it’s where we are for now.

All of us just alive in a life of shadows cast by self and sin, weakness and worry and hatred and hopeless all then chosen at times unwittingly simply because, though claiming to see, we’ve become unaware to where we’re looking as rather we’re more worried about what we’re seeking. And the issue is that what we’re seeking is what we’re finding, seemingly proving that we do know what we’re doing and that we’re indeed doing it well.

For to all this earth’s proved a well endlessly flowing with so much after which so many are going that we anymore can’t find reason to do, to want, to be anything different.

We just see the success and satisfaction of those around us and want it for ourselves too.

Because that’s what we’ve been told a life is supposed to do. To seek after its own happiness, our happiness which we’ve sadly come to equate as mere enjoyment which is anymore measured by anything from simple entertainment to the suppressants of our many appetites for these destructions of ourselves and others as are under way every day inside this place in which we fail to seek to find something more to life than how we feel.

Yes, feelings have become our favorite things to serve, seeking always those which feel obviously better such as pleasure and whatever path, plan or purpose seems to promise it best.

That, to us, that is this life’s best.

And we’ve all so agreed to this that we now hate anything and anyone who gets in the way with anything they even hint to say that may cause us to question all this fun we’re having in these lives we see as being so free that indeed to do anything else with them other than everything we’ve done and are doing within them would find us as if victims of missing out on all the pleasure and satisfaction and success that we see everyone else having.

Measuring ourselves and their meanings by these varied and various screens of a society still screaming for God to let us alone to live our lives however we wish to lose them.

“His blood is on us and on our children!”

If only we knew the damage that such hatred can do. The danger promised in the loving of darkness. The worry won within refusing to worry about anything other than our hurry back into the shadows where we know we can go to hide all we don’t want known in regard to who we are and what we do, the latter the matter now defining the former.

And that simply because a people without a belief in better will thus never find the same.

Because you can’t find what you don’t want to see.

Something proven perfectly in Christ and all the hatred and enmity and vilification He met with and endured in His life in this place. For the people in power and praise hated Him because He freely gave away what they couldn’t admit they didn’t have to give. He offered kindness to those to whom it wasn’t due, healing to only those who could see they needed help, forgiveness of sins unto those few who had/have the audacity to admit they have them.

All of which sounds preposterous unto a people of such pride that, though entirely blind, still claim to see.

Something all of us do more than we don’t. Why? Because that is again the life. The life we’ve all of us known is that one held inside the phone which rings endlessly with the same exact messaging telling us all about how all we’re doing is so wonderful and right that we’re killing it at life.

No friends, we’re just killing ourselves every time that we choose for the darkness rather than the Light.

Because the Day comes within which we’ll find that without the Christ there is no life. There is no hope. There is no peace beyond that met within this place and that by those who sought for it to know. And, reasonably, there be of them many because, well, why not seek for our rewards here? Rewards found in the forms of fun and fame and fortune and friendship. Gifts gained of glory and gold. Hope held inside the things we know we can hold.

Failure then not an option nor even a probability.

For you can’t miss what you know you can see.

Problem is that, though we claim we can see, we are so very blind spiritually that we’d indeed miss the Man should He come alongside and hold our hand and promise to lead us to a peace unlike anything this place can present.

Indeed, we’ve slapped away His hand because He wants to lead us away from the life we’ve come to love. For what? Something better. Where? Somewhere else. When? Sometime later. Why?

Because we can’t risk heading for Heaven until we know it our home.

And that’s something we can’t know so long as we’re so sure that we belong in the shadows of self and sin in these lives we’re still living in.

Lives that are spent doing so much that’s so wrong that one day, if we don’t change, we’ll be from Him so gone that there will prove no going back. We’ll be rather given all we spent our here forever asking for, just Him to leave us alone.

Friends, He’s of a love so kind that He has promised to give us whatever we ask.

And yet most folks just continue requesting that He stay out of their way of living their lives however it is that they feel they find the reason, the reward to live them.

We’ve all hated Him, treated Him as if a stranger, a criminal, an imposter, a freak, a loser, a loner, a liar.

Why?

Because He testifies to the darkness inside of our every life.

Darkness that we’ve come to see as the very light of life itself.

Why?

Because the shadows help conceal all we don’t want seen in regard to who we really are. Something I don’t think we even know anymore. Not on this side of these lives in which we’ve lived for, in, of so very many lies that even truth is something which indeed lies bleeding in the streets having been so beaten and betrayed by a people who want it always to match only all things that we do and like and love and have thus come to become.

Yes, we’re so gone in this idea of living our truth because, well, it bends. It changes. It alters. It always agrees and that with everything we come to enjoy. It affirms our many chosen infirmities and wicked infatuations. It cheers us on as we grow fat and happy upon the seeds of doubt sewn daily in hearts that just don’t want to believe in better anymore.

And why do we not want to believe?

Because every belief is only ever had in something we don’t have, something that isn’t here, something then that isn’t close. Belief asks that we wait, that we work, that we worry even.

About what?

That we’ll miss it. That we’ll fail it. That we’ll somehow get it wrong.

None of that makes any sense to all of us who continue to think that all we do is all that should be done. Indeed, we are anymore so completely convinced that everything we do is right that anyone who asks that we reconsider what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and what better might be done instead, we’ve proven we’ll go so far as to demand them dead.

So confident in our condemnation of them that we’ll welcome the penalty of their punishment upon the heads of our children.

All because we can’t believe anymore and so then we don’t believe that we’re guilty in sentencing others to suffer so that we needn’t do the same.

A suffering assumed in such triviality as in His asking us to simply change what we do and why.

All we heard is Him ask us to die to ourselves.

But we’ve lived for so long for ourselves alone that to do anything else would, to us, seem to accomplish for us only everything less. For to deny ourselves would mean we forgo the praise, the applause, the arrogance which assumes that these things we’re due. That we refuse the enjoyments we’ve known, the joys we’ve felt, the plans we’ve made to find and feel more of them inside this place.

We don’t want to do that because we’re again lost inside this belief that we can see the very best way to live this life.

And that somehow hating everything and everyone who dares do it differently a reasonable hobby undertaken within it.

Indeed, we hate the light because it doesn’t hide anything and thus won’t help us to hide anything either. Rather it shows everything for what it is. It brings clarity to all that was confused or confined. It gives life even to such things as plants which simply root in place and grow toward the sun.

Something so simple that we were too called to do. To just be here where He put us and to reach for Him who put us here as if our lives depended on it.

Instead we now reach for the shadows seeking always to hide our horrors and hollows.

Because we know we have them, have done them, would probably settle for them all over again.

We just don’t want anybody else to know.

Why?

Because we too have come to sell that same lie. That in this place is waiting our best life. That in this world is found all that could make a life worth living. That we’re here to do nothing but everything we enjoy, everything that makes us feel good, everything that makes us look good to those who also refuse to consider beneath the surface of a life so superficial that we refused the Son simply because He looked different in what was a life lived differently.

For He is the only without sin.

Yet we killed Him for that being the case as He proved all we’ve failed to be.

A failure toward which still we flee inside nearly every day we live inside this place now so dark that none of us can see who we are nor what we’ve come to be, the monsters we are truly.

Who would have ever thought that a creation could come to such depths of hatred that they would even hate to death, literally, the very One who created them to be alive and stay that way.

And why?

Because He asks us to want more both from and of life itself than just this version that continues to sell inside this place!

Yes, Jesus came to bring us the light of life as is offered unto all for all of forever if only we’ll turn away from our sins and spend the rest of our days seeking only Him, serving only Him.

And, again, we killed Him.

Because, well, how dare Him say that there might be something better than whatever we’ve found or felt or been or hope to be within this world? How dare He point out our failures and flaws in what we feel are lives going perfectly well? Yes, how dare He promise the punishment of hell when we’re all down here doing so well that we think we’re owed the hope of having Heaven as our home?

A consensus so clearly confused as God will not allow sinfulness, selfishness around Him as He’s neither of them.

We’re both.

We’re everything that He isn’t, thus proving Him all we’re not.

And this itself is a great thing as, well, we’re hatred. We’re division. We’re darkness. We’re miserable. We’re confused. We’re blind. We’re murders. We’re rapists. We’re idolaters. We’re prisoners. We’re criminals. We’re heathens. We’re scoundrels. We’re strangers. We’re danger. We’re destruction. We’re doubt. We’re dread. We’re denial.

WE’RE DEAD!

Yes, we are dead men walking toward that being final.

He simply came to call us to head the other direction:

Toward life.

And, again, we killed Him for it.

Because we thought we’d already found it. That we’d figured life out. That we knew what we doing, so confident of it that we welcomed His blood on us and our children.

All because of how blind we’ve become thanks to our eyes and hearts having adjusted so perfectly to the darkness within us that we cannot understand, cannot witness what the Light looks like.

We just know it everything we’re not, and, seeing as how unwilling to change we’ve become, everything then that we don’t care to be.

Thus we refuse to be His and in this choose to remain dead.

And, again, He is so loving and kind to give us the life we ask for.

Even if it means watching us willfully walk away from the Life toward the flames.

Not something He wants for any of us, a truth proven in the Truth paying our debt and opening our eyes in the process.

But it’s what He opened our eyes to that continues to prove the problem. Why? Because His choosing to die on that cross, something none of us have done nor would ever choose to do as we choose to continue believing that we’re the ones without the sins, it proved that one of us is wrong. We think it the One who lost His life. But friends, He gave up His life because He wants us to live.

Which one do we want to be wrong then?

The thing that we need to understand about a verdict is that it can’t be changed, at least not when it’s rendered by a God who doesn’t change. And so the fact that we’ve all hated the light because we’ve all loved the darkness instead is settled. It’s not going to change.

Will we?

For while we have loved the dark, that we’re still alive is only because He is patient with us, and that because He wants for none to perish.

Again, do we really want Him to be the one wrong?

Friends, He wants us to live and that in peace and that forever.

Why continue hating that offer and that in exchange for a life unchanged in which we have to continue to hide all of the messed up stuff we’ve done and do?

Personally I’m tired of failing. I’m tired of running. I’m tired of hiding. I’m tired of doubting.

I’m tired of dying.

Aren’t you?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold