Day 4261 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Job 20:11 NIV

All good things

We hear often that such must come to an end, a decidedly and sometimes measurably disappointing outcome to what’s otherwise been a stretch of good luck and fond fortune. And indeed, within this life within this world we’ve all felt ourselves meet face-to-face with many of those things that put a rather abrupt stop to our previous enjoyment of something. Perhaps an injury, an illness, a loss of something or someone that left us with what felt like lives less filled and less fun than they were before.

And we measure these moments often as unfair, unwarranted, entirely unwelcomed because, to us, life is this existence in which the best of everything should continue coming toward us, for us because we feel that we’re deserving of it.

But what if it’s our expectations such as such that achieves for us all of the disappointment we meet? What if it’s our ego claiming that it knows that we deserve to have fun, to feel good, to believe we are good that’s only setting us up to be entirely let down when the walls come down? What if our assumption that we deserve something is what causes us so much pain and confusion when something else ends up coming?

What if we’ve chosen to build our lives upon this mind that makes us think that we are supposed to have not only our best lives here but always only the best of everything within them?

I contend that such a conviction will only leave us crumbling when our mountains turn out to be only rubble held together by the hope that we can be the ones to hold them together.

For that’s the life we live here.

It’s this presumption that we’ve both the power to make things happen and plenty enough experiences in which a great many things have indeed gone almost entirely right that have left us believing that life is in fact whatever we make it. And this penchant has found us chasing after so much time and attention and effort that we’re actually only wasting upon all such things as pride and preference and opinion.

All things that will one day lie with us in the dust to which we’re promised we’re all returning.

For, as One who would never ask us to do anything that He’d not do Himself, Christ too left we the dead to bury our dead whilst He went ahead onto Heaven to make ready a place for those who humbly come to hope in the promise that their place isn’t here but rather held elsewhere within the promise of His faithfulness unto the resurrecting of our dead souls unto what is our forever home.

Problem is that, well, we’re still the dead.

And this problem is only always compounded by the fact that we surely seem to be rather alive! I mean, we are living a life here. Anything and everyone who’s breath in their lungs, blood in their veins, thoughts in their head that they think, such are of us those who are alive. And thus, if you are as here to read this as I am to write it then we’re the both of us still alive.

For how long?

That’s become one of those ongoing unravelings that I find that this faith’s found for me. It’s the reality that all life here is but death is progress. It’s all just all of us slowly progressing within this procession of a production that He’s promised is coming toward its end. When? Don’t know. But that I don’t seems only to add but another layer to this now burnt cake in which it asks me to think not in terms of my life’s length but rather the unforeseen brevity thereof.

Why?

Because none of us, not by worrying or whining or winning or nothing, can add even an hour to our lives. And yet all of us are so consumed by the fact that we are alive that all we really try is to live as if we will be forever. And while that is one of the two proposed and entirely promised outcomes, the problem is that it’s only promised to those who agree to die before inevitability says they have to.

And this is where we struggle.

It’s within His call to lay down our lives and take up our crosses. And we struggle with this because, well, we kind of sort of really like our lives. That’s in fact all that we’ve come to think we’re supposed to do with them while we’re here. To like them. To enjoy them. To all but force them, if we need to, to be or become whatever it is that we want them to. That we’re in this world surrounded by so much that looks and sounds and feels so amazing that surely we’d be actually, measurably, demonstrably crazy to forgo it all and in this forsake ourselves.

Why so deny ourselves what is both so easy to enjoy and thus too what we see so many others indeed enjoying?

It seems entirely counterintuitive and thus utterly counterproductive to what we’ve come to be pretty sure are lives meant to remain leant unto this production of all that we think is good, as is often measured by only us and only whatever we then alone think is good, which is pretty much always only whatever makes us look good or feel good.

Because that makes sense.

It’s an entirely balanced equation, at least so far as we can figure. After all, is not something fun if we have fun doing it? Doesn’t a food taste good if we enjoy eating it? Don’t our favorite shirts become our favorite shirts because we both look good and feel good whilst wearing it? Isn’t then life good whenever we have fun and feel good and think we look good while we’re living it however we’re living it?

Have we seriously forgotten that we’re not here living lives but rather losing them?

Again, no matter what we do nor then how much we may grow to enjoy what we do for mostly only the enjoyable outcomes it offers, none of us can make our lives here longer.

For this world is passing away and, as every grave in every cemetery would seem to say, so too are all of us.

What then is it with all of this stuff that we continue to do seeking always only to continue building both ourselves and thus our lives into these amazing adventures so filled with awe and wonder, of only everything here, in what is a world that we’re all promised to leave?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m by no means saying that we should seek to live lives in which we enjoy nothing, appreciate nothing, experience nothing and seek then for nothing good. After all, God gave us the ability to enjoy things as well as things to enjoy. He created us to experience His goodness and thus there is good for us to experience. And yes, the entire point of praise is to appreciate those things that are in fact praiseworthy, meaning then that there are things that are worthy of our praise and appreciation.

But the problem is that our enjoyment has so vastly come to supersede our praise and appreciation that we’ve come unto the consideration that all of life is for only our enjoyment.

No friends, much of life is for our correction and that because, well, we get a lot wrong while we’re living it. We make a lot of mistakes. We prioritize a lot of the wrong things. We say things we shouldn’t say, think things we shouldn’t think, believe things that aren’t really possible.

Such as how we’re kings and queens who deserve for all of everything to always go wonderful.

As much as that might sound wonderful and obviously lean toward our feeling the same, the problem is that the same pride that believes such things also easily convinces us that we’re the only ones we’re here to please. That the flesh is our god and it’s then our duty to ensure it always satisfied. And we’ve so agreed to this being the point and purpose of our lives that we basically never stop seeking for our own pleasure and success and satisfaction.

And all of them found wherever and in whatever we can.

And, again, there’s a lot of things within this world that can and do make us feel really good.

But feeling good was never the goal.

Honoring God was, is and will remain the entire point of why we’re here.

And that we’ve made a life out of doing nothing even close to anything that could even accidentally praise Him or please Him has defined our choices, our actions as sin and He’s said that sin is death. And thus we will all die. Problem is that we’ll do so probably by surprise because we’re all busy down here living our lives seeking, and usually finding, so much pleasure and satisfaction that there sure does seem a rather endless traction to our vastly shared assumption that this world is our kingdom and we should keep on doing only whatever we’ve all been doing that has led us to lives so absolutely amazing that surely we can’t really lose them.

For God’s supposed to be a loving God, a kind God, a caring God.

So surely He wouldn’t actually take away from us all that we’ve learned to enjoy and come then to love.

Well, He will because as much as He is a loving God so too is He a jealous God and a just God and a truthful, faithful God and thus a God who cannot, who will not go back on His Word in which it’s read that He will not share His glory with another nor surrender His praise unto idols.

Problem is we will.

In fact we’ve clearly no problem with giving any praise or appreciation or even fractioned, fractured attention to anything and everything but Him. We do this all the time. Again, we’ve all of us spent entire lives building up our lives as if this world is our home and we’re supposed to make kingdoms within it. That everything around us is only there for us. That the entirety of this life is ours to enjoy.

Leaving us then remarkably unable, an inability that eventually becomes an unwillingness, to refuse ourselves anything that we may elsewise enjoy.

Leaving then God to be often cast aside and left behind in what are lives in which we live seeking always only to build ourselves higher and higher upon all that’s here that gets us high. And I don’t mean as in drugs, though that’s an obvious example that I think most of us can recognize. I mean simply anything that caters to pride. Anything that distracts us from serving, honoring, pleasing and praising God in and with our lives. Anything that steals our focus away from Him and instead asks we give it to that which makes us feel good.

And indeed, we’ve all come to become the stars in our own little shows.

Each of us living as if we sit upon thrones on the top of a mountain made up of our every assumption as to the point, purpose, promise or presumption that something is good and thus good for us for no other reason than that it simply feels good to us or looks good to us or sounds good to us.

Living lives with eyes and ears and hearts itching so endlessly that we seek similarly for only anything that may offer to soothe the yearning.

And this world is filled with piles of deception and darkness and derision that, to those who’ve eyes that can see but only want to see what their lost hearts want to find and feel, sure look like mountains that we can climb and probably find a quite better life would we did.

And so we do.

Every single day we all almost always resort to building our lives higher, ourselves higher, thinking that it’s all but our lone duty to make these years we’re given so full and fun and fancy that, again, surely nothing and nobody would take them away.

We’re all down here living as if we can find such perfection in life that God will agree to let us keep it.

But again, all those graves say He won’t.

Rather they all sing in unison that one day we really are going to return to the dust from which we came. That one day we’ll have breathed our last within this place. That, no matter where we think we’ll go or won’t whenever this life ends, that one day this life ends.

And thus all good things, at least all those that we consider we’ve found already or can find here eventually, they will too come to an end.

And when they do then all we’ve done, every hope we’ve had, every victory we’ve won and every defeat we’ve faced, they’ll all lie with us in those holes in which we’re placed. On that day the entirety of all we’ve tried, all we’ve wanted, all we’ve found, it will be left behind. And thus all the effort we had to give, all the attention that we did give to whatever it was that we chose to give them to, it will forever be whatever it really was.

And while we think of so much of it as good, as fun, as meaningful and thus amazing, that everything here is destined for ruin should always remind us to store up for ourselves our treasures in Heaven.

But so often it doesn’t. Because, well, we just can’t see it. And that because, well, to us believing remains but a byproduct of seeing. And we can see people enjoying themselves. We can see the ads on tv that sell the things we supposedly need if our lives are to ever be better. We can see the stuff hanging on our walls that we enjoy looking at, appreciate the fact that we have. We can see so much in this world that looks good to us.

But friends, every mountain of such will fall.

And if we’ve only spent our every moment and memory upon what we have here, how we feel here, seeking always only the very best of both, then so too shall we fall here.

And when we do all the fun we had, all the enjoyment we felt, all the pleasure we found, it will lie with us in the ground, right next to the cardboard crowns we so love to live our lives wearing.

I guess my point is that while our pride may always be there to tell us that these are our lives and that it’s our only duty to always ensure that they always look, feel and go amazing, in reality we’re just dust and, well, dust doesn’t have all that much to be so proud of. Now we can paint ourselves up to look all different. We can seek after those things that manage to always convince us we’re more. We can spend our lives storing up for ourselves halls and houses filled with every ounce of anything we ever enjoyed.

But the higher the climb the further the fall and the further the fall the harder the hit and the harder the hit the finer the dust.

He’s going to pulverize us.

And the only way for there to be anything of us left to be put back together is if we go there together with He who led the way, and that not up the mountain that is our ego but rather down into the grave in which we’ve all sought to always live as if we’d never go.

Jesus came to show us how to lay down our lives and take up our crosses by doing so literally. And He calls us to follow His example, maybe not physically, but literally enough that He can see in us an agreement that we need to lose these lives that we’ve lived in sin and that we rather wish to share in Him no matter what that means here.

Because faith doesn’t look at what we have to go through. It considers only where we get to go to.

And while faith asks us to come down from our mountains, it only does so to help us see them as the ruins they already are.

Yes, pride and ego and arrogance will continue to help folks live it up down here. But that He promised that they’ll have had their reward seems to say that there will be for them no reward left to find.

Don’t risk that being said of you.

Rather save up your rewards for where they won’t end. For while as fun as it might be to enjoy them here, here is where all good things must end.

Heaven is where all good things are and where there is no end to any of them.

Ever.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold