Forged By Faith

Ecclesiastes 1:14 NIV The madness of meaning It’s found in this seeing that all you’ve done and likely then all you’re doing is without reason, without purpose, without then anything of any ability to offer much in the way of a return upon that which is invested in it, toward it, for it. And this realization causes you to sort of begin to undo, to unravel, to all but come apart at the seams you’ve sewn yourself into trying to make do with all that you’ve had to do as is all done under the sun for things under the same. All the struggle, all the strain, all the tears and all their stains, it all means nothing. So long as all it means is something here. Why? Because all that’s here is already gone. All the things we have, they’ve already been lost. All the plans we have, already finished and proven futile. All the hopes and goals and hurt and gold, it’s over. We are all here as what are but the final cars in humanity’s train of existence pulling begrudgingly into the station that is eter...

Romans 7:15 NIV continues ahead through confusion Simply because that’s what life’s become. It’s a confusion. It’s a delusion. It’s nothing but a daily decision to make as many things as complicated and confusing as we can somehow convince ourselves we need to confuse. It’s this pattern we repeat in which we choose to lose what is the violent simplicity of all such things as honesty and humility for what are their ongoing and warm-welcoming counterparts. Indeed, it’s as if every single day anymore all but starts with our minds convinced that it’s all falling apart and that because we’ve become entirely convinced that we’re the ones meant to hold it all together. How can this be my sister, my brother? How can we be the ones who hold our lives, our minds, ourselves, our souls together? How can those who’ve proven time and again that we have no idea what we’re doing be then the same as they who somehow manage to at some point prove able to manage that which they’ve only messed up, mistake...

Job 21:7 NIV It’s just unfair For it seems that this world and how it works is almost a perfect contradiction to so much of what Scripture talks about in regard to God’s design and demand, both built upon and based within what He deserves as opposed to all the more we all so often assume we do. And yet I think that’s at least part of the confection that’s made for this confusion. It’s that we all so love this now ideal delusion in which we’re losing our minds daily to this lie that has us all convinced of the veracity of this sweetest of all ideas: That both there exist here good people and that, ironically, we’re always among them. Indeed, I don’t know that I’d have had any way to ever count the number of times I’ve heard in my life someone ask that age-old question: Why do bad things happen to good people? And that because I was both once a kid who didn’t know how to count that high, I also once believed that lie, and, perhaps most honest of all, I just never saw the potential for ha...

Ecclesiastes 8:14 NIV A topsy-turvy world One of the more unforeseen aspects, symptoms perhaps, of what is a Christian walk is that it turns you into something of a student of life itself and how it’s lived and why it unfolds the way it does for those who do whatever they do or don’t. It causes us to consider basically the sum of everything done under the sun seeking to find those things which seem right and thus should be emulated as measured over against those which seem only wrong and thus haven’t the same need of being replicated. And this has in fact become something that I find myself doing all the time. Just can’t find any way to make much of it make any sense anymore. For what we slowly come to see is that the world isn’t really anything of everything it was meant to be, could still be, ought to be if only we could gather together and stop treating God like some whether or not situation, destination, consternation, objectification. Indeed, I think we’ve gone and gotten so much ...