Forged By Faith

Titus 2:11 NIV grapples with the gravity For in reality there is a particular if not indeed perfectly peculiar purpose unto every prize promised as is met only when it’s met by those to whom it’s given. It’s a weight won within this realization as to the time, effort, investigation that was given by another in order for their to determine that which they’ve now given. And this time and intention is, or at least should be, worth as much to we to whom any gift is given as is the gift we’re given. And that’s because every gift ever given was only given by someone who took their time from their life and decided to build, to buy what is this then beautiful expression of their having chosen to put us before themselves. And that’s just a really hard thing to fathom. Or, again, at least it should be. But unfortunately what we seem now to see is this sea of which is our society in which we’ve all chosen all but collectively to sink inside what is this life in which we live as if we’re owed some...

2 Timothy 1:9 NIV 38 Our dance with time is a strange occurrence as it begins in what feels an innocence that we only realize we lost well after it gone into what’s by then a past to which we can’t return but yet somehow manages to come with us for the rest of this ride that is our life as is measured in time, both in its adding up and yet then running out. As kids we get so excited about days like today as they mark the meeting of presents and parties spent with friends and family and we count not the oddity of it all being but a measure of our stay and the coming worry as to how little of it we’ve left. That’s rather the gift we get only as we get older. And yet even then it’s one that we so often prove quite negligent in having been given as we seek for anything else but the heart of wisdom apparently waiting to be won within the audacity to number our days and find in their number that we’ve lived so many to waste what is then a number of them which we cannot redeem and spend any d...

Titus 2:11 NIV Teaching us to us “to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions.” And that despite, or perhaps even in spite of, the overwhelming and yet somehow daily growing lack of “self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.” Indeed, so much of who we are as defined most basically by what we do is done and thus won within the ways in which the world around us walks. And yet it’s becoming increasingly clear to see that the ways in which this world walks are what define all as being in an already dire, and that only deepening, need of the grace of God that offers salvation to all people. Really then a most benefiting gift in that all of us are in fact a part of this “all people” spoken of here as being those to whom salvation is offered from only the overarching grace of God. Indeed, while we might be entirely overwhelmed with wickedness and thus vastly found within what is a world now all but overwhelming itself with the pressures to keep choosing and chasing tho...

1 Peter 4:10 NIV To have been so assured and insured that our hope were and will continue to overflow, as such they are, is to bestow an invitation as to the extending of the same grace as has been given in place of that first that He gave. For grace is but an open door. It’s a revolving reverence. It’s a gift given meant then to be given away. Grace is this place to which we go that runs along the outskirts of both Heaven and here, asking us that we might invite the delight to walk this line between mercy and madness as blurred so violently within a humanity that needs the former because of their fondness for the latter. Yes, grace is a gift so God-given that it both settles the matter and then further unravels whatever we once thought to matter more. Because when stood face-to-face with forgiveness, what’s a soul to do but to break down in empathy for the others around who may likely be as of yet unable to see what God’s given them. All because we’re not taught to see such things in ...

John 1:16 NIV And now it’s the lone reason we’re still standing in what is a life lived as if drown underneath what are wave after wave of a mercy and grace so deep that we are indeed sinking to depths no human could go. That’s what I love of this faith that continues to find me for reasons I seem to daily to leave unfound myself. I see not what He sees in me. I know not what He has in store for me. I dream for less than what is His best for me. I’ve left no stone unturned seeking His will for me, and yet as here I sit still I see nothing more than a mountain of mistakes piled so high into the sky that sometimes Heaven seems a lifetime away in a place that I could no more reach than into the past in which all those mistakes were made that need now yet another flood. Only one this time of grace as opposed the grave. For that’s the truth of what I see. Maybe it’s through eyes now blinded to the hopes I’ve always known to look for. Maybe it’s eyes seeing finally what and where hope always...