Forged By Faith

Proverbs 4:7 NIV considers the cost Because, well, nothing in life is free as rather everything costs someone something, even things given unto us without a cost which we need to pay. For even then, say someone gives you a gift without any strings or stipulations, even if this person is someone you will never ever see again, they literally just walk up to you on the street and hand you something for free and walk away, even then do we not have a price to pay? Even then are we not indebted in some way? Even then has not the sudden, entirely surprising gain of this new-to-us something brought with it a cost of finding room for it, appreciation of it? Is not being grateful a cost as it does cost us at least the effort of emotion? Are our emotions free? What about our time, our interest, our attention and effort? How can these things be free whenever we could give them to something other than whatever we do? Have we always given them unto the best things we could have chosen to? Or is this...

Romans 7:19 NIV makes friends with regret What is a friend though? Well, as we all know, or at least I hope we do, a friend is something trusted that we then know we can turn to. A friend is something we can rely on to be there for us whenever we may need whatever we may need. A friend is someone with whom we share that sort of giving love in which the both of us feel that trust and appreciate then that common reliance. A friend confides in us and we then in they as we both of us have our struggles and scars, stories to tell that we can’t tell just anyone. A friend then is someone in whom we find and feel a connection that’s courageous, caring, kind, compassionate, considerate. Yes, a friend considers us a friend and wants then what all friends should want for all folks and that is the very best of everything. And yet a friend is hopefully based closely unto the vicinity of honesty and therefore knows that, honestly, the very best is never either where we are nor then where we’ve been ...

2 Corinthians 3:18 NIV Perfecting holiness And that in something of an overall doubling down upon both the promises and the callings through which they’re to be proven in what remains, for now, an already perfected perpetuity as is already being proven as endless and thus immature as all such growth is supposed to be. For how dare we ever arrive at this place in mind or time in which we think that our lives are as good as they can be? How might we have truly seen all there is to see? Have we indeed undergone all the growth through which a soul can go? How would we know? This is something that’s weighed on me ever since by birthday or so, about 10 days ago. In fact, it’s probably been running through my head for a lot longer than that because for a long time now it’s felt, it being life itself, it’s felt as if something just wasn’t right, a little off, lagging behind and yet yearning to break free and burst forth into those cold winds blowing out of the north like a buffalo faced into t...

1 Corinthians 1:26 NIV A split-screen existence Of what is for each of us to be seen as at least two different lives, and that hopefully finding the best truly saved for last in that hope that we’ve been saved and had our lives changed from what they were to what they are still in the eternal process of finally becoming in what’s a process called sanctification by which those sanctified are the same as were living lives that were in no such way as set apart for such special use as are these things we get to say, think, do, be, see here inside what is a life that’s been both thrown down from a gilded tower and yet one that found its power on the way down. And that in coming to realize that what we were before we were called was a people not living anything of a life at all! Rather what we find first in Christ is that there’s a hope of something so much greater than we could have ever imagined back when our ability to imagine was otherwise the victim of what’s long been the sort of life ...