Forged By Faith

Ecclesiastes 1:18 NIV The depression in progression Perhaps it’s something that only those who fail to progress properly are promised to find as they feel their mind both grow and slow as they come to know what is the more they’ll only come to wish they didn’t. And indeed, I believe that all of us have experienced that feeling, that reeling in which we’re standing there seeing something that we’ve just recently learned more about only become something we’re unsure about because of what we’ve learned about it. Wishing that we didn’t know now what we hadn’t known before. And it’s an altogether odd experience to experience, this realization that you’ve learned something that you both wish you didn’t have to know but also know you can’t unknow. Because that there is no way to unsee something, to unfeel some way, to take back the prior ignorance you had, it leaves you with a burden you can’t escape. It doesn’t go away. That’s why God asked them to stay away from that tree. It’s because know...

Proverbs 2:6 NIV What is knowledge? Is it nothing more than the sum of what we know? Is it perhaps more the mystery of the more we don’t? Is it something passed down to us from those who found it before us? Is it something we pass in the street as it lays there still waiting for someone to care about those who come next? Is it something that knows where better is, the very hiding place of that which is best? Is it the wonder won within wonder waiting for us to wonder about it? Is it the worry felt in worry and our being usually unworried by it? Is it in a hurry to get where it knows it needs to be? Is it patient enough to take it slow so that it comes to know all it needs along the way toward wherever it goes? Is it the learning we’ve met in the lessons we’ve learned? Is it an opportunity to learn still more than we could ever imagine we could still? It seems that we’ve all sort of settled upon this estimation of understanding that’s built upon the degree of knowledge already known. An...

1 Corinthians 8:2 NIV Paper and plastic For it turns out that sometimes in life we don’t even seem to be told of the choice and rather just listen incessantly to this incessant voice telling us to chase the waste that is the want of both. Or at least that seems all of the sudden the life that I’ve come to know. And while I know well now what I’m pretty sure I’ve known so far, what scares the life into me these days is my knowing that I don’t know what I don’t know. And that even about what I’m pretty sure I think I know. Because how can I know for sure? After all, I awoke today already questioning all but everything that I’ve been doing, wanting, winning for most of my life. And well, what do you do when, at 37, you find yourself standing with or within this understanding that the life you've been living doesn't make sense anymore? When it seems as if everything that you've thought mattered might not? When you feel like all of the sudden everything you've tried isn'...

1 Corinthians 2:2 NIV How might one manage to narrow down their focus to the severity of a singularity when living so spread amongst a million considerations? For that is indeed the definition of both what our faith demands and too what this world has made almost impossible. Anymore it seems as though we’re cloaked inside an existence spread across a span of a veritable endless amount of knowledge demanding we come to know more than we need. This tragic reality has come to define our inability to stave our enslavement to these millions of misplaced priorities we pursue and pretend are actually worth the life we waste to worry about them. And our play is applauded by the world that wants us all only as lost as they seek to remain. And our having become so long a very best friend to this world wrecked inside such perpetual enmity with their Father, we too seem to have indeed learned to share in such varied concerns as whatever this place says should matter most today. And though that lis...

Ecclesiastes 1:18 NIV There’s a strange line, thin line that gets crossed in life in which things seem to become rather counterproductive. This realization hit me quite a while back, few years ago now. It’s this sudden understanding that understanding isn’t always worth the undertaking. That there are times in life wherein knowing everything one might feel the need to know might cause one to be caught up within the undertow of a world going under. It seems yet one more of those thoughts so massive and all-encompassing that I’ve felt the need to boil it down into something somehow able to convey the monstrosity. And well, here’s all I’ve got: The more I know, the more I wish I didn’t. For I’ve seen things, heard things, learned things that I wish every day I didn’t know. From the greed of personal gain to the pain of personal mistakes, I’ve lived a life spent learning so many things I know now I never should have known. Because that’s not who God made us to be. He never once asked to un...