Forged By Faith

Galatians 6:9 NIV What is persistence? Is it a person with an almost personal vendetta against compromise? Is it a personal resolve to never allow any single hope to dissolve? Is it a deep-seated belief that there’s always something better we can see, something more we can be, something we can do in order to make it through whatever we have to in order to see that better we can be? Is it knowing in your heart that, despite everything only continuing to fall apart, that at some point it’ll prove to all fall into place? Is it a place we go inside our minds in which all we find is a violent unwillingness to quit? Is it the purpose of patience? Is it a byproduct of a patience’s purpose? Sadly, if anything, it seems to be something many here are forgetting. And that likely because, well, yeah, doing literally anything is wearying. Doing anything is tiring. Doing anything demands an almost exhaustive amount of everything from hope to effort to belief to trust and that in both we as us but so...

Romans 5:3 NIV The weathering It’s something of a matter so easily argued that it’s nothing we need argue over at all. Rather we all know and that because we entirely understand what is the gravity of this life as is poured in this ever-consistent rain which flows in pain, in problem, in punishment and the profit by which we seek the pleasure in which we find this ability, albeit limited in both scope and time, that allows for something of a respite from life. And indeed, all of us have already seen what we likely feel our fair share of the bitter air of a life lived atop what is a battlefield. Whether we see it that way or not. Which is itself becoming something of an irony to be honest. For the honest truth is that there are so many here who live so vastly lost inside this endless assumption as to the general purpose of life itself being something we’re all meant to measure in the matters we think more majestic than others. It’s this theory theorized as our “best life”, an idea we ea...

1 Peter 1:6 NIV In all this As in everything. The waiting, the worry, the wanting to go home once we realize this ain’t it. The promises, the punishments, the precariousness of their being always mixed inside what is so often a life that is quite hard and impressively heavy. The hope and the hardship which allows it to shine only brighter as we stumble ever closer. The joy of knowing where we’re going and learning as we go that it’s not what we go through that matters or makes the difference but that it’s rather the anticipation of the destination that’ll define all we go through as meaningless once we get there. Yes, what matters in this story of God’s surpassing glory is just that: His glory surpasses both all understanding, yes, even ours, but that most often as it even surpasses this passage aimed right through the heart of the rest of the worst that this wicked world both has to offer and insists we see. But please don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t make it easy. Worth it? Yes. Easy? ...

Habakkuk 2:3 NIV The vapidity Such often seems to define the perceived reality of what is a walk of faith as walked, always, amongst an even greater many who’ve no such worry nor want as won within a wait that is a demand of each and every faith. And why is this? Why this ease of finding or feeling or even finding ourselves feeling this lack of liveliness if not life itself? Moreover, why the wait as is what we so often feel as if we have to have amongst a many who’ve not the same but instead seem to find far faster the fun and friendship we all have had in the past and would likely still like in the present and its next successor? Because faith is for now only ever to be the substance of things hoped for and the assurance of those unseen. And what then makes it so hard that many either have or will fall away from basically any form of faith in which they’ve found themselves having earlier believed is that what we here and now see and hear is but an entire world enveloped in so much en...

James 1:12 NIV A love deferred And that simply because of choices asked along that harder path we’ve thus seldom seen reason in taking. Indeed, the path toward life’s been deferred with that life lived and left to the wake of 13,685 yesterdays in which our, or in this case my, main choice was to always make the choice later at some random time we had in mind when life might prove either the choice to matter more or rather us more able to make it and not mess it up like all the times before. And indeed, our tendency toward catastrophe has inspired a great deal of deferral in life. But friends, putting something always off onto another opportunity only shows we've agreed to discount the opportunity we have in the moment. And well, when done just long enough this pattern will prove us out of both tomorrows onto which to defer our decisions and thus too chances to do what perhaps always needed done. Which, in this case, is to both embrace what's often clearly God's will as well...