Forged By Faith

John 15:5 NIV Powerless That may perhaps be the very last thing that we will ever think of ourselves as. And that’s because, unto us, we sure seem to have the ability, the capability at least, to do a great many things. And that’s because we have indeed done a great many things. All of us have lived our lives accomplishing, achieving, assuming if nothing else so many things that we’ve all but curated stories, novels of accolades and attributes that, seeing as we seem to have been always the instigators or investigators, sure seem to have come to pass only because of us. Alas, just because we may have had a part in something coming unto fruition, that never actually meant that we were the ones who planted the fruit. In truth we’re but the barren fields in which all that’s planted either yields a crop or simply does not. And I think one day we’re all going to see just how little we did and that when compared to all we could have had we had the humble audacity to see something, seek somet...

Ecclesiastes 3:20 NIV The burden of beasts Unfortunately it’s something we don’t think about because we only seem to think about the fact that in this life we are burdened. We think so often about all we have to do, all we’d like to get done, all we plan to have did by the time we end up dead. And yet even in this we think so little about life itself other than all our plans and the priorities that they ask us to place wherever it is that they ask we do, something that we do more often than not, doing thus and then only whatever they ask us to. Because we think we’re more important than we are. We’ve embraced this idea that to life there’s some unseen and yet entirely noticeable hierarchy upon which all things, all creatures especially, are to be measured and thus by which we should measure them. And it’s within this now endless measuring of everything seeking to determine, for ourselves and usually only by the same, the value, the worth, the importance of everything. Except ourselves....

Isaiah 59:14 NIV awakens to a wasteland A land in which so much is so wasted and that by so many that daily you find you only feel but this growing ache inside your chest as you walk amongst this deepening mess that is being endlessly made by those who make the maze and yet always seem as if they know what they’re doing, where they’re going, who they’ve become. And perhaps they do as in fact I imagine many of them might. After all, why else would one go on living what isn’t a life unless they’ve come to decide that the death we see and too know awaits is an alright place for us to live in waste? And that of every opportunity we’ve both been given already and still hopefully have awaiting. Awaiting what? Us to realize that this way of life that we’ve come to live and believe we love is nothing but a gross lack of the both. That we know increasingly little of life as within it we love what all it isn’t. That we thus know little too of love as we love that which is actually hate and hate ...

Isaiah 64:6 NIV The reality It’s that our very best is but a betrayal of even God’s worst. That our most upright action is only one taken in what is an obvious opposition unto He who is positioned upon the throne against which we’ve thrown our lives as if tantrums against Him and His call for all to come unto the Son and receive from the same the salvation found in only the Name of Christ Jesus who died to free us not from lives lived as if these perfecting angels we think ourselves to be. No, rather He came to set us free from a life given so fully unto sin and slavery that we indeed grew to love this life more than He who gave us the opportunity to live it. And the same who’s now seen us lose it to living as if He doesn’t. Which is what now forms the foundation of our collective fear of forever being something found not in the many places we’ve assumed it found or still continue to imagine we might find it now. No, the reality is that we’ve searched for so long through so many other ...

James 4:14 NIV What is your life? From the outset this seems just another question in what’s a long line of Biblical questioning that all combines to try and find the purpose, path and promise of this life. All of which are each themselves quite heavy at times and sometimes so heavy in fact that we walk back as we’re taken always aback by His daring to ask such weighty things in such worthy words. Worthy of what? Our consideration. Weighty why? Because we don’t wish to consider them. Simply because our now instinctual answer is that our lives are our lives. Or at least that’s what we’ve so vastly come to assume them as. Because that’s simply what we want them to be. We want these lives to be ours as, to us, that makes an immeasurable amount of sense. I mean, after all, we’re living them. We’re planning them. We’re plotting them. We’re creating both paths and problems and hopes of avoiding the latter as the prior’s the matter that means the most. Or again, at least that’s what we all se...