Forged By Faith

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 5:7 NIV The weight of the wait. There seems, as life grows toward wherever life goes, this growing knowing that the waiting is weighing a worth of wonder as to whether whatever may be good enough as measured always against the unseen uncertainty of the perhaps better still. And I think that it’s that stillness that finds us so often afraid as we wait for whatever more may be in store that seems to most a horrible bore as borne within the moment in which we’re at present already surrounded with what seems a perfect plenty. And it’s, to us, this supposed plenty already perfected that exists as if only to remind of the more we could have right now as opposed to later on if we’d just do as our impatience would prefer as present. For within this world there is undeniably a great many good enoughs and even quite a few pretty greats. But that’s where it begins to find this weighing, this life spent mostly in waiting. It’s found within the feeling that what we want is rather a needing, f...

Hebrews 13:14 NIV If home is where your heart is then I guess I really am out of place as mine doesn’t seem to beat to the tune this world sings anymore. For as a faith, our faith, this faith begins to grow it seems only to show that all this reflection is ripped off to reveal the real of a reality we've never run for before, and in that I fear we find ourselves within a failure to find within ourselves an ability to endure where we’ve come to know we’ve nothing that can endure, nothing that is to last, nothing that we can lean on or hope in or hold to, other than that faith which finds for us the depths of this mess we’ve made without the means to make it right, or even at times to make it through. No, it seems that this road is one paved through a perfectly persistent rain which falls as we fail to feel the way we’ve felt back when we believed that this was home. For let us again, as always, be honest in that this is indeed a right difficulty. This is hard, this path of peculiari...

Lamentations 3:24 NIV As I'm not long for this world nor shall I long for this world. There's a really interesting paradigm shift gifted us within our opting for the humble reception of this new life of faith granted us by Christ. All that once held such high esteem, all the dreams in which we hoped, for all the many goals toward which we strove, well, it's all finally allowed to be seen for exactly what it is. And friends, what it is isn't anything like what we'd made it out to be. So many times we build up these lavish hopes expecting fulfillment and joy to be found within them. We sit around daydreaming away the few precious hours we have remaining tinkering with all the grand ideas that are just exactly what we want them to be. And over time we write this finely tuned existence that offers us the perfect life with all of its ideals that we could possibly manage to make fit within the years we've been allotted. And then, in the most ironic undertaking of all,...

Lamentations 3:26 NIV Patience is arguably one of the hardest virtues for us humans. We live in this drive-thru, microwave, smartphone world where we can get whatever we're looking for and do whatever we're trying to do almost immediately. We can hop on Google and find the answer to any question we may be pondering. We can turn on the TV and be suddenly overwhelmed with all the mind-numbing entertainment our consuming selves could possibly desire. We can find countless ways to make life quicker, and we love it! We're so used to having everything in an instant that if something takes a little time, we simply start assuming that it's not worth it. Why wait for something when we can probably find something relatively similar that we can have a lot faster? We've simply gotten it in our minds that "time is money", and we all know how badly enslaved this world is to money, so our time is seen in basically the same light. We can't waste it. We can't sit a...

Psalm 27:14 NIV We know about Good Friday. The world celebrates Easter Sunday. What about Saturday? What about that day in between? Why doesn't it get more acclaim? Well, Holy Saturday is an altogether different kind of day. It's the day between the dying of our Savior and His resurrection. It's that time of waiting, hoping, wondering. In other words, Holy Saturday is the hard part! We all know that waiting can be excruciating! The promise of something better to come. The hope of promises being fulfilled. The joy of being rewarded for our faith. But so much of our faith and life itself is in those in-between times. We all do a lot of waiting and hoping that what we believe in will come to pass. And no matter how short the wait is, it always feels like an eternity because we know that what's coming is going to be so incredible. The Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is when Christ lay in the tomb. Those who doubted were filled with the joy that they have defe...