Forged By Faith

Ephesians 4:22 NIV Turns out I’d rather live an emptied life than to live one so filled with this world’s emptiness that I never find the courage to chase into the tomb the only hope that isn’t here. For indeed, just such a strangeness seems to have found me yet again today, this idea that it’s not my ideas that can ignite nor inform nor in any other way help me to investigate the impossibilities of this faith that feels more real than life itself seems to be anymore. Yes, I awake each day only to find myself more confused by the current contentment concealed inside a culture congealed inside themselves. Nothing makes sense, much less enough to form any fragment of some reason to restrain from the letting go into which we’re all called to share. No, such an invitation as the insinuation that I need to shed these misunderstandings is the only reason I’m still standing. Because honestly without that hope, none of this can mean anything. And that’s what I just don’t understand anymore. Ev...

2 Peter 1:3 NIV As weary eyes scratch across the uncertain expanse of this new life we’re now called to explore, we will indeed find ourselves in the midst of a right impossibility at times. For we’ve learned that it all relies upon us and thus we’ll come to such a crossroads as the cross holds more times than we’d otherwise want to welcome. Because we’ve become rather content with the content of life as lived within the pretense of arrogance. We’re used to how we live, how we love, what we love that’s become to us how we live as a people perfectly at peace always seeking for peace without the ability to have it proven inside something certain. I reckon that’s because peace isn’t exactly a matter so easily contained as to be held in a place or had in a prize or even hoped for in a promise. No, perhaps peace is a person, just One who’s at times a bit harder to find from inside minds melted into such a maniacal misunderstanding as our assuming that He’s always waiting within something we...

Deuteronomy 30:15 NIV Almost as if a gift designed inside a daily dilemma demanding a decision as to the direction we’ve decided, both oddly enough promising prosperity, just in vastly different ways. For you see, to be prosperous is merely to be successful. It’s an outcome defined by the thriving of something, the fulfillment of something, the provision of something that brings something that we didn’t have in such manner or measure before an effort was given unto gaining whatever it is that we seek to prosper. Indeed, we can succeed at a great many things, and in fact already have a list long and ever growing at that. Problem is that we can succeed in things that bring not what we want but rather allow to thrive things which do not promote life, things which may indeed destroy life. Perhaps this confusion is one found alongside our world’s having misunderstood everything monetarily, momentarily. We’ve come to see through these gold-tinted glasses in which everything we want, and thus...

Romans 6:23 NIV It’s crazy to me that we’re so quick in allowing something as young as fear to inspire us to risk the promise of the permanency of peace as provided inside something as old as forever. Alas much of life as we’ve come to never know it and never live is defined by the presence of an almost permanent fear founded upon our feeling as if we’ve something to lose, leaving us thus unwilling to try whatever may bring closer a life’s inevitable cost. For we all know the price of life as to be paid upon our exit from what we’ve known of it, done to it. Yes, we know the gravity of the grave being otherwise intertwined with the living of life. And thus defines the fear we feel inside, a feeling so fearful that faith is found floundering in the wake of our worry. But we seem to see no real reason to want for more than said worry as we walk still among a world perfectly content it would seem to waste away inside want and wish as if they’re somehow able to prove death deniable. That’s ...

Galatians 6:14 NIV Down here much of life is lived as if life’s a gain, a gift given for us to keep and/or give away to whatever we deem worth the waste of a life lived as if there’s something here worth losing what isn’t. That’s either the hope or the horror of His holiness. It’s a truth which either confronts or comforts. It’s the realization of the reality toward which we’ve grown irreverent at times. The understanding that where we’re standing as lost within a world in which we’ve sought our hope and seek it still after having found none thus far, while heavy-handed it offers the hope we’ve yearned to have, just promises that it’s always waiting for us to have less here to hope in so that we might hope for what’s not here. And upon a hill some years ago a grace was given that bridges this gap carved between us and reason, and now we’ve no reason to remain where we are other than the fear of what the ride home will cost. You see, such is precisely why so many still deny the undeniab...

Romans 6:6 NIV “because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.” Along that little line which separates today’s verse from verse 7 as quoted above, a line drawn in eternity’s sand, it turns out it’s not what we have to lose but rather what we get to leave. Alas, as a people the likes of whom we’ve become as but a replica of a world relishing in rebellion against everything from rhyme to reason, we see only the latter of such a truth. Because this world, which is the sort of sordid shepherd behind which we’ve all flocked into a fellowship with foolishness for the simple sake of our sharing of their seeing that having friendship is of greater worth than having faith, this world has taught us too that we’ve here something to lose that is apparently of such vast worth that it’s worth seeing this world as our home. Thus doubting how Heaven ever could be. But you see, that’s the gravity of our ingratitude as shown in our standing well wrapped within the wicked wanderings of a world w...

Ezekiel 11:19 NIV A promise so crucial as the expanse between Heaven and hell demands an undivided devotion given unto the hope of the first, not this indifference we tend to show toward the second. And though we do try to deny that we live inside such eternal indecision as deciding every day to descend again into the darkness of sin, such is the very danger designed inside our taking so lightly the gift of eternal salvation from the sinful damnation we’ve all but demanded. For that all but infernal negligence is seen when shown alongside such obviousness of our obliviousness to the true gravity of our disgrace being thrown in the face of the One who embodies such grace as to take our place in our grave. That is what Christ did, and since He alone now sits on the other side of our chosen death at the right hand of the Father, it matters not how desperately we deny our indifference as He’s already paid the cost. Just a matter for us to now determine what is lost and when. For the mercy ...