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...

Ecclesiastes 1:17 NIV The search continues… For such is what a search is meant to do. We all undertake any search in which we search for whatever it is that we thus apparently feel the need to search with the often hope-filled expectation of finding whatever it is that we’ve determined is worth looking for. Nobody, or I guess I should say I assume that nobody, ever agrees to do much if anything of anything without their having a strong reason or excuse, or I suppose even alibi, already firmly in place and well established beforehand in regard to why they’re going to do whatever it is that they’re planning to and, too, the overall outcome for whatever this undertaking will hopefully become. And, well, when the undertaking is a journey taken from the madness of man toward the wisdom of God, you’d think we’d understand that a lot is going to happen, going to change, going to probably confuse and thus ask we lose what are our preconceived notions about whatever it is that we think that any...

Ecclesiastes 1:16 NIV The emptiness of everything This world manages to offer each of us so very much that the sum of it all seems daily overwhelming. For we start this journey as but children who’ve still their ability to believe in those things which exist outside of what age tells us are possible. And as we grow in a world filled with so much to know, so much to see, so much have and hold and hope to be we don’t feel that ability to believe in more slip away. Why? Because it’s replaced by a way of life in which we don’t need it as, again, there’s here so much around us that doesn’t ask that we believe in it. It’s all just there. We can see it. We can feel it. We can hear it and hold it and hopefully even come to have it. And this idea that we can have rather than continuing having to hope becomes to us as we get old the wiser pursuit. After all, why endure the wonder and worry of what is every belief when you can settle far easier for all that you can see? (Wonder because all belief...

Ecclesiastes 1:15 NIV What it is Is what it shall be as there are things which simply cannot be anything other than whatever they are. And even this reality has managed to find a way to be, at least sometimes, agreed upon by humanity in that every now and then you’ll hear a man or a woman or perhaps it spoken even from the mouths of children that now common concession that it is what it is. It’s something of an agreement as to the impossibility of our changing anything about whatever something is or has become. But for most of us that agreement is often spoken in something of shame as if a failure found only at what’s then the end of a certain period of time likely having been given trying to change inevitability’s mind. And we sure do that a lot in life. All of us find nearly every day here this desire to prove that we’re the ones who can do what reality, what logic, what simple and honest truth and mathematics say cannot be done. We want to be the one who proves otherwise. And indeed...

Ecclesiastes 1:14 NIV The madness of meaning It’s found in this seeing that all you’ve done and likely then all you’re doing is without reason, without purpose, without then anything of any ability to offer much in the way of a return upon that which is invested in it, toward it, for it. And this realization causes you to sort of begin to undo, to unravel, to all but come apart at the seams you’ve sewn yourself into trying to make do with all that you’ve had to do as is all done under the sun for things under the same. All the struggle, all the strain, all the tears and all their stains, it all means nothing. So long as all it means is something here. Why? Because all that’s here is already gone. All the things we have, they’ve already been lost. All the plans we have, already finished and proven futile. All the hopes and goals and hurt and gold, it’s over. We are all here as what are but the final cars in humanity’s train of existence pulling begrudgingly into the station that is eter...