Day 3368 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Acts 20:24 NIV

Seems we’ve come to become all but entirely desensitized to a lifetime cast across a billion distractions decided upon for a million different reasons, each of them somehow the same.

And I for one am utterly exhausted from all this effort given always to assuming my life is meant to remain mine. For that is the cohesion which holds together this chaos that’s all but tearing us apart. It’s this endless agreeance upon a grievance that agrees with our seeing incessantly, habitually through eyes incapable of humility as they’re otherwise stained inside an eternal hostility against still He whom we’ve come to all but insist upon enmity. Indeed, we are but enemies of God as here in these lives we fight not to survive toward His gift of salvation.

No, rather we settle to thrive through our time via dreams and ideals crafted inside a selfishness that shouldn’t be so alive still inside of us.

For the gravity of the coming grave says that selfishness will be the death of us as it demands we decide to descend everyday once more into the realms within seeking inside ourselves the meaning of this life we’ve stolen from ourselves. And it’ll be that death both because we likely care to not to admit we have stolen the hope of living from our lives, our minds, our souls, but so too because it’s the entire antithesis to what Christ showed us from upon our place upon our cross felt by instead His pain.

I guess that such has become for us a rather sordid irreverence in that we feel that He minds not having to feel that weight again, our crosses still crushing down upon His kindness, almost as if seeking to prove Him what we’ve always been. As if we could kill the goodness out of Him so that our lack of goodness might not matter as much as we pretend it doesn’t. Because that is in fact who we’ve become inside the lies of lives we’ve not cared to live. Just a people hell-bent on the betrayal of whomever we might find the opportunity to disappoint.

All so that we needn’t sit inside our own disappointment as designed by our many desires leaving nothing but confusion in regard to who we are, why we’re here, where we’re going and mostly if we even need to care.

Because we don’t want to. We don’t want to think about things such as responsibility and the reason which makes it the only reasonable road to revere. We don’t care to consider the choices we’re making, knowing that we’re making most of them as wrongly as possible. We don’t enjoy the gravity of our ungratefulness. Don’t have any reason to brag about all we’re going without in this life spent living as if we lack nothing.

And if we’ve no reason to boast, then there’s no benefit to it, no profit in it, and thus no point in it.

So we leave things set aside for some time up ahead where perhaps humility crashes upon our hostility and causes us to correct course for once in our lives. Otherwise, no, full steam ahead over the edge back into ourselves and these eyes that say they see a way for us to do this by ourselves, for ourselves. And since that’s the same message we hear constantly from this calamity amongst whom we walk and work and waste away all these days we can’t get back, well, it’s all the more reason to assume still our lives our own.

But there’s become an inescapable gravity to that chosen reality that I can’t outrun or outhustle or outmuscle. I can’t seem to confuse myself anymore, or maybe that in and of itself is the only confusion in me as it does seem I’m one of quite few who see the danger we’re in. No, I look around and listen in and see and hear a people living it up as if everything’s either fine or headed there and scheduled to arrive later this afternoon. And so maybe it’s my fault for not seeing it that way.

Yes, maybe I’m just broken from asking for this weight to be placed upon my shoulders found inside something to say every day that I pray glorifies God as much as I never did before.

Or maybe I’m broken away from that life I lived and lost in the lunacy of looking for something to call my own, some way to call my life my own. And since the latter just sounds better, I’m going with that one. Because such has indeed become my biggest dream in this land, to leave it all behind. To walk away. To be the one no one understands, a lone weirdo otherwise unnamed, unknown, a nameless and faceless enigma that nobody can quite figure out for fear that my weird might wear off on them should they venture too close to this cusp I’m fighting for.

For I wish only to live on the outskirts of normality, and this decision seems a right formality as not a day comes when that idea doesn’t go. No, such a hope remains inside my mind, only deepening into an ever-stranger desire to echo the words of Paul found here in Acts.

To count my life as nothing to me, nothing more than the time I’ve left to finish this race and do the rest of whatever work He’s given me to complete while here. I genuinely want nothing else of life as I’ve had plenty of life lived elsewise and, having seen enough, I know it’s never enough as again, that idea just seems so deeply rooted and well-watered that my hope of leaving here just doesn’t seem willing to agree to die.

And so it’s that hope that I seek to thrive, even if it means everything else starves. Especially if everything else starves.

For what is here that Heaven hasn’t made better? What good is found in this world that His promise doesn’t promise more perfectly? Is there any enjoyment, any entertainment, any excitement in this earth that eternity doesn’t offer a thousand-fold? Is my happiness here able to sully the joy of there? Can my best prove itself a worthy rival to His better? Indeed, might I truly find something here to gain that’s worth the pain of seeing those gates stay closed?

No.

And such is quite the reason that I see no reason in remaining the one worried about my life and making sure it arrives safe and sound at every port and point and purpose for which I’ve planned always to miss the point and purpose of His promise saving me from mine. I see no excuse to retain some selfish and silly semblance of control I’ve tried to commandeer from the only One who knows how to turn death into unending life, humility into a hope that cannot end, surrender into the sort of success a soul needs in order to understand itself.

See, I’ve sought all these other ideas scattered in all these other directions thinking that if I just gave the right amount of time and effort and, if I have to, even a little bit of patience then I’d find my purpose. I’d find my worth. I would somehow stumble upon myself somewhere. And so I’ve done what the world inspires us, incites us, excites us to do. I’ve traded dispossession for dispensation, giving my life to a billion ideas hoping for a billion rewards to flood in someday.

For such is the sad outlook of life that we’ve come to settle for. We know only to dispense parts and pieces of our lives and our time within them. We give to different things and different ideas different portions of our preferences and prerogatives. And in this we retain that semblance of control we truly love thinking we have. Because if we can stay convinced that we can do this by ourselves, for ourselves, then it’s we ourselves who will win both the gold and the glory.

Quite the culmination to this story we’re stealing!

But I’ll be the first to say that I have sought to control my life in order to wrangle it into everything I’ve wanted it to be. I’ve given my time, my mind to so many materials and mannerisms assuming that inside them I’d find me. I followed the world toward every X they promised marked the spot where my treasure of triumph awaited. I have indeed done all I could to be all I thought would leave me proven the captain of my ship, of myself, of my life.

Yet from up here on this chair I can see now that all I’ve accomplished in that regard is driving it and myself right into the ground. I’ve commandeered this life and wrecked it upon all that’s worthless. I’ve stolen the reins and rolled my hoped into this ditch of a disaster I can’t seem to find the courage to walk away from. Yes, I’ve given so much of my time to so many things that weren’t even worth the acknowledgement that I find myself now only afraid and coming close to becoming unwilling to give so much away as this little life I have left to maybe do something right.

And so it seems that I’m finally learning the different between dispense and dispossess.

For as I walk amongst the wreck I’ve won of a life I’ve lost, I realize now that I cannot keep any control nor even concern for my life anymore, as I know what I’ll do with them. I’ll worry myself into never trying. I’ll work myself into thinking I’m the one accomplishing things. Indeed, I’ll accomplish things, dreams and goals and plans and the like, right up until I convince myself that I deserve things such as grace and glory. I’ll barter with everything and everyone so that I’m left never feeling as if I need to beg back what I’ve foolishly forfeited for such fame and fortune as we’ve come to crave.

Yes, I’ll decide to further descend into darker levels of depravity thinking the shadows afford me a little more latitude to make mistakes that are made less visible thanks to the lack of light. I’ll run in fear from things that don’t deserve that kind of respect and I’ll pay no respect to the few things we are called to revere. Indeed, I will always revert back to being emotionally insufficient, eternally negligent, spiritually retarded, and that is why I cannot retain any control over my life anymore.

And while the simple fact that I never had any such control to begin with should have been reason enough, again, alas, not too quick on the uptake as it turns out.

That’s why we’re called into a share of Christ’s surrender. Because, as He knows better than us both who we are meant to be and thus what we’ve become at the expense of such opportunity, so too does He know full well that we can’t do this by ourselves. In fact, He died because of our trying to do this by ourselves. Thus we need that surrender we see upon the cross as it’s only the loss of a life we’ve lost to the losing of our minds thinking more highly of ourselves than we’ve ever had any reason to believe.

No, this happens to be one of few instances in which I actually agree that seeing is believing. Because I look up from all these plans I’ve been making for a life that unfolds perfectly and see only a catastrophe I never imagined I could create. Never thought that I could destroy my life trying in vain to design my life. But therein lies the danger of vanity. It teaches us only to think more of ourselves than we’re actually capable of being. Leads us to seeing life through a lens of irrationality.

And I just can’t do that to myself anymore.

Too much on the line, too much left to live for. Not for me, and for once, that’s actually the part that excites me. Because again, I look up and see quite clearly what I can do when I clearly care only about me and what I think best for me. And I just gotta be honest, I don’t see much point in chasing more of my own glory when the surroundings it leads to are this bloody gory! No, I’ve done ripped to shreds enough of my hope, my joy, my story, myself.

I think I’ll officially retire from trying to help myself toward all I once wanted for myself. Because having gotten quite a bit of those dreams, I see now just why He asks us to let Him take the lead!

There’s just nothing we can do with some illusion of control over our lives that’s actually worth doing. There is no prize to win at pride’s insistence that we can do this with His interference. There isn’t some pot of gold waiting at the end of these selfish rainbows we’re painting inside plans we’re making. Nor is there any point to keep trying to be what we were never meant to be.

For God didn’t create us to steal our lives from Him. He created us to remain in Him, and since we chose otherwise, He died to live in us. And if the King of Heaven was willing to die in order to lead me toward everything better than everything I’ve found and been and become, I just don’t see any reason in not letting Him. Because again, I’ve done this my way, and well, turns out my way sucks.

His way saves.

And so yeah, I count my life as worth nothing to me as I know I can do nothing with it than can come close to what He’s promised He can. Because I now finally understand, or at least I’m starting to, that God doesn’t call us to dispense our lives by giving our time to whatever we think might be worth the regard, as if we know what matters having lived a past proving we don’t.

No, He rather calls us to dispossess our lives, as such is quite possibly the only way to show Him that we finally agree that, as He’s the One who gave us this time, then He is too the only One who deserves to tell us how to use it.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold