The ever-pestering of repeated thoughts and regrets and
pains and losses. There is not a moment when these things which haunt us do not tap us on the shoulder and whisper its little nothings. And, quite often, it asks us to dance. To dance the dance of pain and mourning; of remembrance and regret. These things which make us feel so limited and incapable and small and out of control.
“Failure!” it often cries. And it sells its wares on the street
corners of our minds, and our brains take the candy of it and are
intoxicated by all the untruths of these insidious lies. Soon, there’s more and more of them.
Have we not taught our brains to not take these candies
from these evil sources? These untrustable strangers? Do we not guard our brains like children?
We ought to, for they are so prone to delicacy. So prone to falling prey to ugly things. We ought to keep them near and pull them close as they pass by those sellers of lies within the alleys of our thought. We ought to whisper to them “see those? Avoid them!” and keep them taught on a leash.
And yet, we let our minds free, instead, like wild dogs who
feast on roadkill and foam at the mouth. And they are sickly! How do we wonder why they are sickly? We never tend to them and their diets; we let them roam and eat and they bring ugly and rotten things home to stench up our thoughts more and more. Their vomit covers the floor of our minds and it eventually seeps into our hearts and makes them equally as ugly!
Is it these which we must surrender to the hands of God?
It is. And it is these things which are hardest to give up, for these wild dogs of our brains become addicted to the novicane of lies and the pain of ugliness. It feasts on it and yaps and bites and grows ugly with others until we are all gnashing our teeth at each other with sharp canines trained against a metal sharpening block.
We always are up in arms for the next war to pick with the
dog beside us. They snarl and we snap and they bite and we toss. They scratch and we snatch. And all of us are red in the eyes and foaming at the mouths. Why? Because our brains are full of poison. Full of lies and discouragements and judgements which we feed on and soon force-feed to others.
This feast becomes our own doom. The meals we put
before our minds become their very downfall and death. And somehow, we never see it. We never notice that this is what has happened, and so we all go on, getting worse and worse and falling to dysfunction and then to chaos, and then to dystrophy and then to tyranny and then to atrophy.
And what is more, is that, at some point, we silently chose
it; even if it took years and years and tiny little snips and snaps and yaps.
The addiction becomes expensive, but we keep it up, cherishing the risk rather than a better reward; keeping danger in our hands, rather than wisdom at our sides. Making friends with
ease, rather than guarding our ways with strength and finding
dignity in morality.
And see, to let go of this toxic feast of lies, and go in search for truth and to seek peace, is to gain! Yet, we strive and strive instead to be god on our own, and so never find his peace. For we seek to grasp, not to understand; to control and know, rather than to humbly follow the One who does know.
Lay down your arms; let us all lay down our arms. Let us
quiet our gnashing of teeth. Let us close our jaws, but not clench them. Let us relax our shoulders and not stand over our brothers and sisters. And let the redness in our eyes instead rest in brightness and goodness and peace. Let our faces shine with light, rather than steaming in smoke and anger.
Let us rest, let us look to the One who leads and let us stoop before his glory and bow humbly; for here we will find peace and peace will flow as a river of goodness through our hearts
and restoration begins.
To play a tug of war is to lose it. And by saying this, I
mean, when you are too proud to bow humbly to the authorship of God, my dear, do you think you can succeed?
Why must you know, oh tortured soul, all these things which are for God to know? Why must you see and know to rest? Why this incapability to rest in something which does know?
To know that it can know for you? That it can guide this without your knowing? What is this? What is all this commotion, tortured soul?
This fight of striving on our own…when we continue in it,
we lose our strength, and kick up the dust so much that we no
longer can see. But, we have a stronger warrior on our side—the
Lord. And if we let him fight, the destined ending comes about
anyways, and we’ve lost no strength. Indeed, we’ve gained
strength. For, to do it in our own strength is to do it the weakest
and slowest and hardest way possible.
What is that saying? “Work smarter not harder?” This is
efficiency. To be smart and wise; this saves time. It does not
expend resources which are valuable or limited. And indeed, we
are limited. But God is unlimited.
We could forever run around in the circus of the mind and
up to the booths of each of its wares of advice and we will never
find a trustworthy thing—even if they be not the sellers of the
poison, yet they are fleshen and created up anyways.
Indeed, I hop now to one booth and it says one thing:
“Hello.” Says the man behind the counter, spectacles on his
nose. He certainly looks wisely! I might think.
“Hello.” I return. “I’ve got this issue, you see, and it needs
solved. What must I do?”
And he hmms and hahs and says, “Well, of course, you
must do this. It is so reasonable and here is the logic from which it was derived.” And he pulls out his fancy looking charts which
seem so legitimate at the time. And I thank him, and interview a
few more.
By the end of my excursion, I have five different answers, but ten different theories and all of them seem reasonable in my limited human mind, and so I visit them again to follow up, because I am still confused on what to do; many of them contradict the others!
Man number one has abandoned his theory already and
shows me a new chart. Warehouse number two dipped ship and
has given up the fight. The last three hmm and hah again and say similar things to what they said before.
But all this goes on in the council of my own mind. And,
within my own head, all is limited by its fleshen walls and
mechanical organs. None of this is knowledge which comes from outside the universe. All of it is limited human thought.
But, God, you see, is outside of the fleshen prison gates. He
sits above the universe and created knowledge itself. He is all
knowledge. He is all wisdom and logic and glory. And there is no fallible way in him, for he sees all and knows all and thus, there is no err in his way.
He sits above all this: our human circumstances. He is
outside of it all. He peers down into the hearts and minds of
mankind and laughs, for we have such limited balloons of thought. And each of these are so easily popped!
The human mind is always changeable, for it can only
agree with what it knows, and once it knows or experiences
differently: “wowie! A new world of thought!” And thus, the air in these little balloon minds can change and sway, but they only hold so little. And they are so stuck in their own perspectives.
But God owns the air of knowledge and wisdom. He does
not breathe one balloon of thought. He does not only know one
gate of knowledge, nor does he pass through only one street of
wisdom. His kingdom is the whole storehouse of all wisdom and knowledge! It is vast and limitless!
All this, friends, is to say that to strive is futile. To never
cease in our own strength is to guarantee the most confusing and difficult path. Though it be common-trod, it is futile; a hopeless jaunt around an idle track. Both you and I can only see through the peepholes in our own skulls! And how far is that? Barely the horizon! And we are driven by electricity and little chemicals! Oh fallible things!!
We can see to barely the horizon, and then there is fog and other weather, and smog and manmade confusion. This is what our peepholes are limited by: ourselves, nature, and others of mankind and their schemes. The whole physical realm trips us up.
Thus, our strivings in our own sight and strength are
entirely futile and ever-changing and imminently failing. But God is never-changing. He is still. He sits in one place and sees all. He sees through the fog and smog and rain and sea and even through our thick heads—our stubborn prisons of human thought!
He does not have a skull of bones nor eyes of flesh, or a
mind that is created and doomed (though his son was cursed to this for us).
He does not have mechanical organs which govern his very
functioning. His being and living is without any flesh—aside of
what the son took on to liken with us and suffer with his own creation out of mercy; yet he also conquered this, and even death.
He is without any prison of confinement or fallibility or limit. He is limitless and infallible and unconfined.
I say all this, because V’s thoughts are never ceasing, and I
imagine you must bore of them. This is because it must mix
effortlessly with your own waters: nothing of it is removed or
different from your own unreachable strivings. It is not exciting,
because it is no different than your own every day.
And, if it does quite excite your soul, then it must be that
you have sought to be understood and to know that you are not the only who is on the hamster wheel of limited strivings out there.
And you are not! Maybe V is consolation to you.
And, if you are neither of these, then I suppose you ought
to look in the mirror, for, although you are not V, you are you.
And in your life, there are strivings, or stubbornness, or
passiveness or gnashing or spikes which lay flat all usefulness; or
any other kind of thing which is so affected by the human circus of life and limit and pain and past and change. And this certainly is true and you are born with the pain of this plaguing your heart.
To submit to the ever-ness of God is to require one humble
receptacle in ourselves. And, if we let God pour into this little
receptacle a trickle of his knowledge, then we need not see with
our own eyes, for we are fed from his limitlessness. We follow him and acquiesce to him, for He knows all.
All we need to be are the legs. He is our eyes, and we humbly accept this gift with respect to the one from whom it comes. We need not even pick and choose and decide and hmm and hah, we are given his gift; the knowledge of his divine authorship.
And we need only that acceptance and submission to his ever-ness to forever be secure. For then we do not rely on ourselves and our striving.
Receive and rest, tortured soul; receive the peace of God’s
ever-ness. …And then, we need not ever rely on our balloons of thought to carry us far. For we are then guided by the winds of the breath of knowledge from his kingdom. And these will lift us more than our one sad balloon ever will. And we drift upon it to our resting place. To our peace; to our God.
To strive in our never-ceasing human fight is to lose, but to
receive the gift of communion with God is to ever-win. For he is ever and he is Everness and he forever wins.
V is ever-striving, is she not? And E is ever-seeking. When
will they both rest? When will they see that they cannot see? And accept their limitedness? Only the reverence of God could cure their never-ness: their never-findingness and never-stillness and never-secureness.
We are neverness and God is everness.
Each of us are a bit of both of these: V and E. We always
ponder and question, and then we run and hide and take action out of fear. All of our actions are driven by some human thing: such as fear or selfishness; all these which are trapped in our fleshen ego and limited thought.
And let us not think that we are God that we could vainly
produce his holiness and everness. For in this striving, too, we are doomed. He is ever-above us. And our humanness will forever fall flat before him and his vastness and greatness and limitlessness.
We are never above God. We are below him in every way.
My dears, I say all these things in, possibly, a most hypocritical way, for I nearly never loosen my own fingers on all these things which I think I know. And handing it to God, Who I
know has bigger hands than I do, and Who I know is above me,
still sometimes burns me. It burns my flesh and makes my weakness cry. But that is because I am a thing of flesh. And oh,
emotions wreak my flesh. (Or maybe my flesh wreaks my
emotions—for God himself feels, and created emotion, but he feels in a perfect way and his emotions are not twisted by chemicals in his brain.) How they wreak it. But for such a sinful thing as flesh to be burned by the holiness and glory of God; this is gain. For indeed, to be released of its physical prison is freedom.
I only wish E and V would be able to not make the same
mistakes as I in sabotaging my own life. I hope dearly that they get it right. That they save themselves before they are me. So fragilely human am I. 😦
I cannot see beyond me, and still I try to pick up the reigns.
What a fool am I. To think I, on my own, could steer this beast of life, or even understand it. What a fool am I. Why must I know?
Why do I think I can know? Or should know? As if things only
happen when I have knowledge and understanding of them. Why can I not just leave it to God to know, and follow the leader? What a conceited child am I.
(Excerpted from “Everness and Neverness,” Kanda Land by Lovless)
Thank you for reading 🙂
I hope your Saturday is bright–if not in weather, then in spirit, yet preferably in both 🙂
–A.M.M.
Popp!nTalk 