Guess why the meek inherit the earth?

​Because after God destroys the haughty and the arrogant, the meek are the only ones left standing.
Adam, Noah, Job, the Israelites, Peter, Paul, Jesus--the second Adam...
and I, who crawled out of the crater of my arrogant life. Humbled and barely alive. But barely alive in the sense a new born baby is barely alive; not because I had almost died, but because I had barely lived. And like every newborn thing, at the sound of my first cry, an inheritor of the whole earth.

Zephaniah 3:11-12

You’re getting religious.
You’re getting to the place where you finally meet God.

Christ didn’t just lower himself to the earth, he went even lower, he lowered himself to the cross. 
He went all the way to the bottom of Job.
Where man and his suffering and God finally meet.

The essential thing a truly and finally lost person realizes is not that he can’t find where he is going, but that he can’t find his way home.

Give is conscious—in the sense it is the preeminent gesture in life.  The servant becomes royalty and the king becomes a servant with the voluntary choice to give. The river flows in four directions from this throne. The circle of humanity is complete in the giving of the servant king.
Get is unconscious—in the sense it is the manna on the ground every morning at sunrise. It is the prince born into his miraculous kingdom with frankincense and myrrh laid beneath his cradle.
Until get means want
In wanting getting crawls into the light of consciousness, but to a dark, unnatural kind of light. The dimly lit fluorescence of the future.  With the advent of wanting, the breeze and shade of the garden, which is getting that is already having, turns into the strain and sweat of the fall.  And what of all the world is offered to a soul under this black sun?  It is only Satan’s loneliest bread, it is all the kingdoms of the world but only surveyable from the uninhabitable air of the stratosphere, it is only the suicidal jump from the precipice—not faith’s leap, but logic's.  Not a leap of faith into the father’s invisible hands, but a leap of logic into the faithless certainty of a maniac, his blind eyes leveled in arrogance, secure in the knowledge that controlling his choice is the same as controlling his outcome, sure of his next immortal step.  Certain the 10,000 hands of the cosmos are under his command.  Yet it is only thought, only conceptual, it is only a granting of three wishes, only a leading into three temptations—not real, not God. Do not follow this dark glow to the inverted landscape of reversed values where gray and gray and gray is the only comfort.  Where getting means grasping and grappling air and wanting means lacking and giving only means exchanging money at the lender’s table.  A topsy turvy world where holding on is the only way not to fall even as it chokes the life out of life.
Come into the light of day. The green pasture of “I shall not want.” Lay under the firey light of the sun.  Stand up and let go and laugh at the bottomless sky. Walk over the brightest peaks, and under the shadow of death.  With outstretched arms walk through the driest lands.  Walk and walk and walk.  Forever walk as one who walks on water.

You can’t have life and live it too.  
In the same way it is difficult to both be happy and know your happy.  To live life is to give it away at the same time.  To eat it.
As you enjoy the cake it goes away, and since you know this, there is a tendency to save the cake so you have it.  But if the cake remains a cake, then you have not enjoyed it. As you live life you lose it. But this is the only formula for enjoying it, which is what both a cake and a life are made for. If a cake remains a cake, then it is merely symbolic, which wouldn’t necessarily be all that terrible unless you keep insisting every night at the dinner table that your uneaten cake is not merely a symbol but, in fact, is a real cake. It is then that it is terrible and false and fatuous and a lie and tragic and embarrassing.  It is then it is merely a superficial decoration.  The same with life.  To actually be proud of the talent you wrapped in cloth and buried in the dirt, only to dig it out on the last day and present it back to the giver of life, unlived; the maker of cakes, uneaten; the candlemaker, unburnt; is shameful; is wasteful; it dishonors the master and creator of joy.
It is the same as life being worth the enjoying of it. The only way to enjoy it is to cut it up and share it, to ingest it.  To Lose it. 
The same as the candle. It’s only usefulness and enjoyment is in its burning. Is the candle worth it?
Energy is only good, in the sense it is only useful, also in the sense it is only energy, if it is released. I can not use the potential energy I have stored on top of the mountain, unless I leap. Life is only good if it is given away.
​

“Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”
40 days is like the period of time until death.  The thing you know is coming. There is the you that is listening, and the you that isn’t.  The you that is listening is the only one who can hear. The great, massive city—impossible to cross—is you. Jerusalem. The old city. The city of God became the city of you.  The city God made  became the city man made, the city you made.  You have thrown your life as far as you could, and even in it’s scale, impossibly distant from you in every direction,  it wasn’t enough.  You have pushed the limits, you have reached them, and now they are stretched to the breaking point. Walls you can no longer see and never examined are breached.  Something can and will throw further than you. The truth walks through, alone, proclaiming this single, small message. 
It is this inability to walk to limits and survey the limitless, which paralyzes and imprisons the soul. Because the city of your soul can arrogantly claim in it's near-sightedness, “I am all there is.” 
When just outside the city is God. It is this great city which rises before the eyes of God, blocking him from view.

​Jonah 3:4

a joyful heart  is more than a mere attitude, it is a compass that guides you to the center of God’s will

Go all the way to the blackness.
​Go all the way to the void. 
Go all the way to meaninglessness.
And wait there. And wait there.  And wait there. And wait there. 
Wait there like Solomon in the dark. And listen.
Then what?
A question emerges from the shadows.
If this is your condition, your existential state, could you choose to live anyway?
​

You are always supposed to save everyone from everything. 
But you are never supposed to save someone from themselves.

“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.”
And it is Jesus. 
It is not what Jesus did—in the same way it is not what gifts and offerings Abel brought—that confers the righteous label of “good and acceptable” upon him, but rather who he is.  
He is a way. The way.  The only road in a wilderness of roads that truly goes somewhere. The other roads, instead of flat and straight, having everyone rejected the foundations of the earth, cant dangerously upright like a hulled ship and stand on their ends as tall as pines, each branch gasping in mid-air, each root plunging  to hell.  
He is solid and flat and straight, cutting through the gray, misguided trunks of other ways to a golden city.  It's great, golden light only matched by his, the two shining one upon the other.  And being this other way—this road, this Jesus, this good shown to you, O mortal, this completely transformed thing—all of who you ARE—is what the Lord requires. 
“To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Micah 6:7-8