Choose. You can choose.

I don't know what's been happening, but at least now I know that I don't know. You know? A year ago, I was so fearful - so anxious about what I didn't or couldn't know. I tried not to think about it so much so for months, I've been ensconced in this ''filler arc'' in my life. I think I needed one so I could rest and recover from the mental, emotional and spiritual torture I'd just come out of. But in that rest and recovery, I got vengeful. I got bitter.

So I let my entire view of existence as I knew it go to the gutter: living the life of a principled man didn't matter to me anymore because it didn't seem to save me from what I was going through.

I let it carry on, I let myself go. I was saying and doing things that a younger version of me would be mortified to find out. It wasn't as simple as that, though - I could hear it in my own conscience that something had gone very wrong and I was taking the wrong path to right a wrong done unto me.

But you can't escape your conscience forever - it'll follow you, for better or worse, all the days you live. The best we can do is try keep it quiet by going numb using whatever we know is bad for us. 

Keep that up often enough and you lose your sense of self to the pointless of this fleeting world. Let's fill ourselves with the unending appetite of our perishing bodies and die having experienced some level of happiness before we can no longer.

Something that's always mattered to me is choice. Being able to make decisions carries this strange allure because I know that's something I can do. To live is to choose, and to the set apart, to choose is to live. I can speak only for myself uniquely but to reject choice and consequence is to choose a prison for your mind. Freedom is a choice. Choice is a choice. Do you choose believe that you have a choice?

To exist above the impulses of this dying vessel and command it to obey my choice to choose freedom - that's been the season, I suppose, in the wilderness. I don't even know if I'm out of it, but I know that I don't know so my choice is to trust the beauty in being refined. The process needs you to have impurities that need to be removed: that's what being refined & purified is.

But reading that doesn't really take away the fear of pointlessness, does it? It's a thing that lingers so long as you continue to attach to this material world. Everything in it is vanishing, even the things that were here before you. It's another story entirely when you see something old - even older than you fall to the merciless march of time. 

Here's a word for you: meaningless. There is no meaning. Our purpose is to die, our lives begin to end.

But what if death was also a choice? 

What if the option to escape death into immortality existed? 

Would you choose to believe it? 

Would you even be able to choose?

What if the ways and luxuries of this world were designed to keep you from reaching that immortality?

What if the idea that there's no reason to life other than its own sake reasons you out of your chance to transcend this mortal coil.

I know that there is a core reason that we're here - to learn how to understand ourselves and evolve. If you're asking one of those born-agains, the core reason is to die daily. We're here to die, but in that death, find the Life we know that we've been separated from. It's knowing and accepting that we do die but if it's for the sake and unique purpose Jesus gives over to us, that death has immeasurable meaning. It's more than just ''being a good person'' or ''doing the right thing'' - it's wanting and desiring so deeply to do the godly thing even when it means we feel we're killing something inside of ourselves to reach a point of not even wanting to do anything wrong.

Facing death like a door into the next world, dying to ourselves every day until the new life begins - that's the best choice any of us will ever have.