this prayer

I wasn’t going to put this up, but tonight the clouds are gathering and the thunder is stirring my heart to call out to each of you.

Instead of defining my beliefs, I am going to go straight into this prayer I am praying:

“Oh, God! Every time I turn around, you have turned everything upside down. Here I am again, and this time I don’t have any fancy words to pray. You hear me, I know you listen.

Help me, and help my friends, to know the deeper comfort of your love, the kind of of love that enables us to look at contradiction and smile. Circumstances are no measure of what this life is worth, and neither are faulty memories or trumped-up future goals. God, help.

In this small moment, with the light rain coming down from the sky, I turn my face up, and I ask for help. I’ve never really grown in my ability or capacity to receive grace. In all this time of believing, my tendency to pull away from the intimacy of your overwhelming love has not changed at all. Believing is still the same exact raw, desperate experience. Believing still takes every single thing I’ve got. All my courage (thin as it is), all my strength, all my soul… believing you and receiving your grace (your love, your protection, your presence) takes every ounce of guts I’ve got. Help.”

I may feel the dread of circumstantial reality all around me, but I am trusting the Resurrection here. I can’t see. I don’t know. I am ill-equipped, unprepared, totally stunned, worn out, and not even close to being the person I wanted to become… but I do believe that my Redeemer Lives, and that His love can take away the shame and sin and that his Love is enough for us. I believe because he makes me to believe by the power of the Life that overcomes death. I am nothing, this life I live is nothing, when compared to the blood he bled, the death that he died for us, and the incredible victory he won for us. I can’t see. I don’t know.

But I don’t live on a stage after all, and I don’t have the answers. The time has come to worship God and get stripped to the core again, to believe from my core again.