Month: November 2018

I choose to be here with You now, because You choose to be here with me now. This is a mutual love thing going on…and You chose me first. I am not winning Your affections on account of any special virtue…This love relationship has been one hundred percent initiated by You and You alone, and the only way I can actually reciprocate it is to do so from a place of complete honesty. I am what I am, and You offer to accept me that way, and only as we continue on these terms am I transformed from glory to glory, into the person You’ve intended me to become. This is how I step into my destiny…by being honest about who I am, and about who You are, and by continuing in a place of simple acceptance.

As I rise this morning, I look first to You, Jesus. You are always with me, and I choose to keep this first in my mind. I need this truth to permeate everything I think, say, and do, in order for You to do your healing work in my life as effectively as possible. I choose now to refuse the lies of my enemy, which slither and stalk, threatening me with fear and condemnation. These thoughts are not mine, and they do not come from You, Jesus, and they have nothing to do with Your ways or Your kingdom. I cast them down, and I stand firm in the original words You have spoken to your servant…

I even repent a little bit, Lord, for thinking lower of our relationship than You do, for you say in Your word they You have called me no longer a servant, but a friend! Help me to understand this friendship better today, as I go about my life. Help me to understand and to believe that I have friendship with God.

I stand as one guilty of accusing God’s plan. I don’t resist these charges. Their allegations are true. I’ve been weighed and found wanting in all kinds of ways. But Jesus, you are always, always, always calling me up and away with you,  asking me to forgive myself and move forward, as if these things that I have done don’t even matter at all.

How can this be? I am told that you are a holy God, absolutely intolerant of sin, and I am shown my own trespasses in a light and a way after which I have no misgivings about the severity of things, in general.

None of this matters to you. Jesus, your atonement has rendered all my transgressions inert, removed, harmless, irrelevant…and my only actual instructions from you now are to come up and away, away from the catastrophe, away from the lies, away from the things which put my mind in a place where I am vulnerable to believing that there is anything beneficial at all whatsoever about the way things can go, apart from you, because there is no separation now. I must retain NOW in my thoughts, in my memories. I must remember NOW.

You are with me NOW. You call me up to you NOW. You call me up and away in the moment, in each individual moment, and they are adventures, all of them, beyond my most optimistic inclinations, and they are wonderful beyond words, and all of this is too much for me. It is too good.

This is what I am called to wake up to, in this great, violent spasm of repentance. This is what you mean when you talk about choosing you. This is righteousness, this beautiful perfection. I have been a fool, and you call me anyway. I have been a transgressor, an accuser, a wretched, vengeful glutton, running blindly from pain, and into pain, and slapping away the helps and the provisions, and the opportunities for more and greater freedom. I have chosen the darkness, and I was choosing the darkness when you found me, and I continued to choose it in all kinds of ways when you broke in upon me and invaded my soul with peace.

You take me from this perch of malevolent fear, and you place me in a garden of joy.

I must remember the NOW. I look at each present moment as only an opportunity for more of what you are in my NOW.

In this place of choosing only you, there flows a river of healing that never stops. Death no longer progresses, no longer attains, no longer controls or directs. Life has been chosen here now, and it is all that there is for me, for us…and we choose it together.