As I wake up this morning, I put aside every impulse and squirrel-seeking function, and I lay myself down at your feet, Jesus. I bring you my tired, frustrated self…I bring you my idol-worshiping, me-obsessed self that is excited to do something else immediately without focusing on you first…I bring you my worries, my cares, my anxieties, and I lay it all down as I come into your presence.
I refuse to listen to the lies that try to convince me otherwise. The enemy would tell me that you don’t have time for me, that I am not good enough, that I am not wholehearted enough, that my desire to walk in your favor is useless…
I know that these are lies. I know it from experience. I know it because you have heard the voice of my supplication a thousand times over, and you do hear it now, and your spirit testifies with my spirit that this is so. I choose to acknowledge your spirit as the source of ultimate and absolute truth, and to deny these other anxieties the right to influence my thoughts.
I come to you in the midst of the greatest pain and distress that I have ever known. Jesus, I have known pain so many times before, and have been intimate with suffering in so many ways, and you know this…but I have never seen this type of anguish. Nothing on this level. It doesn’t diminish with time, not even a little bit. It stays big and bright, and its fire burns just as hot now as it did even two years ago when this whole thing started. It threatens to consume absolutely all of me, to leave nothing behind, to rape and pillage my very last ounce of hope in your mercy…
Even now, your peace wells up within me. It is a peace that defies all else, and flies in the face of conventional wisdom. This is something that can only be known because it has been tasted. It cannot be explained. It cannot be purchased with money or with human effort. It cannot be looked for and discovered in the normal way. It can only be accepted as a gift.
It is the deepest form of anything, the fullest manifestation of the very thing that holds the universe together, and it is being born all over again, right here and now inside this very heart which cries out for reprieve and deliverance from a pain which can only be described in nightmares, and not with words.
This is what it means when it says that you are near to the brokenhearted.
Somehow, the fears and the panic are still an option, but I choose to lay them aside. I choose instead to focus on who you are. I choose to focus on all the different levels of it, which I have known, and on all of the different experiences that I have had of your mercy and grace in my life.
You came to me when I was young, and you stayed with me no matter what I did. I remember kneeling in prayer all those years ago, listening to that song, and I remember being struck by the awareness that I had never in my whole life been so sure of anything as I was of your acceptance and your love right there in that moment. I asked you to lead me and to guide me, and you picked me up out of a place of limitless confusion, and you carried me right into a big, beautiful life that I never could have earned or deserved.
All of these problems that are here with me now, they are temporary. Your love is the only thing that lasts forever, and everything that aligns itself with that love will pass with it into the realm of eternity.
I choose now, here and now, in the middle of this pain, to align myself with this love, even as it swells within me, and I allow it to take me completely over.
I choose to trust this love.
