How is it that you know my heart so well and know exactly who to use and how to use them to tell me who I am? Lord, I am at a place where I just want to spend time with you. More than I want to do anything else. There something in me that says not too, not to spend too much time with you, to be doing other things, that I shouldn’t have this much time to spend with you but your all I want to do for the rest of my life. I don’t want anything else anymore. So I can’t have too much time with you. It’s this word of yours. I read a chapter and am overwhelmed by the depth and the breadth of it. I can’t get a grasp on this word they can on anything else. So to read it for a just a few minutes…I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think that I am supposed. God, keep telling me that I can spend as much time with you as possible.
As Brother Lawrence said, God has infinite treasures to give us. Yet a little tangible devotion, which passes away in a moment, satisfies us. How blind we are, since in this way we tie Gods hands, and we stop the abundance of His grace! But when He finds a soul penetrated with living faith, He pours out grace on it in abundance. Gods grace is like a torrent. When it is stopped from taking its ordinary course it looks for another outlet, and when it finds one, it spreads out with impetuosity and abundance.
I think its because God you made my heart for yourself. So as I just barely begin this process of letting it be satisfied in you, I can’t get enough. I wonder, or am perhaps sure, that we should never get enough of you. And I keep trying to label this purpose and meaning onto this season of life, saying, well I am being prepared now for work later or soon I’m not going to have time to spend with God so I am storing up or maybe soon I wont have as much desire to be with God, or life just won’t allow this time together, but for now it does. Please, God, only you can grant me the courage and the peace to stop fighting it. To stop fighting the purest desire I’ve maybe ever had. As Henri Nouwen said, we desperately need men and women who know the heart of God. “A heart that forgives, cares, reaches out, and wants to heal.” And I will never know your heart at all through a study of theology. I will only come to know it this way. These days I sit at home with the Word and a cup of coffee and wait on you and let you come in and be together. The strange thing about your heart Lord is that the less I spend time with you, the less I have desire to spend time with you, the less I get out of our time, the less I want to stay with you. The reverse is true. If I spend an hour with you, I’d like another hour. And if I have another hour, I just want to stay the whole day.
Lord, forgive me if I am hiding from the world with you and you want me to be out more. Forgive me lord, if I am trying to pour into to few or too many people. Forgive me for begging for a mission and a ministry and a purpose when all that has already been given to me, and my mission is to know Christ and him crucified and carry that to the ends of the earth. I do need you. All the time. Desperately. I can’t deny my need for you.
What is this thing that we Christians do? As we strive to figure out who you are and who we are and what you want us to do? Bless our striving dear lord? Make this utterly human thing holy, they way only you can?
God, I think maybe part of this fear is that the things that we love in this life are from you and are ways you want to work though us, but they threaten to consume us and take your place. Like with writing and me. It a source of deep joy and deep anguish already, and I barely write at all in terms of the realm of writers. And whenever anyone says, yes you have a gift; it is rush of relief and joy. Because I have a lot of fear towards the things and the ones I love the most. And I know that it is because when you choose to love, you inevitable choose to eventually grieve. So my rational mind says, don’t love. Run away from your loves and your gifts all that you hold dear because one, you might love them more than God and two you might lose them. And that is a very dangerous thing. But I don’t have to believe that because loss is really about death. And Christ has already conquered death. And I will not lose him. And that leads to some sort of freedom and stability that the thing that my heart belongs to cannot be taken from me. So I am free to write and free to love and free to sit here and not do work because I would much rather dance with you. And I can write and be okay with the fact that I might be good at it and be okay with the fact that I might not. Because it belongs to you. We offer little things of ours to you and you use them in huge ways.
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