Thursday, September 20, 2007

Dear God,

Honesty. Baring one's own soul. Owning feelings. Being forthright. Letting go.

Carrying hurts is a weighty proposition. Tiring, exhausting, allowing space for pain to grow, resentment to take hold, bitterness to frost the heart. Senseless.

I am a carrier. I confess it. I carry hurts. It's not a noble feat, nor a worthwhile endeavor. When I carry my own personal disappointments around, they get heavier and heavier, weighing me down. Sometimes I feel my shoulders leaning down and forward. My feet feel the added weight. It takes more energy to pick up my feet, one at a time, and keep walking forward. Eventually I falter and fall or I decide to care properly for the added burden.

Today I really felt the weight and heard your gentle whisper. I did what you wanted me to do. I confronted my burden, looked at it from all sides, explored solutions. I was honest, forthright. I owned my own frailties and flaws. I set forth my needs and expectations. I listened. I felt lighter, less burdened.

And now hours later I am thinking more clearly. I am able to smile, to take in instead of pushing away. I can take nourishment again, of the spiritual variety. I have let you in, taking the place of the hurt for I had given it center stage. No wonder I was off kilter.

Sometimes my mind gets so fixed on a hurt that I let it fester inside me. I rob my insides of fresh spirit air. My "home" gets stale, stuffy, smelly like an old unattended mildewy basement. The curtains are pulled inward, allowing only the barest of light to shine through. Cobwebs form because I grow stagnant, allowing undesirables to link up with me. I don't feel well because I stop goodness and beauty from regularly entering into my soul, daily refreshing my spirit. And since I prohibit all your good things from coming into my "home", I get cranky, mean, ugly. And what has started growing inside me, like creepy crawlers, comes flying out. Good Lord, save me from myself! (Doesn't hurt to save others around me as well)

But when I allow you to break through the exterior steel wall I erect from time to time, you wiggle your way through the window, past the curtains, beyond the creepy crawlers to my center and there you offer me mercy. My head falls in shame and sorrow. I speak my truth, cry a while, then exchange my burden for the mercy, a gift of great proportion. Opening the curtains and windows, dusting off the creepy crawlers (or carefully carrying them into a proper space in the outdoors) letting in the spirit breeze, the light breaks in and everything looks new again.

I can start over.

Wall-breaker-downer God,
trusting in you
makes me
a better me.
I simply
am not
all I can be
without you.
Not like a cripple
looking for a crutch
but rather
more potential
is revealed
within me.
Resources
come to life,
some I have not
seen before.
It's all there
waiting to be revealed.
But I allow you
to break through,
to enter
the interior
of my soul.
Oh forgive
my hasty departure
from you,
from moving you over
and giving
so much space
to other things.
Let me dance
in fields of daisies
with you at my side.
Help me to rest
my interier.
Speak the truth
of silence
within me.

A grateful me, Andrea