I didn’t want to know. I wanted to just think there were hypocrites everywhere. I wanted to think I’d left my arrogance, my sense of secret heavenly knowledge club somewhere in my youth. I wanted to see the sunny side of the life I’d accepted as true. But now I’ve seen what happens when you take what you thought was a sabbatical (but is actually an entrance into perpetual rest), from years of being told when you’re ready to do things, which gifts you have, what a call, a vocation looks like, what to aspire to. For so long, I thought they knew. I put myself in submission to the system. I was anxious, dissatisfied, settling, always waiting, never measuring up, perpetually struggling with something, all the while certain it was part of my preparation for life. It felt like it was meant to be difficult. As though I was hard to love, and I could expect loving others to be work. I could expect to have to give up myself to experience love, acceptance, a position of service within my gifting might have been a mirage in a desert… a longing never satisfied.
The very way of life I had embraced as beautiful has grabbed both arms to hold me back, and demanded I run at the same time. The difficulty was not me, it was not the Maker, I was right to have the instinct to fight this, because it was abuse. It was breaking the commandment not to use the Name of God in vain because it justified its judgement and oppression and tradition and blamed it on Love. It’s so incongruent. There is no wandering through the desert in Christ’s message, only rest. Religion has made a shrine of the desert. Instead of embracing the silence and actively moving through it, becoming a voice in it, as John the Baptist did, fulfilling the calling even in the stark moments, we have made it a period of desperate waiting, prized the abstract longing, called it holy discontent out of which desire for revival comes. Doubtless he has met some of us here, softened us in the waiting process, for we were finally quiet enough to hear what he already said. Children in a temper tantrum do eventually tire and become silent. The things we have misquoted in our religion… When we are weak, he is strong, they that wait on Lord, shall renew their strength. We see these things in such a helpless light… Like an eternal pregnant pause only the Divine can bring an end to, he who is out there, transcends and saves us from our circumstance. HE cannot, after all, move us until we are humbled, self abased, full of the knowledge that we are nothing. It is then, when we realize we are only of value in Him, that we are ready for service anyway. Not so? Not. So. A fallacy proven by failure. No one ever became utterly convinced in their own mind to the point of trusting their actions to be the good work put before them to do without a hint of insecurity from this starting line. There is always a degree of “what if” about the decision, and a panicky need for God to close a door, and an equal dichotomy of wondering over regrets if I did not pound hard enough for heaven to hear… Reality is much simpler.
I exist in HIM. Some day is NOW. The Kingdom of God is NOW. I waited, but I looked out when I should have looked within, for I only felt weak. He is in me, I am in him… I AM STRONG.
It is time, I think to cast off that which hinders, for I was born to more, to greatness, and I have complacently accepted mediocrity. I do not want to sit and wait. I am a writer, a singer, a healer, a mind given to deep thought, ears to listening, a mouth connected to a heart which speaks love. These are his pleasant thoughts manifest in my being. My engagement in such flow of activity is my praise. While I sat and waited for it to be time for them to be exercised in a “spiritual setting,” the rocks were forced to cry out. No more. I emerge whole through the gate in my open mind. I embrace life. I am well, free, whole. Healed. I cry no vain tears. I do not wait for heaven for life to begin. I have this moment, and in it, I sit in my right mind. I have the mind of Christ. This is the way, walk in it. I open my hands to accept the good you have placed in them. I abandon fear, to which I have long been captive. For I am enough. Music and healing flow. I have a place in your world. I belong. I have been placed where I am free to love. Perhaps, all along, the desert has been the mirage, and the mirage the reality. Perhaps it is not what I have seen that is the problem, but what I have chosen to look at. I choose to see with the eye of my soul, the growth that is. I am beauty. I am life. I am enough. Complete. I can see.