With force

I’ve been praying terrible prayers about someone I care about. I started off praying for him lovely flowerily prayers. “God woo him, draw him in.” To "God take his life by force, shake everything he knows and destroy what he knows. Take him by force. Be like a terror on his heart. Pursue him and don’t let him go” God please don’t let him go.

I want much for this friend I want much. I want a life that is marked by the supernatural. That is more than what he is settling for. I pray that is life is unsettled until he comes to God. I pray that nothing gives him peace other than God I pray much.

But I pray those prayers for myself.

I will never forget the prayer for my favorite brother. God let him be miserable unless he is with you.

Tuesday I was running and I was thinking about that prayer and then started praying it for myself. But I guess against my will that prayer has become real.

God is not a simple idea, he is force that is relentless and will not let me go. He is kindness and gentleness and patience, oh so patience but a force that will not let me go.

I remember saying to God. “I am doing wrong. Why won’t you walk away from me? I would walk away from me.” but He didn’t He stayed… which made it worse, oh it made my struggle and sin worse because the guilt that he wouldn’t walk away kept nawing at me.

I remember this same friend asking me “why do you keep shoveling guilt…” And it is true, guilt is not the mark of Christianity. It is not the mark of grace or knowing you are forgiven… but it is the reality of a woman who knows she is cheating on her husband, it is the reality of someone who knows she is cheating on someone she loves. It is that knowledge that you are not only breaking your vows but you are affecting another person. Heck it is not even the vows part it is the honest to goodness knowing that you are being unfaithful to someone you love. There wouldn’t be the guilty if you didn’t love him.

I guess that is the one thing that I wish I could explain to him. If Christianity was fairy tales and rabbits then I would have never struggled with being with him. But God is not. He has never been that to me. God has always been real, present, touching me though I can’t see him. There in my heart in a way that I struggle to explain. Always who I talk to. A presence I feel and know. A personality and not just an idea. He is real and present… if it wasn’t for the fact that God is real to me then I would never have felt that I was cheating on him by being with this other person. Here’s the irony I would talk to Him about him… but never the other way around.

I woke up this morning thinking, praying, reading. I was reading blue like jazz… and I love his heart and the simplicity of what he writes. I have no idea if the stories are true or not but the ideas make me think. Ideas of the fact that there is no difference between me and the rapist, that there is nothing inherently good in me save Christ… good thoughts. Thoughts of wanting to be a force in people’s lives. I pray often to be light but I want more than that I want ot be a decision point for people. But for that to happen they have to be involved in my life in more than just the fun but in my very thoughts of God which is how is understand the world.

I want much out of life. I feel awake today. Awake in an eternal sort of way. Awake like I haven’t been in a while. Not content to just keep on living the status quo or to live in fear of others opinion but to love them more than that… to love them more than myself, to love them eternally.

Anyways those are the thoughts at 5 in the morning.

Good morning world.