Tonight -- a prayer

Tonight I will rest on Your peace. I will not tear myself to shreds in the desperate search to find some value, some justification, for my own existence. I will choose to believe that You love me anyway.

Tonight I will let You love me. I will not dwell on the ones who failed to love, who lured my soul with the promise of friendship, only to mock and reject me when they had backed me into a corner where I admitted that their goodwill mattered to me. I will choose to believe that Your love is real.

Tonight I will entrust my heart to you. I know it isn’t worth much, it’s so pathetically self-centred, and fearful, and it’s been broken so many times that the sticky tape of my willpower can barely hold it together. Yet I believe You want it anyway.

Tonight I will share my dreams with You. They’re so secret I don’t tell anyone else, I know they’d only laugh. But You made rainbows and stars, and the lift of a bird’s wing against the sunset, You know why You made me me, and one day You will teach me how to fly. I want to know what Your dream is for me, to catch a glimpse of the possibility that will become in that place where Your grace makes these incongruities graceful.

Tonight I will trust that You really mean it when You say that You forgive me, that there’s no secret hoop You’re waiting for me to jump through before You take me in Your arms. I do not need to keep struggling with my shame, You bore it all and have borne it away for me.

Tonight I will not be afraid of all the holes in human love, even if I fall through them, I cannot fall out of Your hands. You always understand, even when I cannot understand myself. I will never understand You, but I know that I love You: feebly and foolishly, but that doesn’t matter, because it is so real, You are my only life. And You call forth this tremulous love, because You first loved me.

Tonight I will remember that every promise is Yes and amen in You.