Esther and the Human Condition
Father, I just want to thank You for the privilege to come before you--to get to worship You. I have not deserved to be here. How can it be, that Your love never changes? Here I am, having doubted you, lost faith, forgotten your faithfulness to me, fumbled endlessly with the condition of my heart--here I am, fully an utterly falliable human being--but You say You delight in me and call me Your own.
Amazing love! How can it be, that You should die for such as I? You died for lunacy, for my stiff-necked stubbornness, for bitterness and for desolation. Was this worth dying for Jesus? Why did you still choose to go to the cross for me?
Only because you delighted in me, despite the fact that I have no way of being who I am meant to be on my own. You want to be my Father, to tell me You know and share my pain. Only so that you could teach your child the strength and hope that is found in you--because she now thoroughly knows she can hold no hope to overcoming her human condition. At the limits of humanity--one's capacity for deriving meaning and purpose from reason and intellect, one's capacity to muster endless love amidst unending pain, one's determination and will that always fails at some point, one's memory that takes the wisdom of life's lessons You have taught me for granted--you have called me Your child!....Child! You call me your own, begotten of you, and you delight in me. In all my failures Lord, You have overcome. You smile and say "nevermind", you ask me to learn again, and ask me to rest in Your love. All you ask for, is for me to walk with You all of my days, to find strength in You in my inadequacy, to find stillness and peace in turmoil and trouble, to rest in Your unfailing love.
When I am old and grey and overcome with dementia or senility, will I be cackling away in infantile ignorance of the realities of my life, my experiences, my responsibilities to You, and who I am? Will I forget You, or my need for You Lord? Will I have any concept of who You are at all? But in many ways I realise this has already set in, I have failed you in these ways countless times, and You are saying it doesn't matter. You are teaching me that my relationship with You is not dependent on what I do, or who I am. I am called to grow in You and bear fruit, but that is a privilege and an inevitable condition that comes with loving and following You, and not key performance indicators by which you measure out Your love for me. You will never leave me or forsake me, and I will always be Yours to call tenderly as Your own.
I had always feared the day when I would no longer be able to hold on to You Lord. I am afraid to lose You--afraid when You are silent and far away, because when I start to believe You have given up on me, or want nothing to do with me, life becomes nothing but a tiresome existence and I lose sight of my reason for living. But You've promised that You'll never leave me, which only means Your silences are there to teach me as well. Father You taught Tozer that you cannot use anyone significantly until he has deeply experienced pain, and hopelessness. And it is true that it’s only in these moments where we come to know utterly our limitations as human beings--we often think we have a capacity for being this or that, and can do so much more than we do--and only after knowing these things can we know our need for You. Satan tries sometimes to twist this into the lie that You are egoistical and maniacal, for making us so, so that we'd be dependent on You. But Lord, you made us to love us. You made us in Your very image--can there be any greater expression of Your love for us? You wanted us to be like You. And that entails becoming beings that had a capacity for love as well. You wanted us to be empowered not in terms of an expansion of our capacity to reason, perceive, know (cf Satan's words to Eve) , but in terms of Your character. Our human condition is not the result of egoism on Your part, but only so we could know Your love and have need to give and receive--a consequence of being made in Your image--met.
| e.s.t.h.e.r in the arms of Jesus @
5/15/2006 11:28:00 am |
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