My 2017 Prayer

I pray to be neither a perpetrator nor a victim but a forgiver. 

There’s power and growth in forgiveness. 

I pray for the grace to humble myself and let Him hear my heart cry. 

To fall to my knees and choose to let Him help me forgive. 

I pray for the ability to bear my cross by owning the way something or someone made me feel. 

There’s freedom in, instead of trying to overcome the pain, submitting to it, realizing it pained me for a reason, and then releasing the negative energy I’ve harbored as a result of that pain. 

More than that, making the intentional choice to do doing something for myself, not for the sake of anyone else, is a pure and truthful act that further sanctifies the relationship I have with myself.  

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who’ve trespassed against us.

On Demons.

It’s a hard season of life for a lot of people I know. It seems like wave after wave of unexpected and uninvited black tides keep pulling them under. And all I can do for them is try to be a reprieve of fresh air for a minute or two when the crush of gravity momentarily abates. It has me wondering how humans get there in the first place, and it has me terrified of demons. Like a shark to blood, they make their move at the first whiff of weakness. And then effortlessly they instill seemingly permanent feelings of falsities like fear and inadequacy. 

They have no boundaries. They meet us in what should be early morning splendor only to cloud a new day with dark veils of deception, teasing and taunting us, asking us how we’re going to possibly make it through another day. They sneak up on us at work as we’re unassumingly going about our day, mocking us and infiltrating our bloodstream with poisonous shots of anxiety and panic.  

They have no limits. They push and push and pull and pull; until our muscles are sore from clenching and our bodies ache from fatigue. They whisper and scream, soft but violent. They blur our lines of sanity so much so that we begin to think their thoughts are our own. They submit us into wearing their thorny and twisted crowns. And when there is no known beginning to their madness we cannot perceive an end. Time stands still but moves too fast. With no internal order we slip further into desperation and despair. We become void and listless and hollow shells of our old selves. Stuck underwater as the world goes its way, no longer remembering what it’s like to feel okay.

03

Who I am vs. Who you'd imagine me to be:
Two very different things.
The content underneath the sheath,
Made visible only to those who seek.

02

There,

In the middle of the dance floor,

You looked me in the eyes and asked if I still feel hurt by him.

And I knew exactly who it was you were talking about

But all my head could think about

Was that my heart’s been fractured by far greater things than a boy who couldn’t get his shit together;

Like my leaving father.