For understand this: there is no victory without me. Without me all is empty shell, open casket, pale and cold. Victory with me is given with shouts of joy and no bloodletting. It is worked with cries and trumpet calls, but also patient sitting and dull waiting. Glory looks decidedly different close up.
Here in my heart, the very definitions of words are changing, coming face-to-face with their own inadequacy. For the spoils of war are given from my hand, not looted, and the lands passed on to those I deem worthy, my trust-friends and confidantes. The good earth is given as territories to those who will husband it with tender hearts and soiled hands.
I eschew the rich and the powerful who do not want to get their hands dirty or their hearts broken.
For my people are the broken in heart and the crushed in spirit, the low and the humble, who tend their own roots before pruning the branches of others, and their soft, brittle wondering warms my heart. These are my beloved dear ones, the lost and confused, the uncertain and the wounded. Dismiss them at your peril, for you send me away with them! If you want to find me, look here first, among the discarded and bereft, and do not speak to me of rewards and revival until you have lived a time in their love.
I take no prisoners, no tepid self-servers who will not give me their whole hearts. I am in the business of freedom and completion, redemption and blessing. Your boldness will not serve you here. Remember your knees and what they are for. When you can bend, you will rise my children. Remember your neck and what it is for; when its stiffness can bow, then your heads will be lifted lovingly. This is my way, dusty and true. Walk in it.
Selah
Diamonds
DIAMONDS AMONG MEN, WOMEN, and children are those who seek me out by seeking the good and humble hearts in themselves and others. For it is the childlike, pure-souled and helpless who can truly see goodness. The clever judge everything and think themselves wise. The wicked see only what might profit them, and the strong lambast anyone who tries to offer them aid or succour.
Do you see, my beloved, how much these things impede the flow of my kingdom? Therefore, seek not the smart, the selfish or the self-sufficient, for in their hearts and minds they are already saved and healed, whole and presumptuous in their perfection, when the reality is far from this.
This is what is meant by “if you lose your life you will gain it,” for it is only those who speak of their own unworthiness who become worthy, and only those who give up their hearts willingly who can truly love the world into submission.
I love everyone with an equal and unmatched passion, which even the universe balks at. Do not mistake this or think otherwise. But it is only the few who walk into that love by becoming small enough in their own eyes, who will be utterly enveloped by love in this life.
More is to come, of course, but I do not wish to speak of this yet, for I am like a parent on Christmas Eve who has hidden all the best presents and will relish the giving out on our special day, when there shall be hands clapped in glee and unscheduled dancing from the heart, mine and yours, and the floor of heaven shall rock with happy laughter!
See, I can hardly contain the vision of it, even within myself! But for now, the seedlings must grow to be trained in the Way. I am the Good Gardener, and I may be trusted with all things, from the care of the tiniest wind-blown seed to the mightiest, most ancient of oaks.
Place everything in my hands in prayer, therefore, and like all good under-gardeners, toil and watch and wait. The diamonds are growing. I can hear them sing.
Selah
Time
TIME IS NOT THE THING YOU THINK IT IS. Time is expansive and elastic. It is there to enable and enlarge, not to constrict and confine. Time is your helpmeet, for it divides the day into hours of prayer, of meeting, of work, play, challenge, and rest, and the night into a silent hopeful darkness for denizens of moon-gazing, star-watching, birthing of wisdom. A time for doers, a time for dreamers. Lines may be crossed over or mixed up, yet time remains the same: a watchman on the towers of your life who proclaims the coming of the dawn and the dusk, who sings you into prayers and death alike. But though time seems rigid and preset, it is pegged out as the boundary of an encampment, and the more you savour it, the further the rope reaches.
If you take no notice of the markers I have placed, you will trip over them before you see them and lie face down in the dust, hot and confused, wondering at your own ignorance of the obvious.
Time is the Good Shepherd’s sheepdog, a Border Collie who will herd and guide you, if you know how to respond to her presence, and recognize as she does, the sound of my voice and the pitch of my whistle. Be wise therefore and learn the ways of edges and guidelines, of drooping eyelids and weary backs, of aching heads and sore knees, of overworked hands. For all these are shepherdings into rest, and my fold awaits you always, a place of replenishment and safety, love and restoration.
Visit often and let the grass grow green and lush for your readiness, and your jaws rest from the grind.
Selah
Prayer
BUSYNESS MUST ALWAYS MAKE WAY FOR PRAYER and not the other way around. We cannot shoehorn prayer into our day as if it were another thing to cross off the list. For prayer is not something you do, it is something beautiful that happens in your heart, a fluttering burst of coloured wings soaring up to their maker when they hear his voice in the stillness. A flock of songbirds returning to their mother, who is calling them up to higher branches.
Prayer is always a homecoming, a place where desires find their true voice and character and are not what you thought they were. Where desperations are met with tear-brimming eyes full of compassion and mercy.
Prayer is a reaching up and out, a wondering, not-knowing, questioning, angry demand for demonstration sometimes, met with loving hands closing around your tantrumming fist. A wailing and a gnashing of teeth, hell brought before heaven’s throne, looking for answers and finding them.
For no one goes away from my table hungry. Did I not speak? Did I not answer you? Was the air crackling with the un-saidness of my words? Does this silence all around your pain let the naysayers creep in, telling you to ‘curse God and die’, be done with it, admit the non-existence of I AM, or the not-caring of love itself, the lies told by the truth of the Word? This is folly, and child’s talk, the babbling of fools in the marketplace, of gossips at the city gate.
How can the one who created ears not hear? Or the one who gave you sight, not see everything? Nothing is hidden from me. Your words and longings, your heart cries, your situations of need, arise before me tenfold. I know all. The softest unspoken whisper of disappointment rises alongside the loudest birth-pain groaning.
I will respond. I AM response. Relationship is what I do.
Do not be dismayed. For who are you to know when legions of angels have been dispatched on your behalf, or a journey set in motion, or a healing balm called for?
I alone have all the answers, and in me you must place your confidence and your trust. Your hearts are mine and I care prodigiously, painfully for each one. Life is not a game. I take serious things seriously.
But know this. I will not answer your whining or your selfish disdain of others, your foolish prattling and your skin-deep wants. For I know you better than you know yourself and I will give you only good gifts.
I sense what you need, even before you part your lips to speak, but I like to hear your voice and