While we all turn our backs and hide

Accept life with humility and patience, making allowances for each other because you love each other. Make it your aim to be at one in the Spirit, and you will inevitably be at peace with one another. You all belong to one body, of which there is one Spirit just as you all experienced one calling to one hope. There is one LORD, one faith, one baptism, one God, one Father of us all, who is the One over all, the One working through all and the One living in all. Ephesians 4:2-6

Break my heart in two until she returns to you. You love her so.

She breaks Your heart, You give her grace,

Take my heart, it is your own, Fill my hands with seeds to sow.

Reprehend my foolish pride So I can see her with Your eyes.  -City Psalms

I remember thirteen years ago, as does the rest of the world, the flaming twin towers. The horror of the smashing airplanes and billowing smoke and crumpling skyscrapers, replayed over and over again. And I remember sweet Charly rushing out of her bedroom door with tears streaming down her face and her voice trembling with rage, ”This is why I don’t believe in a loving God.”

And I guess this is why I do believe in a loving God, because of Charly’s streaming tears and trembling rage. Somewhere, somehow we learned that all of this is terribly wrong. And our hearts, when rightly aligned and tender and how it should be, are broken. Because that is what we have learned from our Abba Father. And He is not the Steinbeck god, and we are not ants. In The Pearl, “The ants were busy on the ground, big black ones with shiny bodies and the little dusty quick ants [and] Kino watched with the detachment of God while a dusty ant frantically tried to escape the sand trap an ant lion had dug for him.”

But sometimes our hearts harden with pride and impatience and fear and we need to return to that holy place, on our knees before the One, the one Father of us all, who is the One over all, the One working through all and the One living in all.  

And sometimes we turn our backs. We cling to our self tales that form bulwark adobe walls around our souls. And on that last day we will ask, “When did we see You hungry?”

And the song He sings to us is

What I want to you know, Is I will always love you.

Even if you feel you walk alone.

When you walk away from my love for you,

I will walk along unknown to you, until you come home.

No need to be so confused by all the fires you walk through,

Because they are breaking you and making you and building you to be

soft enough to love the least of these, even Me.      -Cameron Hood

And today, dear LORD, may I Accept life with humility and patience, because You are my brokenhearted Father, pacing back and forth on the road, squinting into the setting sun, welcoming me to see You, the One over all, the One working through all and the One living in all.