Undone...

'Thread by thread I come apart, 

If brokenness is a work of art

Then surely this must be my masterpiece. 

I'm only honest when it rains,

an open book with a torn out page 

and my ink's run out. 

I wanna love you, but I don't know how...' 

—"Neptune" by Sleeping at Last

I get hung up on these lines, because they make sense of me, of life in this season. I often feel like an open book, but one missing pages—or the ink for the empty pages. I need that ink to explain myself chronologically—or just logically—to folks sometimes, and it has run out, run dry.

Yet it was the last line that stabbed my heart, because I've been feeling like that with God in this season of life. I want to love Him, but I don't seem to know how. I just know I keep failing. And if I don't love God well, how will I love people well? Doesn't loving—for the creature—begin with being loved? And doesn't that mean being humbled by Love enough to receive that precious gift from the Giver of all good things? 

Really, when all is known, isn't He the only One Who can prepare us to receive the love He gives? Do we ever do anything? He makes us vessels to be filled. He fills us. He runs out through our cracks—over the lip of us earthen jars—onto others. It isn't us. It never is us. It's all Him. Always. 

But He chooses us to be those ready vessels. He chooses us to be conduits of His love and creativity. Even though the echo of love, creativity, and Beauty is dim—poorly reflected through us—somehow He seems to delight in that reflection, no matter how grubby it is. 

Does that ever amaze you? It amazes me. It humbles me. Because I know myself... How could He be pleased with the flicker of an echo of Himself that shivers through me? But He is. 

Woe is me!

I am undone...I am flying shrapnel shards. O God, hold me together! I come back to Him. Because He is the Love that creates us to hold love—and to be held together by Love. 

Such a mystery and a joy, this. He is our Great Lover, meeting us in mystical union—the weaving of our body, soul, and spirit into Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I want to throw my hands over my head, over my face, over my sacred places to shield myself from this invited invasion of the realest One splintering my shadow-self. Finity cannot contain Infinity. Time has no hold on the Timeless. Flesh as frail as mine cannot contain a particle of the Spirit of God. 

How can His Spirit dwell in me? I must cramp, confine, and frustrate Him. I must necessarily shatter as He enters, my ink spilling out, dripping all over. And then He re-forms me; makes me new. He doesn't rebuild me as I was, all fragile and wispy—He begins to make me a solid home. He makes His dwelling, finity expanded to hold the Infinite. Not contain, but hold. 

I cannot contain another person, but I can hold their soul. A soul can be knit between two distinct persons. I cannot contain another person, but I can hold their hand. O God, make me strong enough to be empty hands, cupped to receive the outpouring of Your Spirit! It is the Spirit of God who empties me; shatters and re-makes me; heals and makes me whole. It is the Spirit of God Who is the fluidity of Love pouring Himself into me, over me, through me, onto others. 

'Thread by thread I come apart...' And He makes my brokenness a work of art—makes me His masterpiece, though I don't know how to love Him. Though I try and fail. Love takes me apart, stops my striving, hushes me... He unwinds my threads and weaves me into His tapestry, His story, His art—into Himself. 

I am undone.  

                            I am remade. 

I am still me, but woven so tightly into Him as to be both found and lost; a piece, yet so intertwined that I am inextricably linked to the whole. 

                                                                    I am made whole.


O Love Who will not let me go—though I let You go so often—I want to love You. I just don't know how. O help... I don't know how. But I want to.