God,
Is it proper to approach you first with a heavy heart? Or rather should I come confessing your goodness and love and holiness even if I don't feel like it? When I come with such a desperate heaviness it is hard to confess with my lips what I know to be true of you in my heart. I have read about your every-day-new-mercy, but I have also read your servant David and have seen how you accepted his groanings when he lay on the floor in despair over the heaviness in his soul. From where my heaviness arises I cannot with full confidence say, though I know my sin and its subsequent guilt are ever-present before my eyes. Though I rest in your forgiveness I tremble when I think of my hearts willful disobedience to what is righteous, to what pertains to wholeness. I know my heart and its vileness and evil, I know what hides in the shadows from the eyes of my friends.
But here is my despair: that I yearn yet I do not know what for. There is a strange and dark cloud alive over me with a mission to cast aside the light of day. In the darkness I desire, but for what? I can't say. Like a child who cries for warmth or food, I yearn for something beyond my own experience. I look inside and with my inner eyes I see but cannot find the cause of this distress. I am broken, incomplete, and prone to self, yet that for which I long seems to be something so much more than I could give to myself. It seems to be something so much more than any other besides you could give. I know the heart is saddened when through a lover or a friend, it fails to be known - truly known so that the whole self is exposed and is loved in spite of its ugliness. Behind the door of my eyes is a thing, a desire, a movement of loves desire to know and be known by one who understands me perfectly, who can look in my heart and tell me what I yearn for. And here I am longing with a deep sense of futility, a sense of tragedy, a sense of unfulfillment in that I am known by no other save you, yet I can't feel you. You are elusive and mysterious, and it's only in your son that I find hope of knowing that someday I will be known and no longer will I yearn for that thing that so easily escapes the grasp of my heart.
Is it proper to approach you first with a heavy heart? Or rather should I come confessing your goodness and love and holiness even if I don't feel like it? When I come with such a desperate heaviness it is hard to confess with my lips what I know to be true of you in my heart. I have read about your every-day-new-mercy, but I have also read your servant David and have seen how you accepted his groanings when he lay on the floor in despair over the heaviness in his soul. From where my heaviness arises I cannot with full confidence say, though I know my sin and its subsequent guilt are ever-present before my eyes. Though I rest in your forgiveness I tremble when I think of my hearts willful disobedience to what is righteous, to what pertains to wholeness. I know my heart and its vileness and evil, I know what hides in the shadows from the eyes of my friends.
But here is my despair: that I yearn yet I do not know what for. There is a strange and dark cloud alive over me with a mission to cast aside the light of day. In the darkness I desire, but for what? I can't say. Like a child who cries for warmth or food, I yearn for something beyond my own experience. I look inside and with my inner eyes I see but cannot find the cause of this distress. I am broken, incomplete, and prone to self, yet that for which I long seems to be something so much more than I could give to myself. It seems to be something so much more than any other besides you could give. I know the heart is saddened when through a lover or a friend, it fails to be known - truly known so that the whole self is exposed and is loved in spite of its ugliness. Behind the door of my eyes is a thing, a desire, a movement of loves desire to know and be known by one who understands me perfectly, who can look in my heart and tell me what I yearn for. And here I am longing with a deep sense of futility, a sense of tragedy, a sense of unfulfillment in that I am known by no other save you, yet I can't feel you. You are elusive and mysterious, and it's only in your son that I find hope of knowing that someday I will be known and no longer will I yearn for that thing that so easily escapes the grasp of my heart.