Amazing Love (Grafted into the Vine series)

This series is especially difficult. I knew it would be. I knew it would challenge me and take me to places I didn't want to visit again. I knew God was going to stand me in front of the abandoned "homes" of my life and show me things I've strove to forget. This is one of those things - I've tried desperately to bury this. This is a piece I wrote for a woman who once held a position of extremely high esteem in my life. She loved me - and I loved her back b/c she taught me how to be loved, and in being loved, how to love.

I genuinely believe that until you are able to accept love, you struggle to love others. Not understanding the value of who you are, or that you are worthy of love simply because God says so is to find yourself living in a place of perpetual performance. The desire to be loved drives you to do rather than to simply be.  This woman genuinely showed me my flaw in my loving of others, and she did it through loving me without condition. She loved openly, despite my filth, my seeping wounds, and the barbed wire personality I used to keep people at bay. She dove in fully, and through her God fully revealed the value of being loved. 

When she betrayed me, when her love was absent and left a void inside of me, when it broke my  heart, I quit writing with God. I turned instead to blogs, and  turned away from the submitted pen that my life had been in God's hands. I refused to write creatively again - because this wounding had been so severe, so amputating and so destroying to me.  

In revisiting this piece, God showed me some things. Yes, the wounding was terrible. Yes, I had good reasons for putting up walls while He continued to expand my tent. Yes, I was completely validated in being too hurt to trust so soon again. But we are moving past that place, and He's been the one on the waiting end this time.  This isn't a new piece. . .but just like the very character of God, He has redeemed it. I doubt I will ever read it and not think of her, but with the simple change of a capital letter, God has redeemed love for me yet again. 

We all have places that are absent of the light of Love. What is the breaking point? When does the crack get so big that the light it lets in makes the pain of being seen worth it?  Don Williams wrote this about the painful cracks and breaks we endure. . ."That's how the Light gets in."

This is how Love got in for me. 

Amazing Love

I’ve stood before here in this place

where light is strangled in blackness that is night

Where broken heart and tortured soul find rhyme to the chaos inside

Here on my nakedness You see my shame, 

my sin,

my living death indeed

And yet before barely I whisper “let me go” You’ve wrapped round me your arms,

neglecting that filth 

which brought me here

Blazing eyes with love within seeing that which I want to hide

You find in me what’s real

Here is where you have spoken life into my living death. . .

           . . .where freedom frantically launches flight and batters broken wings against prison bars

You’ve stood me here in naked splendor/shame to face which has been hidden

in front of me

My eyes worn soft with longing

a heart daring to truly live

You’ve captured and now hold in your hands

And I see which was the purpose

Love, amazing Love