Flesh & Bones

I am so  HUMAN.

I can't help but be anything else. 

Why do I even try to be something other than myself? It's so, ridiculous. I am so fragile. And yet, am forever-attempting invincibility. Strength. Flawlessness. Anything but pure, unadulterated, humanity. I trip, I break things, make items fly across the room and then I cry, "I don't even know how that happened!!!!!" (And seriously, I really don't - call me butterfingers), I sneeze in a room full of silent people, I laugh so hard I wet my pants in the kitchen, I say "look ma no hands" and promptly fly over the handlebars, I forget my cell phone and get stuck somewhere for hours...I am nothing but a very real, very natural, pitiful, painful, sinful, human. I often forget just how human, and how like me  the rest of the world is. And then somebody else does something I would do and says, "I am such a wreck!"  And I think, 'oh, thank you, Jesus; I'm not the only one! Other people are human too!' That's right - we're all part of the same species. Fearfully & wonderfully made, and yet very, very human.

"After all, we're only human - always fighting what we're feeling, hurt instead of healing..."

That's Jon McLaughlin - he's such a passionate musician. He plays like he's never sung the song before.  I want to be that passionate about something I love - something I've poured my whole self into, that people know me for. That 'one thing that makes you different than anyone else' as Gerry says in P.S. I Love You. The thing that makes  me - that defines me - that fills my soul to brimming and spills out onto everybody who comes in contact with it. So that all may see - sounds something like "being on fire for Christ". Essentially, yes. That's the root of it. Yet, there's an unrest that's in me that wants something earthly  to be so wholly passionate about. Something I can live for, full-force. Like making music with a harp - or painting with pastels - or the inner-workings of a cell - or nurturing little ones - or gardening - or the early church - or the civil war - or the life of Blaise Pascal - or rock climbing around the world. A niche - something I am interested in. No, interested is too commonplace a word - something I am overwhelmingly fascinated by, and would die doing. Something that I could do, and know  that when I am doing it, I am doing it because God made me for this. This  is my purpose. God made me so I could bless through this thing,  this art  - this piece of myself,  this bit of beauty that I have created for the world. Like Eric Liddell - "God made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure." 

I so desire to sense God's intense, profound pleasure when I do something, I adore, doing. 

I've always felt this way. I want to 'live a life worthy of the calling', and for me, that means living so richly, so fully consumed with the Great Love that has redeemed, and so wholly living in and through that freedom  of the soul. A winsome, gracious, thoughtful life, full of a passion and a beauty that displays the Lord's splendour at every turn and fork in the trail. Even  when I can't speed through it on a bike and feel the wind in my hair, because it's just too rough a ride - or I'm stopped up for who-knows-how-long by a tire burst on an unforeseen thorn, which very well may be attached to a rosebush when I can finally see through the flying rubber.

JESUS, make me into the type of person who proclaimsYou - 

- and givesYou  the honor that you deserve. 

I want to live for You, because of You, in You & through You. Like a great, big sunflower that lifts its face up to Yours every morning with a vibrant, grand intensity - like it's giving all  it can muster to the One who created it. Just the One.  Not the ten thousand others, but; One.  You, Jesus. My Creator, my Joy, my Crown. Be all my hopes, be all my dreams. Be all my delights; be my every-thing!   Thank you, Saviour, for giving me a passion for & sheer delight in the life you've given me. 

I am pitifully, painfully, sinfully, human, and yet You love me. 

I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

"Away she hurried; not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the place of both qualities - something that can best be described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life."