shift: the focus

You know how your world revolves around you and you say dumb things and do stupider things and regret a thousand things and feel down and hate your insufficiency and make the same mistakes over and don’t talk to the kid eating lunch alone and yell at your Mum and punch your brother and accidently speak disrespectfully to the teacher and you just feel like you can’t make yourself good no matter how you try and it turns out that you’re not that fantastic person you considered yourself to be and you’re actually a lot more like the wicked folk the Bible goes on about?

Yeah, it turns out there’s a reason for it.

We’re broken.

(And probably you’re also slightly exhausted from that really long sentence. Sometimes I get excited and break grammar rules. Apologies.)

Because we can’t change ourselves, not like we want to. Sometimes it’s too hard to even stick on a smile, let alone give up everything we have. 

And you listen to Worn by Tenth Avenue North about a gazillion times and you’re falling asleep before the movie even finishes -- which sucks, because Andrew Garfield makes an incredibly good Spiderman.

And you keep holding on to some kind of Truth. That this tattered, tired soul you’ve got right here will find some kind of relief.

Because we don’t need healing until we’re broken. And then it’s the end of the day and you’re there out on the trampoline in the bitter cold and you’re staring up at that sky, calling out and begging and crying out and you’ll be there for hours if you have to be because this isn’t some routine quiet time with God –

You’re not leaving until He answers you.

Because you want to be healed.

And you’re reading Hosea 14 and little miracles tiptoe through all your cries and blurred vision and desperate pleas and all of it –

And you see dewdrops on the plants and you remember a line from a prayer,

The dewdrops of mercy shine bright

And you look down at what you’re reading and you see it, how did you miss it before? –

I will heal their waywardness.

And there’s all this grace and that’s exactly what there is,

In all of it,

There is Grace.

 

 Dear Jesus,

Transform us today, every single broken tattered soul in this world, that we may be like You a little more than yesterday. I pray it for the boys in 1D and the kids in my class and the ladies that work at Bakers Delight and the gardeners that trim the fancy rose bushes. It says in Romans that focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God and oh God shift the centre from us to You: and that our lives would not ‘revolve’ around You but that You would sink them into Yourself. To simply be and embrace Your Spirit in us, yes dear Jesus.

 By sheer Grace we are saved and I pray, that with grace may we live. By Your grace.