Strapped

Inside there is a war over my soul. It sounds melodramatic but I can feel the battle being fought in my subconscious. I'm often thrown into deeply disturbed moods. When I am there my body is next to immobile. It's as if all my energy is so consumed by these mental fits of rage that I can't control myself. These are short depressions that leave me stained with frustration. I can't seem to work it out. In my mind I am arguing about simple things, fundamental principles to my beliefs and even the way the world works. Yes, I am annoyed with school, I have questions about the church, but that has never put my day at such a dark stand still that I feel as if I couldn't continue. I've been thinking about it, and praying, and the only way I can ever get out of my mental arrest is through prayer or sleep. Whatever it is, the battle belongs to the Lord. This too shall pass.

It's a bit sappy, but what the heck

This morning I met Jesus at the beach. There he was riding up to greet me on the frizzy seems of the waves. So I sat barefoot hugging my knees, my sandals wedged under my butt, and watched him come. He soaked right into the sand and shells at the tips of my feet. I dug my toes deep into the beach to catch the traces of his salty oceanness. And then with a sigh I was overcome. “My God is beautiful,” I thought. I knew it so hard, so truthfully right then.
To my right my footsteps were disappearing into the soft surf from where I had walked from the hotel. The lawn chairs, tikki huts, and sky scraping hotels, grated roughly against the natural serenity I had ventured into at my spot by the rocks. But I knew my God had been here first, and would be here last. Again, I knew this so hard it quaked a shiver over my sun warmed shoulders. And I knew His love was the sun and His energy made manifest around me in the crisp morning light was his perfect way of spending time with me. Then he did the softest thing. He came right up and hugged me, starting out by my ankles, working his way along the lightly forested plains of my arms, into my sleeves and swooping up to plant nice salt spackled kisses along my hairline and face. He was so warm, so cool—all at once my sun ray and windy breeze. Sometimes when you forget yourself you become so happy it radiates from the pours of your skin. When I think about coming into that feeling of bliss I get the picture of walking out into an endless meadow of flowers after treading bare foot on a dusty rock ridden path. I’m almost too scared to let my bruised feet walk far into spongy meadow for fear that it will turn back into rocky path before my aching feet have regained their strength. It scares me a bit, as if I’m on the edge of happiness, as if I’ve stumbled across something so rare, so frail it could crumble into itself and disappear at any moment. That’s how I felt sitting there, God playing with my hair and over my tanned skin. I felt like our meeting there was far too rare to ever believe it could just keep on going after the tourists and merchants had arrived to ripen the beach into a trashy, sugar coated version if itself.
The sound of a squawking bird shot through my ears, making me look up from the scab over my fears I had been picking at. It was God grabbing my arm and pulling me farther into that meadow. I followed him willingly. All the while he was saying “Let me show you where else I am. Let me show you how far you can truly walk in this meadow.” My eyes were opened again to his beauty. My shadow a testament to the dawning day, faded softly into the morning. Two coke cans sat like towers on the pebbly shore. A forest of boulders cascaded into the ocean to my left. And there I sat, snug between night time and morning. There I knew he wanted more than just my temporary praise. “If you want me to come everywhere with you, you have to let me inside. You need to let me come along.” I bowed my head to him. But it wasn’t enough. He knew I was hiding. He saw before I could say that there were so many things wedged into that gap that he wanted to fill. Piece by piece he eyed those sensitive parts. He was there and I was there and I couldn’t hide my shame from him. And then I saw my own stupidity wash up like my old dirty laundry onto the shore. Those temporary issues I thought I was fretting over really had nothing to do with anything but my own inability to fix the gap in my soul. One by one he pulled the mess out of me until my heart was an open vessel, a whole and empty cistern waiting to be filled up with all of him and only him. By this time that grassy flower filled plain had grown so big and needy. Then it was just me loosing myself in his presence, falling into the endless plain of him feet first, running in and around and all over it. And I began to know that I would exhaust myself before I exhausted the bliss of that field.
Our conversation, his heart to my heart only rose and fell with the gravity of the oceans waves, rising and falling on themselves and then eating away at both sand and sea life, then spewing back onto the shore, back into itself. And I met him there. I met him in the sky, the mountain lines smug behind the morning mist. The palm trees reaching high into the sky saying “I see you sun and I welcome you today.” I met him in the crevasses of the large sloping rocks. Like giants curled over examining the seaweed and black creepy crabs on each others backs. He stretched out with one arm across the oceans treading wake. And again I thought I couldn’t follow him there. He didn’t care what I thought but brought me out anyway to see how big he really was. I saw his name written in the meeting and separation of the sky and waters. “I Am,” it read in what I was sure was his best cursive. “I Am,” repeated the seagulls as they sailed by the cotton ball clouds, only affirming what I had seemed to miss only moments before. “I Am,” came the echo of the wind lunging like an athlete from mountain to plain to ditch and skidding across the top of the ocean. “I Am,” it finally squeaked from the hinges of my open heart, and began to fill my gaps with spaces of divinity. And I knew him, right there on the simplicity of the beach, on the outskirts of the shoreline in Mexico. And I knew with the severity of a Father loving alike the mistakes and good deeds of his child that He, The Great I Am, could never leave me because he is in me. He is wrapped around my world so tight, so through and through that he can’t leave me. And he won’t even try to.