Lord, i want to know you

But I have a problem

I want to know my own life too

When someone speaks harshly to me

I revert to early lessons of my childhood

And (even if repressed)

I want to Demand my rights

I want to fight back

I want to respond in kind

Usually with a little justified increase

Just a little harsher

Just a little louder

Just a little stronger

But this is not knowing you

When someone speaks harshly to me

Knowing you is turning loose of my own life

Knowing you is not starting

from a vantage point of My own rights

or a vantage point of demanding

treatment deserving of one of the stature

I imagine and wish to be mine

Knowing you is starting from a vantage point

Of having and continuing to receive

Unmerited favor and undeserved grace

Which i don’t, can’t, will never deserve

But none the less have it in copious quantities

Here’s the hard part

Knowing You, Lord, is extending that grace

To others who don’t deserve it either

This is an elusive, unreachable goal

That of forgiving seventy times seven in a day

Unreachable in terms of man

Reachable in terms of God in man

When a person forgives

It is the wind of God moving

When we forgive

The undeserving

The unworthy

The unrepentant

The unreformed

The unreconciled

Those who hurt us and will continue

Without abatement to hurt us

Here’s a cravat

Forgiveness is not the absence of hate

Forgiveness is not neutral

When God forgives me it obliterates

Any barrier in the heart of God to loving me

Just as I am, even if I never change

The pinnacle of forgiveness is love

Love doesn’t always give what is wanted

Often it does

It almost always seeks to

But often love gives discipline too

Without discipline there is no maturing

With out maturing there is no flowering of gifts

Into the realization of personhood

I desire to know you God

Please form in me a faith that can have perfect peace

Being spoken to harshly

Where no harsh word produces a heart condition

Other than love and a covering of the other’s sin

That heart condition pleases you (Hebrews 13:16)

And creates the conditions for me

To grow in the knowing of you (John 14:21)

To become mature

And experience the flowering of gifts

Into the realization of personhood

In tandem with the flowering

of the nature of the real God in me

so that means I must release and relinquish

my right to all good treatment

and receive bad treatment with joy

that i might know You, Lord

11/27/2003