on an honest prayer

Father, God,
Sometimes I don’t get it. Sometimes I can’t blog, and I can’t find anything more poetic or true than just talking to you. There aren’t any beautiful phrases in my head that could fit this moment perfectly, and you haven’t really given me any random or inspiring subject to bless me or my readers with, like falling snow or puzzling vacuum cleaners. So, here it is.

I don’t get it.

I don’t get any of this life sometimes… I don’t understand the people you have put in my life, or why… I don’t understand why they hurt me sometimes, and why others can be so uplifting. I don’t understand why you would speak different things into the lives of others that I am somehow not let in on. And sometimes, God, it even feels like you have left me out of the loop; like I’m missing something that you intentionally kept from me. I don’t understand why I would feel called to a relationship when the other person wouldn’t; why I would feel chemistry and they would not… and I furthermore don’t understand what I was supposed to learn from any of these trials lately. Did I not seek you out enough? Did I not hand it over to you enough, or was it just a stupid move in general to seek a relationship through the means that I did?

Why? And why do I feel so forsaken?

Why is it so easy for me to slip into faithlessness? Why is it so easy for me to fall back into the same mistakes, when I have asked you to make me a new person, with new desires and new passions? Even when I try my best to let you do your work in my heart and my life, I mess up. And they aren’t new mistakes, they are the same friggin things I have wrestled with my whole life. I just want to be free God! I just want you to make me new, and to take those parts of me that I don’t know how to surrender, and make them beautiful. Yet, every time I have earnestly surrendered my heart to you, genuinely and faithfully, it is swept away by the world again. I would ask ‘is it my doing or yours,’ but I know that somehow the blame rests in me. It is always me, and it always has been.

You say that like a dog returns to its vomit, a man returns to his folly. Why does it have to be that way? Why do I have to keep seeking out this stuff that I have already tasted and experienced; things I already know don’t mesh well with who I am inside? And why are those things still so attractive to me? After every mountaintop, God, you have given me a valley. Or placed me there, whichever way you want to look at it. And now that I am here, and off of my joyride down the hillside, I just don’t want to lose heart. I just don’t want to sink back to the places I have been and the things that have already damaged me.

So would you help me out? Would you give me some hope? Would you point me in the direction I need to go; with finances, relationships, school… I so badly want to be where you want me to be. It is just so hard to get there sometimes or even just to figure out where those places are. Be in my relationships, stay in my heart, and thank you for not giving up on me on night like tonight, when the doubts are creeping in and my relationships and plans seem to be falling apart.

I don’t know a lot, God. But I know that I love you; that I want this thing between you and me to work out, and that I want my life to be for you. I’m for you.

Would you help me live that way, think that way, and breathe that way? Because at this point, that's all I can ask for.

Amen.