Knowing the depths of my sinfulnesss... and glimpsing the radiance of Your glory!

Sept 18 2002

Oh dear God, more and more and more I am becoming convinced there is only ONE GREAT BOOK and all the rest are, at best, human efforts to describe the Author and ideas of that Great Book… Your Book. And that while it may be useful to read some of those books… very carefully… even suspiciously… one should always come back and be centered on the Word of God, IN RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD, Creator, Author, Father, Lord, Savior, Elder Brother, Guide, Spirit, One God now and forever more, Amen!!!

So… I guess I’m saying I’m glad that You’ve made me the way I am… “different” in the eyes of the world (and even of my children and perhaps my husband too… though he sometimes seems quite “blinded” by love!) . But oh God, if You have made me “different” then You must have a purpose… and so far, I seem to have pretty much missed it – well, I don’t know… maybe not “missed it” so much as “failed it” by walking in so much sin and despair… and most of the time, not even realizing it.

(I’ve often heard preachers talk about realizing the depth of their sin or whatever, and sometimes I’ve tried to “conjure up” a “feeling” of despairing sinfulness… because it seemed to me that that is perhaps, supposedly, by example of others who are perhaps more “spiritual” than I, the “way to do it.” But God, all my trying has mostly resulted in only dissatisfaction and disappointment and emptiness. And now… when I guess I’d kind of given up finding a sense of the reality of sinfulness in my life… You seem to be pointing it out… no, I should more like say, “shedding Your light into the dark, hidden, musty passages of my heart and soul and mind”.. the bright radiance of Your glory (as I have dreamed it a couple times in the past months or year) just filling up, cleaning out simply by its “being,” exposing all the murkiness, sliminess, muckiness, muddiness, the dark, dank, deathly alive creepy, moldy, growing things nurtured by sin in all the dark corners of my heart… and now… now I sense… no , now I know (how much more real than feeling or even sensing) the dawning of the radiance of Your glory… at least I feel I am catching glimpses of it, almost as if “out of the corner of my eye,” more real in my dreams than in my waking moments… and yet also in flashes in my waking moments too – oh glory!

Draw me into Your Presence!
Drive out the darkness, Lord!
Dissipate the dark mold growing in the corners of my heart (“He chased me down the years, He chased me down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind” … Continue to be the “hound of heaven,” Lord. Please, please, please… never give up on me!