About Feeling like a Failure, About Regret and Sources and A Modern Day Psalm 51: Brutally Honest Psalms #7

For hands stained

with unqualified regret,

for all us Davids who murmur it:

I have failed and fallen,

in what I have wholeheartedly attempted to do,

and what I’ve wholly failed to do,

and in all I’ve done that’s fallen far short, and lays there painfully at fault—-

Is it possible to come wash

in the fountaining source

of fresh forgiveness?

For intentions and systems may fail,

but it’s truer that souls ultimately do.

And well-meaning explanations

can end up looking like mean excuses, as if both sincerity and apology were half-trying to excuse their sorry selves.

Is it possible to find a way forward

when all you’re wild to do

is go back and undo

what you never intended to have done?

For there is shame that isn’t merely a lowering of the eyes,

but a pierced spearing

straight through,

that snatches away the breath

and sucker punches the soul

doubled over

with endless wretching

on self —-

but there is no vomiting free of

one’s self.

Is it possible to feel like

there’s a stinger that cannot be removed from the soul,

venom nauseating

the vein of

every moment?

Every pained thing

is done in plain view

of God.

And every wrong

that leaves us undone

is done ultimately

to Him.

Who catches God when He heaves and bleeds?

Who bruises the face of God and walks away?

Who can believe that David threw around his weight and position

until he crushed a woman

under the sin of his full-bodied lust,

and yet he winds his way back

on stinging skinned knees

to the feet of God,

to feel his failure finally

lifted off flattened lungs ——

to exhale the expansiveness of

grace that is weightless.

Who can believe that Nebuchadnezzar’s pride defied

God

till he was laid low on all fours,

foaming at his boasting-now-bovine mouth,

chewing on grass ripped from the earth with his bare teeth,

for more than 2,000 naked days

under the beating elements,

until he came to

his surrendered mind

and willing feet

and was returned to humble power from the humiliation of the pasture,

even more able than he had been before,

his needed cud-years ruminating him into restoration?

Who can believe Peter scorched his own soul with his repeated denial of Jesus,

the hostility around Caiphas’ fire absolutely terrifying,

only for the resurrected Jesus

to light a fire on the beach

and Peter to turn,

filled with the burning scent of shame,

and hear Christ’s humbling hospitality

to come eat,

to come and be entrusted still with work in the Kingdom

to humbly feed Christ’s sheep?

Who has the gall to believe

there is still a gusher of love that cleans life’s grime and any of conscience’s contamination,

or hushes the hauntings that howl in the hallways of the mind?

Not me.

Not. Me.

But maybe — nothing remakes everything like grace.

Maybe — wreckage always births resurrection.

Maybe: Trust that there is no such thing as destruction, only reconstruction.

Trust that nothing ruins,

only ruins you for anything less than God.

Trust that what is coming at you,

is God coming for you.

Trust that what looks like a wave to carry you away,

Is the wave that will carry you to shore.

Trust and obey the One who walks on waves

will make a highway

Out of everything that rises in your way

Trust that breathing in His pure, unadulterated passion for the broken-hearted—

is what creates in the broken a pure heart.

And what makes even us whiter than snow —- is melting into the depths of His unfathomable love.

Maybe what fixes all that’s broken is to cast everything aside but His presence.

Maybe life is a long repentance in His direction.

And maybe it is actually possible —-

that in

Surrender to the Master,

the thrumming drum of your heart

is Remastered

Restored

Reworked, Reformed, Remade,

And your joy in His always enoughness

Returns.

And one shattered heart erupts into a fountain of need,

and one broken heart becomes a geyser for glory,

And one split heart is a sacrifice that streams with amens

to the One who is the Source of all things.

 

All Photos by heart-sister, Joy Prouty who never, ever, ever stops looking for His Light.

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