YOU are terribly faithful.

Sometimes I cry when I read out loud stories that I can read silently tearless, like Lewis’ A Grief Observed. I find myself growing increasingly pastoral, more frequently and intensely moved to a painful ache for others I can’t explain. I gaze into the eyes of a hurting person, and it starts in my chest and I feel my eyes and nose sting with their pain, and it becomes hard to swallow, and I can’t stop blinking. I feel like the Grinch, whose heart is growing more rapidly than he really knows what to do with. It happens as I listen to a friend’s story of family abuse, or sing a song about the beauty of God’s final healing of his world, or watch the strength of compassion as it chokes the voice of Francis Chan when he talks about hell as if he wakes in the dark of the night sweating from the heat.

God, I just want you to know. . . I see what you’re doing to me. You are terribly faithful in your reshaping, remaking work in me and around me and through me and for me and, oftentimes, despite my shortsighted and deep-seated resistance. I want you to know I notice, and sometimes I’m grateful. Be your best, inexorably gracious self toward me.

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