The world wants you
To be a tool for its use.
Refuse.
Hold your brokenness high.
Your bleeding wounds, lift up.
The pain, don't trade it for anything.
It is your living.
Do not fit in,
Especially when it costs you money;
Especially, especially, especially
When it costs you you.
Give up every happiness
To stay wild.
Give up everything
To love the one who sets you free.
First, you must understand attachment and detachment. Desire itself and the thing that is desired are two different things. Detachment is to experience the desire — and all the feelings and thoughts that come with it — separately from the desired thing; to feel desire but not attach it to some outcome.
Once desire is detached from any object, a strange emptiness is felt. Simone Weil calls this “the void.” Others call it a “God-sized hole.”
Experiencing the void does not make God come to us, but it opens the door and invites him. With wisdom beyond ours, he decides whether to enter or speak.
Simply, to give it up to God is to feel the desire but not reason or think about the thing that is desired. In that empty space, wait for God.
This is difficult to do, even for just a couple minutes. Try. Let it be prayer. You might experience a great deal of peace in letting go of yourself.
And what of the physical feelings — the trembling hands, the pounding heart, the cramped gut — how do you give those to God? Love in spite of them. It’s not easy, but it is the way.
You see, these worries are the me of the present — without the graces God can give me in the future — believing I will fail.
Of course the me of the present will fail at the future task. He lacks the strength God provides, only in the moment, to handle whatever happens — which, by the way, will probably be very different than what I expect.
Inside of me,
A place where wild things roam,
A flock I must shepherd,
A garden I must tend
Through storms and attacks,
Famine, entropy, growth...growth
— Is it not all growth?
Growth to be hedged and pruned,
Encouraged here, enticed there,
To be nurtured into something beautiful.
And what of these thorny worries?
I've let them grow, expecting fruit,
But they've only become a mess.
I try pruning,
But they only grow back stronger.
Instead, I'll try to crowd them out.
I'll scatter, all among them,
Little seeds of prayer, and of faith
That I'll receive the grace
To handle whatever comes, when it comes.