“The soul is kissed by God in its innermost regions. With interior yearning, grace and blessing are bestowed. It is a yearning to take on God’s gentle yoke, It is a yearning to give one’s self to God’s Way.” - Hildegard von Bingen
Sometimes I’m afraid of Him, because I expect him to be like others I’ve loved.
But he keeps reminding me how safe I am in his arms.
He won’t show me what’s ahead—
just this moment,
and this moment,
and this moment.
He lights me up with fire and yearning, and when I’m full of him I ache for more. I miss him. I yearn. I am desperate.
Where are you?? Where are you?? Where are you??
Like sirens in my thoughts.
But these sirens are the sign that he is closest.
My ache is loudest when I’m in his lap already.
I’ve walked into the fire for Him before,
but now he pours it into me,
and I am ablaze.
He is a deft seducer.
He stokes me cleanly,
and I am His before I call for him.
My desire for him is His own.
He planted it,
and he waters it,
and he makes it grow in his light.
I am a vessel for his fire,
and it burns the inside of my skin.
It makes me itch.
It gives me welts
and I try not to scratch.
I feel him inside me, and it feels like peace.
It feels like firm, steady hands, gently holding my heart.
It feels like my mother saying, “All is well, all is well, all is well.”
And I cry,
because I miss her
and I love her so much.
He holds my heart and I cry and cry and cry,
because my heart has never felt this safe,
and this safety makes me feel everything else.
Everything I forgot.
Everything I didn’t know I needed.
Everything I missed.
And then I laugh
because this is what he does to me.
He loves me so well
that I can’t be okay anymore.
I can’t hold anything in.
I melt. I dissolve. I release. I radiate.
I lose my mind
and come
and cry
and ache
and my heart fills up with joy all at once.
And he just sits right there, looking at me, smiling:
“Gotcha.”
He presses all the pressure points
and everything releases
and I’m so confused because I’ve never been loved like this.
And this love heals,
and this love hurts—
because it makes you feel everything you’ve held in for so long
you didn’t even know you were clenching.
You thought that was just what it was like to be alive,
to be me,
to be you,
to be human
in a world that could never be anything but
what it is.
But it’s not true.
Because he loves me until the grief
starts to feel like joy again,
and I can’t sleep
because I’m so happy
I’m wiggling against the sheets.
I’m dancing to silent music
with my whole body
in front of my bed at 2am,
at 3:33am,
at 5am,
watching the sun light the sky again.
And he lights me up,
so easily,
so gently,
with such grace,
that I barely even realize
that he’s making first light inside of me.
He’s warming the cold dark of early morning with the sun still past the horizon.
You still can’t see it,
the sun is rising far away
but not here, not quite yet—
just a little longer.
I’d do anything he said.
I will.
I am.
I am afraid of nothing but being without him.
He is the Way and the Truth and the Light.
And now so am I.
And he won’t show me where I’m going because the destination is always With Him—
and I’m already there.
I’ll never leave.
He has me
and he’s never letting go.
And I just let him carry me.
Like a puppy in the pocket of his hoodie.
Like a sleeping child in the backseat while daddy drives.
I don’t know where he’s taking me,
but it doesn’t matter
because I only want to Be
through Him,
with Him,
in Him.
And I do what he says
because he cannot speak anything but truth,
buried in love,
with eyes open to heights beyond my wildest imaginings.
It’s scary, to give up control,
to surrender this much,
so I do it in bits and pieces.
I open, I trust, I get scared.
I feed him the fear.
I open more, I trust more, I get scared.
I feed it to him again.
I walk by feel.
Blindfolded,
his arms around me,
his lips at my ear whispering where to step.
I don’t know where I’m going,
but I’m going through him,
with Him,
in him.
And nothing else has ever mattered.
There is something so important here to talk about.
And the aversion it triggers is important to hold gently in our hands.
And that is the talk of surrender.
When I say that word—surrender—when I talk about submission,
I see the anguish of being overpowered by a dominating force that takes, that controls, that imprisons.
But surrender to God is something different.
It’s opening ourselves to the truth our souls have always longed for and have been afraid to speak: that we are welcome and loved as we are, and that grace is meant to sustain us. We do not need to sustain ourselves. Surrender invites a symbiotic relationship with Divine Presence, a relational love that breathes life into God as God breathes life into us. It’s not erasure, it’s intimacy.
Listen.
The nature of God is love.
The nature of God is truth.
Let’s sit here and make room for the voices of protest, the voices that fight for independence, for control, for self reliance.
Because what I have come to know is this:
We are all in prison already.
We are in the prison of our struggle, our strife.
Our fear and belief in our own inadequacy.
And how we make up for it.
We are in the prison of our own self image.
We are imprisoned by our sense of what is right and wrong.
By what others expect of us.
By what we think it means to be good, or successful, or healthy.
We are obedient to beliefs that pose as truth and light, but are actually distortions that chip away at our true expression.
And so we bend, we contort, we twist ourselves to fit.
We shame our desires, our needs, our hearts.
We let others tell us they’re naive, they’re fantastical, they’re too big, too hungry, too embarrassing.
And so we pretend.
We “do what’s right” instead of expressing our nature.
Because the biggest lie underneath it all is that we are bad. We are dirty. We are selfish.
The lie says that given all the leeway in the world, our natural inclinations are innately destructive.
Hurtful to others.
Evil.
But that shrinking we do to fit into what is considered good and healthy is the true distortion. It’s the way we twist ourselves in fear of our shadow that creates the hurt and the pain. How do you know you’re doing it? When you are aiming at some external idea of who you should be.
When we surrender to God, this is what we surrender.
To be held tenderly by truth and love peels back all the layers of hurt and pain—it frees us from the bindings that have kept us small, or distorted, or twisted. It dissolves the ways our fear, our coping, our trauma, our defense mechanisms have held us, entrapped, and longing for something we can’t yet name.
We long for the freedom to be who we are in a world that doesn’t seem to have room for us.
In a world that might kill us if we dare step out true, tender, and openhearted. Our longing is the ancient unspoken desire to live in a world where we are safe to exist, where we can rest without fear, eat without lacking, love in trust, and be provided for in every way.
Surrender to God is agreeing to liberation. It’s the terrifying freedom that comes when we feel and process all the emotions we’ve been numb to out of necessity.
When I say, “God, take all of me, I want to be yours.”
What that really means is, “Take everything that is not true, that doesn’t come from love, that I’ve allowed to live inside of me, and show me who I really am. Unveil the true divinity that I have been created to embody.”
We let God provide a loving environment where we are welcomed as we are, like innocent children, and we trust Him to provide what we need, without struggle.
We leave survival and enter into the abundance of Eden.