Love Won't Leave

Raw faith.

I’m not sure if I have it.

If I do, I’m sure I don’t have enough of it.

I admire those who do, those who have faith in its purest form.

I live in their angelic shadow.

I feast at their banquet tables laden with succulent fruit.

I consume their prodigious offerings.

Their buoyancy, resiliency, their irrepressible spirit give me

Nourishment for my soul.

How do those who lack raw faith wrap their arms around God?

Do they ask if He hears them when they doubt if He is real?

Do they confess skepticism to a God they dismiss as mythical?

Do they say yes when they mean no?

Is there a fine line between hypocrisy and honesty?

Maybe.

Consoling hope.

When I can’t find faith, hope shows up.

Like mystical night patterns, strange cloud formations

Playing out on the forest wall, faith slips away.

Occasionally, it defaults into my grasp, but never for long.

Teasing, taunting, glimmering, vanishing into the dark trees

Faith eludes me.

But when it disappears, it leaves me with hope.

Blessed hope.

I want it. I want more of it.

When I can’t seem to believe, hope assures me that I want to believe.

Hope encourages me when faith mocks me.

Hope compensates for its elusive companion faith.

Hope feeds me in the famine, shelters me in the storm,

Holds me through my nights of sorrow,

Edifies me in my disconsolations.

Hope soothes over my faith lapses.

“Lord, I believe. Please help my unbelief!”

Lasting love.

When faith flees my plaintiff cry,

When hope tries to comfort me but fails,

I fall into the arms of ever present love.

Prescient love, faithful love, assuring love.

It knows.

It knows when I’m not feeling faith.

It knows when I don’t respond to hope’s desperate attempts to save me.

It knows when I break down, berating myself, suffocated by loneliness.

When chasing faith, I outrun hope.

Love follows me, surrounds me with people,

Reminds me of kindness, generosity, tenderness, community.

Love asks no qualifying questions.

Love does not measure me, weigh me, test me, try me.

Love does not view me with narrowed eyes, judging me.

Love welcomes me when faith leaves me and hope can’t lift me.

Ahh, love.

When I am less than I profess to be,

When I disappoint, come up short, lose my way,

When I am scared that I am unworthy,

When fear inundates me,

Love always says, “I’ve got you.”

Now abides these three, faith, hope and love.

And the greatest of these is love.