This Is My Sanctuary

Eyes closed in the breathe of morn. A night song rises in my chest.

But instead of loud and brazen, I nuzzle its anthem like a nursing child, aching for lullabies, needing the worth of a parent in the darkness.

And it is there I find rest. There, I sense the affirmation I have been needing from my exit from my mother’s womb…

A warm embrace, a supernatural stillness, a quiet wake, while the night is still darkness…

It is here, I hear His whisper of not demands or commands, need to’s or have-to’s, but…Love.

I am loved. He is love. There is love in the quiet. 

It comes like a song; familiar, expectant. Known to a being before my souls entry…

This is my sanctuary.

I find him standing there. Tall. Strong. A man of not force, but gentle strength; emmulating goodness, like my daddy. He is my childhood.

He is rest. He is peace. He is comfort when I am weak. With him, I am known, seen, accepted…maybe more fully, more completely that I have ever been, really.

He asks or demands nothing from me, unlike other men. Other people.

He is o.k. with my childhood antics, my pleasant watchings, my content spirit just being where he is.

He is love, fully. Not because He thinks I am perfect, but because He knows my flaws, yet loves me anyway.

He is a fortress, a watchguard, a protector of our family. He is playing with frogs in the creeks in Mississippi….

And he, like me, sees Jesus most in the untarped ceiling of the spreading out of evergreens…

Where birds chirp His sound and the wind tells the beauty of a God who is both force and found, present, yet all encompassing…

This is my sanctuary.

I see him in his weakness. Broken by a world that devours the steely and resiliant. Evil is no respector of persons. And yet, this man is not less than, because of his illness.

He is constant. My constant. He always has been.

He is an ear when a little girl comes to him wearing adult clothes, at fifteen, or twenty five, or nearly fifty.

There is no wavering to His thick fingers interwoven in mine. Not in talking or pinning, or deriving to untangle the web in everyone’s mind…

But just being. Sitting in his presence. That is enough. It always has been….enough.

This is my sanctuary.

I race to pen these words, before the sun rises. Prior to all my children rising from their beds, eating, spinning, dancing, expectant.

It is picture day. We are all just taking pictures of what we hope to be.

But they are more. They are my everything. 

Intellectualism has failed me. It’s failed my children.

They may not know what a hexagon is, but they know how to embrace wholeheartedly, love, joy, peace, happiness…

And to me, that is more precious that gold. Titles. Fame. Fortune.

They take the day and run with it, with all their might. Tiny legs, I see the reflection of my own childhood in.

And they say when you help someone, you are really trying to redeem the parts of yourself that is broken.

I am broken. I know that.

Yet, I still see my Savior in the eyes of the innocent, the excitement of little arms wrapped around my neck every single time I step into the room.

I am not too proud to confess, I need them too….In fact, more than they need me.

They are not my redeemers. I am not their savior…

But, they are healing me, more than any therapist, or theological seminary ever could…

They are His reflection. His beauty. His goodness. All wrapped up into one.

They are my sanctuary.

I step out onto the land. The earth beneath my feet, a place brown skinned indians came and dwelled before the blodshed.

I feel their presence even more; a history, robbed, taken by a people now esteemed and emmulated…

In Hollywood, societal systems, the braking back business of taring others down, in order to lift themselves.

And I want nothing of it.

Nothing of the lies that wreck the lives of other people; whether that’s in some office on Wallstreet, a congregation of thousands, or in someone else’s home.

I connect with a people whose faces felt the dirt, whose knees bowed to accept their place with this world…

Created to give, but also a place they were asked to take care of.

When did we begin stealing? Stealing from this land? Stealing from one another?

My Great-Grandparents, and Grandfather, and Father were baptised in a river not far from here. Sharp cliffs on one side, sandbar in the middle.

Water washed around them, as if to remind them, this earth must immerge us, before we can step up and have any rule over it.

We must accept He is larger, Creator, mightier than our own egos pounding down everything in our paths.

This reverence for humanity….

This is my sanctuary.

It is a gospel. A gospel melted in a pot of dirty ash, humbling the proud and bringing down the loud. It is quiet. Blessed. Holy….

Written pure.

Yet, we have adorned its edged, climbed and pried and questioned its relevance. We have placed our decorations on it….

Dressing up this gospel to “improve” its appearance. Make it much more pallable and attractive to the world.

Yet, this holy, raw, humble gospel. The one of a crying baby in a manger; passed by, by the rich, unseen by the proud…

This savior, who got down, and wiped the mud from Judas’ feet? It is this selfless gospel I seek. One I am learning. Yet, still understand, I know little about. 

Loving His accusers, running to those weakest and useless, and calling the guilting intentionally to Himself.

Because still, I long for the days of innocence. The days when Jesus was a man I would sing to, swinging my backpack on my way to grade school early in the mornings. 

The man I would talk to, up in open skies. Clouds bursting with life. And Jesus, not far off, but close inside….

All of creation.

This place of oneness and completeness and wholeness and innocence….

It’s the life I ache for in the early morning, with my tapping fingers ready for the hurricane of children, ready to climb out of their beds.

Yes, it is here…

In the loss of all things man-given. In the holiness of nothing added. In the simplicity of an uncomplicated all-knowing, ever-presence Savior, living near me and in me and with me every moment…

Yes, that. That is my sanctuary.

Here, I always find home. Here, I am fully loved and known.

Here, real family dwells. Here, I am content with just myself.

Although the world races for prestige and wealth…

I am one, with Him. Not because of myself….but because of His grace and mercy.

All that matters is, this…

He is my sanctuary.