I Come

“Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, NLT).

I come to you, Lord, stripped of any pretense. I come abandoned. I come vulnerable. I come deserted. I come barren. I come forsaken. I come fearful. I come overwhelmed. I come anxious. I come rejected. I come hopeless. I come so that I might find respite from all the turmoil of my life in your presence. I come with nothing to offer but my brokenness. It is when I come broken of all that I have attempted to hold in place that I find you waiting.

Lord, you accept and love me in my weakness and feebleness. I can be who I am with you. There is just you and just me. There is no image I have to keep. There is no mask I have to hold in place. There is no agenda that has to be met. There is no perfection that I need to maintain. You see beyond all my limitations, and you love me still. You always see my potential, and never my failures. You know what you have created me to be, and that is never something that I have to struggle to receive. I am a new creature in you because of who you are—not because of who I am. You love me with an everlasting love, and that is beyond my human ability to understand.

When I open my heart, mind, spirit—my soul to you, I receive your freedom to believe in the potential you see in my life. In your amazing love, I discover who you have always meant for me to be. I am set free from my limited human understanding, and filled to overflowing with the freedom that you bring into my life. I am no longer in bondage to my human failures. I am free in your promise.

I rise from my time with you accepted. I am no longer deserted or abandoned. I am not forsaken or rejected. I rise from my time with you free of the fear which has tormented me. What has overwhelmed is now seen from your perspective. You have taken my anxious thoughts from me at your altar, and now I am at rest. I am broken of self, and restored in your power. I rise from my knees again—revived and renewed. I know my hope is always in you, Lord, and it shall always be. I shall see you again in just a little while, Lord, because without my time with you, I am lost in my own weakness. So I come.

  Lynn Hampton Lacher