Coming Up For Air

I felt it on the way home tonight -- that lighter sense of my spirit, lifting mostly off my chest and shoulders. I was playing a song on a CD that a dear and spiritually sensitive friend has loaned me because he knows I've been heavy of late. This wasn't the song he marked for me. I am blessed and enthralled by it too. But at this moment, it was one song that opened up the space between me and the release.

The music was loud. Sometimes I need it loud in the car.

He is jealous for me
Loves like a hurricane
I am a tree, bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy

All of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory
And I realize just how beautiful You are and how deep is Your affection for me

And Oh, how He loves us
Oh, Oh how He loves us
Oh how He loves

The artist is David Crowder but the Voice of the Spirit speaks deeply into mine through these words and melodies, and I am suddenly unaware of my afflictions because of the glory strongly around me in the moment.

These past seven weeks have provided for me again those opportunities to press hard into God and find out what I'm really made of. It's been smothering at times, washing over me in pounding waves of confusion and anger, and I am not at all pleased with myself. Not at all. The stresses reveal the best and worst of me it seems. The taking away of something fragile and treasured that is now not safe, is infuriating and terrifying and wrong. I have been lain flat with helplessness, crushed.

But Oh, how He loves me. Some days it's been all I could hang on to, this knowledge that my God loves me. My God loves me. When nothing else has any sense to it, this does.

My treasure is still not safe. But loudly in the car on the way home tonight, my spirit drank in the power and presence of God Who is healing me and Who is bigger than any force that would come against me or the ones I love.

And I breathe in lightly and deeply and loudly this love.

Love wins.