About Elizabeth

Hello! I'm glad to meet you! My name is Elizabeth. I am a wife and a stay-at-home mommy to three beautiful girls; I am a musician and a writer. I would love for you to visit with me at MadeSacred.com where I write and try to thoughtfully engage life and culture as a way of loving God and loving others. After all, God has made everything to be sacred, things in our daily lives and things in the world around us.

Experiencing God Part Two

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Elizabeth

Last week I wrote that it is only in recent years that I have begun to experience God, to recognize His Presence around me and His voice within me.

I wrote of becoming aware of Him by degrees, by spending time listening to Him and simply being with Him.

I wrote of God showing Himself to me in soft and small ways rather than through some miraculous, mountain-top experience.

This awareness of God can be, as A. W. Tozer wrote, “increased by exercise or destroyed by neglect.” It is not some God-experience achievement level that we unlock and then possess for all time. It is, rather, a relationship that can, like our earthly relationships, be cultivated and deepened or neglected and allowed to move back into the shallows.

Along with neglect and hurry, the sure way I have found to have God’s Presence hidden from me is to become unwilling to surrender to His Spirit.

Sometimes this looks like some sin I am unwilling to let go of.

Sometimes this looks like a circumstance I desperately want to change and thus am unwilling to surrender to God.

Either way, my Self starts to become more important to me than God.

Tozer calls Self the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us.

The only way to remove this veil and regain my awareness of the Presence of God is to crucify it.

Daily.

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgement. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Saviour passed … ~ Tozer

This is a hard truth. Crucifixion hurts. It desperately hurts.

It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free. ~ Tozer

Yet I have learned that there is nothing my Self can give me that can compare in any way to God Himself. How could it?

I forget, though. I start thinking about the pain and I dig my heels in and refuse to surrender.

When I do this, I lose God.

I don’t mean that He leaves me. He promised He never would.

But I lose the awareness of His Presence. I lose His voice. I lose the gift of experiencing God.

Just as it takes being faithful to spend regular times of quiet with Him and His Word to cultivate my relationship with God and thus my receptivity to Him, it takes surrender to Him and to anything He chooses for me (whether through giving it to me or through not taking it away) to remove that veil of Self between us.

Let me be clear: God is the one who does the work of tearing away the veil. Our part is only to surrender and trust.

This is important to understand, for we are forgetful and like to wrest away control for ourself. Our work is only to surrender to the Holy Spirit, whether that be in how we spend our time and cultivate our rhythms or in giving up what we want in a given circumstance or sinful way. The Spirit’s work is to show us the Father and the Son.

If we co-operate with Him in loving obedience God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the light of His face. ~ Tozer

Once again, if you hunger to know more about this, I have written about it more deeply in my book, Beyond the Front Door: Cultivating Rhythms of Abiding in Jesus. You can click here to find it on Amazon.

Art credits: Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Johannes Vermeer; all other photographs are my own — copyright Made Sacred 2021

Experiencing God

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Elizabeth

I have been a Jesus follower my entire life, yet it is only in recent years that I have begun to experience God.

I should qualify that last assertion. It is only in recent years that I have begun to recognize my experience of God.

God is here and interacting with me even when I am wholly unaware of it. He is evident only when I am awake to His Presence.

I still have never had An Experience of God. Never a burning bush, a voice from the sky, a parting of the waters.

Thus far in my life, God has revealed Himself to me through the quiet, the small, the subtle. I have to pay attention.

In all my years of showing up to church, studying Scripture to gain understanding, and praying at God with all my words, I never learned how to slow down and look for God Himself.

This kind of awareness of God’s presence comes slowly, by degrees. As A. W. Tozer writes:

It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence … He is nearer than our own soul …

This was certainly my own experience. It took an entire year of learning to be still and quiet before God in prayer, of learning to read Scripture in a deep and listening kind of way before I recognized God’s voice.

I pray I will never forget the first time I understood what it was I had been hearing my entire life.

Awareness of God, being awake to His Presence, comes in degrees. As I surrender to Him, being faithful to spend regular times of quiet with Him and His Word, I am more and more receptive to His Presence with and in and around me.

In the same way, when I allow my life to become too busy, neglecting my rhythms of being with God, it becomes more and more difficult to hear God and recognize His Presence.

Receptivity (to God’s Presence) … can be present in degrees … It may be increased by exercise or destroyed by neglect. It is not a sovereign and irresistible force which comes upon us as a seizure from above. It is a gift of God, indeed, but one which must be recognized and cultivated as any other gift if it is to realize the purpose for which it was given. ~ Tozer

This is, after all, a relationship we are after, not a magic formula to the good life, and relationships take time to develop. Time spent together, talking, yes, but listening as well. Time simply being together.

I am learning that it is worth it. Every moment spent with God leads to more awareness of Him throughout the day, which leads to more time spent truly with Him, which leads to … simply more of Him.

Which is what our hearts desire more than anything else.

This is what fills us up and satisfies us in the middle of this world that promises to fulfill us but ends up draining us instead.

Next week I’ll write about the other issue that keeps me from experiencing God. I hope you will join me.

In the meantime, if your heart thirsts to know more about this, I have written about it in even more depth in my book, Beyond the Front Door: Cultivating Rhythms of Abiding in Jesus. You can click here to find it on Amazon.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credits: Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Johannes Vermeer; Pathway of Life by Thomas De Witt Talmage; The Road to Emmaus by Robert Zünd

Beyond the Front Door: Cultivating Rhythms of Abiding in Jesus

A Great Lie of our Culture

Posted on March 5, 2021 by Elizabeth

One of the great lies of our time and place is the idea that there exists a separation between sacred and secular, that faith should be private, that what happens in religion has no bearing on the “real world.”

We have decided it is acceptable for people to have faith as long as they keep it to themselves.

There’s no need, after all, to go crazy and foist your beliefs upon everyone else.

The very truth, however, that the physical body of man is now the temple of the Holy Spirit reveals this for the lie it is.

The whole man is now made the temple of God, and his whole life is from now on a liturgy. ~ Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World

It is through us that the temple of God is in the world.

Spiritual and material are not in opposition, but

each ounce of matter belongs to God and is to find in God its fulfillment. Each instant of time is God’s time and is to fulfill itself as God’s eternity. Nothing is ‘neutral.’

God reveals himself through the material and in Christ it all holds together.

When we assume there is no connection between the material world and the spiritual world, we live in agreement with our culture. We deem, as Schmemann writes, the world to be profane in the deepest sense of the word — incapable of any real communication with the divine or of any transformation.

Yet the material world is precisely the opposite of profane. It is sacred in the deepest sense of the word. The world was created as “the material for one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.”

The sacraments (such as the eucharist/communion, baptism) do not transform something “profane,” that is, religiously void or neutral, into something “sacred.” Rather the sacraments reveal the true nature or destiny of some material item such as bread or wine or water.

The sacraments restore the material world to its proper function, revealing it as true, full, adequate. The sacraments cause all matter to “become again a means of communion with and knowledge of God.”

This is what the world was created to be, and this is why the idea of a separation between sacred and secular is so monstrous a lie.

When we build a wall around our faith, denying it any relevance to the world outside our churches, what is denied is quite simply “the continuity between ‘religion’ and ‘life,’ the very function of worship as the power of transformation, judgement, and change.”

We deny the world its ability to be a means of communion with and knowledge of God.

We deny God the power to transform the world through his people.

In truth, we deny ourselves our roles as rulers and priests, the twin roles we were given from the very beginning.

We as Jesus-followers, we the Church, must begin to think differently, to speak differently of our faith and the world.

We must stop walling up our faith and instead allow it to permeate every ounce and instant of our lives and, through us, of the world all around.

If we do, both we and our world will find in God our fulfillment.

Our worship will again become the power of transformation, causing our world to again become a means of communion with and knowledge of God.

It begins with us, God’s rulers and priests in this world.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credits: photographs of the cathedral, light through the tree limbs, and tulips are by Kirk Sewell; all other photographs are my own, copyright Made Sacred 2021

Purchase my book Beyond the Front Door: Cultivating Rhythms of Abiding in Jesus

Marked with the Cross of Christ

Posted on February 26, 2021 by Elizabeth

I was able to attend an Ash Wednesday service this year.

It looked much different than usual.

Registration required. Temperatures taken at the door. Masks on throughout the service.

Even the imposition of the ashes was different: the pastors used Q-tips instead of their finger.

But I was able to attend an Ash Wednesday service this year.

I didn’t know if that would happen.

So I choose to be grateful for what is rather than grumble about what is not.

When I went forward to receive the ashes from the burning of the Palm Sunday palm branches upon my forehead, the pastor looked me in the eyes and told me, You are marked with the cross of Christ …

Marked with the cross of Christ.

It overwhelms me every year.

Because, God help me, I forget.

I forget that I am marked with the cross of Christ, forget that the cross should be the center of everything, forget that my whole life should be cruciform.

Every year I am reminded, and every year I forget again.

The whole of my life should be a sacrifice, a laying down of myself, a turning away from the world and a turning towards what Matt Papa calls the blazing center.

My heart is fickle and forgetful and I desperately need this Lenten season every year to turn my heart back toward the One to whom it belongs.

I am grateful for a Father who knows what we need, who graciously centers our lives around communal rhythms that continually remind us of who we are and whose we are.

If you, also, need the reminder:

You are marked with the cross of Christ.

What Is God Calling You Toward This Lent?

Posted on February 19, 2021 by Elizabeth

Lent began this week.

Lent, for any who are not so familiar with this time in the Church calendar, is a time to practice self-denial for the purpose of becoming more unified with Jesus.

Lent is a 40 day period in which we set aside time to gaze at the crucified Christ in order to awaken a sense of our sin, a sense of guilt and sorrow over our sin.

Why? In order to feel shame and a sense of not-enough?

Not at all.

Rather the purpose is to awaken a gratitude for the forgiveness of our sin and what that cost.

Again, why? In order to feel warm feelings of thankfulness and look-what-was-done-for-me?

This is also not the end towards which we are heading.

Rather the final purpose is to awaken and motivate the works of love and justice that are done in gratitude for the forgiveness of our sin, done to the glory of God.

Glorifying God is the end.

Before we can get to the glory, however, before we can get to the gratitude or the sorrow or the guilt or even the sense of our sin at all, we must begin with time.

Time.

Time spent gazing at Jesus.

Time spent gazing at Jesus’ life and, more specifically during this season of Lent, at his cross.

Before anything else at all can happen in our life-with-God, we must begin with a sacrifice of time.

Lent is, as I said in the beginning, a season of giving up. A season in which we practice the habit of denying ourselves in order to become more like Jesus.

I want to offer you a challenge this year. A challenge that I will be attempting right along with you.

Give up something for 40 days.

Not a purposeless sort of giving up, but a giving up for the purpose of gaining more of God.

Speak with the Holy Spirit about this before deciding. Sit for a time in silence before God and listen to what he might want to say about this.

What does this look like?

Perhaps it is giving up something in order to spend more time with God. Such as a show. Or a few minutes of sleep in order to be still before God.

Perhaps it is giving up something in order to become more aware of God’s presence. Such as fasting from food periodically or for a time. Or a podcast in order to have some silence in your day.

Perhaps you have been living in a particularly indulgent way lately and simply need to exercise your spiritual muscles of self-denial. Such as giving up one of those indulgences.

Traditionally, Sundays are feast days even during Lent. They are kind of a mini-Easter. Practically speaking, this means that whatever you are giving up, you gain it back on Sundays. Celebrate that and give thanks for the good things God has given us.

Will you join me?

Find a way, some way, any way, to spend time gazing at Jesus during these 40 days of Lent.

If you, like me, have been distracted lately, giving God only a part of your heart, join me in doing whatever it takes to return to him with your whole heart.

Listen to the promise he gives us through the prophet Joel:

Yet even now,” declares the LORD,
“return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;

and rend your hearts and not your garments.”
Return to the LORD your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love;

Use these 40 days of Lent wisely, using the rhythm of this season to return wholeheartedly back to the Lord your God.

He is waiting.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Waiting with Eyes Wide Open

Posted on February 12, 2021 by Elizabeth

We all go through times of waiting.

Perhaps all of our lives are spent waiting.

My waiting usually looks impatient and discontent.

My waiting usually is spent trying to arrive.

If all of our lives are supposed to be made sacred, how can this waiting become sacred? How can this waiting become beautiful?

If all of our lives are meant for God’s glory, how can we lean into this waiting instead of resisting and pulling back?

Henri Nouwen, a Dutch theologian, writes about waiting as an active kind of waiting.

He speaks of those at the beginning of the Gospels (Mary, Elizabeth, Zechariah, Simeon, Anna) as waiting with a sense of promise. A promise that allows them to wait. Nouwen says that the secret of waiting is the faith that something has already begun.

Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. ~ Waiting for God

It is a waiting that knows the waited-for thing has already begun.

Like planting a seed and waiting for it to emerge. Like seeing the plus sign on the pregnancy test and waiting to hold the baby in your arms.

It is a knowing that there are beautiful things happening in the darkness. It is a knowing that even though you cannot see, it is growing.

It is a giving up of control because none of us quite know what we are waiting for when God is involved.

Rather than waiting for a job or a baby or a spouse, we are waiting for whatever God chooses to give. We hold our expectations and dreams lightly, with cupped open hands, knowing that whatever comes is ultimately the best thing of all.

It is a giving up of control but it is a gift of surprise and adventure, of something even better than what you had imagined.

It is a waiting with eyes open and breath held in expectation. Expectation of beauty and excitement.

This is a waiting I can lean in to. A beautiful, sacred waiting that glorifies God.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credit: Final photograph of crab apple blossoms by Kirk Sewell; all other photographs copyright Made Sacred 2021

edited from the archives, as I work on the release of my book, Beyond the Front Door, this week!

A Sneak Peek Just for You!

Posted on February 5, 2021 by Elizabeth

A sneak peek just for you, my subscribers, from one of the chapters of my new book, Beyond the Front Door, which will be available on February 10. Enjoy!

Our culture has instilled in us a pride in our busyness.

We brag about how little free time we have, how many vacation days we have built up from disuse, how many activities in which we have involved our children. We feel, in fact, a sense of shame if we don’t have work or play scheduled on the weekends.

We run and we hurry and in the middle of our running and hurrying we wonder how in the world — how in this fretful, busy world — we could possibly still feel empty. So we ramp up the running and the hurrying in an attempt to drown out the loneliness.

Why is it so hard to jump off this carousel?

We want to cram more and more into our schedules. Regardless of how full our lives are, however, we are increasingly empty inside.

“Busyness acts to repress our inner fears and personal anxieties, as we scramble to achieve an enviable image to display to others. We become ‘outward’ people obsessed with how we appear, rather than ‘inward’ people, reflecting on the meaning of our lives.”

We do not, however, need to prune our lives of all busyness.

The truth, it turns out, is more nuanced than that.

The truth is that busyness is not always a negative occurrence as long as you have regular rhythms of stillness in place in your life as well. The problem comes when you have a life that is full of busyness with a complete dearth of any times of stillness.

Jesus’ own life shows this rhythm of ministry busyness and alone-with-God stillness. A rhythm in which both busyness and stillness involve an intimate connection with God.

When we read the gospels, we discover his almost constant action throughout — coming, going, crowding, teaching, healing — and Jesus is regularly withdrawing from all of this activity, regularly going to a place of solitude to pray.

Rhythm.

When our lives are full of work and activity with no times of respite, we become exhausted and anxious. When we have an overabundance of time, we become bored and struggle to find purpose in life.

Rhythm.

God taught us about rhythms at the very beginning of the nation of Israel.

In the same passage later quoted by Jesus as the Greatest Commandment, Moses is giving instruction about when they arrive in the Promised Land.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

Moses tells the people they should keep God in their hearts and minds, they should talk about God, talk to God, listen to God, both when they are still and when they are busy.

… when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way …

This is why these disciplines of silence and solitude and lectio divina are so necessary to our lives.

Having rhythms of being alone with God and his Word are the way we are healed by the Holy Spirit from this illness of being busy.

Daily rhythms, as well as longer monthly and annual rhythms, of being still are the way we put ourselves in a place where God can fill us up with himself.

Having rhythms of taking time out of our busyness to gaze at the Lord, taking the time to sit at his feet and learn how to abide in him, making our home in him, this is the cure for our illness.

Weaving Trials into a Tapestry (plus a giveaway!)

Posted on January 29, 2021 by Elizabeth

Please join me in welcoming to the blog my dear friend, Amanda Wen.

Amanda and I lived in the same town in Illinois for several years, worshiping together at the same church. Our lives have matched up almost eerily. We were musicians together, playing on the worship team at our church. We had our babies together, the first three of mine only a few months apart from her three (although she quit having babies before I did!). It wasn’t until we had both moved that we discovered we were also writers together, and now we are birthing our debut books together!

I have written before that people learn best through story, that the Holy Spirit can often teach us things through a good tale that we would never have understood otherwise. Amanda’s novel is a beautiful example of this. Be sure to comment at the end for a chance to win a signed copy of Amanda’s novel, Roots of Wood and Stone!

The tombstone, set on a small patch of windswept prairie in Rural Sedgwick County, Kansas, is stark in its simplicity.

George W.
Died Apr. 6, 1871
Aged 4 days
Child of W. F. and S. E. Stevens

On a facing side, further tragedy is etched in granite for all to see.

Sarah E.
Died May 13, 1871
Aged 30 years

Such grief was sadly common on the Midwestern frontier, and for Sarah’s widower, William, this was just the beginning of his litany of loss. Less than two years later, he’d bury his four-year-old son, Arthur. In 1876 he and his second wife, Dorcas, would lose their infant son, Ivon. In 1877, Dorcas herself would die, followed in 1878 by one-year-old Mark and in 1879 by both his six-year-old daughter, May, and 24-year-old son, Isaac. and twin tragedies in 1879 with the loss of his six-year-old daughter, May, and his 24-year-old son, Isaac. In fact, of William Stevens’ fourteen children, only six would live to adulthood.

How could a person cope with so much tragedy? How could one emerge from loss upon loss with an intact faith? Yet by all accounts William’s faith remained steadfast. Perhaps it was lessons learned from his preacher father, or the helping hand of a neighbor in a time of need. We don’t know exactly, so I decided to fill in the blanks through fiction, a story which ultimately became the historical timeline of my debut novel, Roots of Wood and Stone.

In the novel, a character endures the loss of his wife and son in a matter of days just a few months into settling the prairies of Sedgwick County. And Jack Brennan isn’t shy about his questions. His doubt. His anger at the Almighty. “I stopped talking with God altogether,” Jack says in one pivotal scene. “Either he didn’t exist, or his purpose was to gut me like a fish. Either way, I was through.”

I must confess I’ve been where Jack was, and it didn’t take anywhere near the level of tragedy he endured to bring it about. But I’m comforted by David’s example in the Psalms. He raged at God on occasion. Hurled all kinds of accusations at his Creator. But God didn’t condemn David for his very human emotions. In fact, he called David a man after His own heart.

If we bring our anger, our devastation, our confusion, and our doubts to God, rest assured He can handle them. No matter what vitriol we spew at Him, He remains faithful and steadfast. And in His time, and His way, we will see that faithfulness. We will see His love. His healing. God may not calm our storms, at least not right away, but He will carry us through them. He’s done it for me. He did it for William Stevens.

As for Jack Brennan? Well, you’ll just have to read the book to find out.

A postscript, if I may. Remember those six Stevens children who survived to adulthood? One of them, Mattie, was my great-great grandmother. She and her husband, Francis Little, homesteaded not far from her father, in a large white farmhouse that inspired Roots of Wood and Stone. And Francis’s memoir, A Kansas Farmer, not only provided a wealth of information as I researched for my novel’s historical scenes, but it cemented the family legacy of faith. It’s clear from those almost-century-old typewritten pages that Francis and Mattie themselves carried a strong faith in Christ, and I know from my mom’s research into our history that every generation between theirs and my own has sought to follow Jesus. It is their legacy of steadfast faith I sought to honor in my book, and—more importantly—instill in my children.

Whatever you’re going through, you aren’t in it alone. And I pray that God will help you see how He’s carrying you through. How He’s weaving your trials into a beautiful tapestry.

What do you know about your own family history? Any inspirational stories about your ancestors you’d like to share? Leave a comment for your chance to win a signed copy of Amanda’s debut novel, Roots of Wood and Stone! (Giveaway ends February 5, 2021. Due to shipping costs, we can only mail to a U.S. mailing address.)

To find Amanda Wen’s blog and short stories, visit www.amandawen.com. Readers can also follower her on Facebook (@AuthorAmandaWen), Twitter (@AuthorAmandaWen), and Instagram (@authoramandawen).

Finding Truth in Fairy Tales

Posted on January 22, 2021 by Elizabeth

I love how much truth can be found in fairy tales and myths. I love that God chooses to give us glimpses of Himself and His Word in the words of storytelling throughout time.

We often view Christianity as rules and laws, as limitations on our freedom. We wonder why God puts so many limits on our fun. I once experienced a switch of perspective.

I read Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. In his book, he points out that in fairy tales, there is always an “if”. You may go to the ball IF you return by midnight. You may marry the princess IF you never let her see a cow.

All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend on one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden. ~ Chesterton

Everything beautiful and glorious that cannot be understood is dependent upon a condition that equally cannot be understood.

In fairy tales, this does not seem unjust. If Cinderella asks her Fairy Godmother why she has to be home by midnight, the Godmother may reply “why should you go to the ball for any amount of time?” If the miller asks “why can’t I let the princess see a cow?” the fairy may reply “why should you get to marry the princess at all?”

Fairy tales never focus on the condition. The condition is so small as to seem irrelevant. The focus is on the dazzling, the wild, the fantastic vision.

We don’t focus on the vision. We focus on the limitation. We wonder why we must not get drunk instead of marveling at the beauty, the deep color, the richness of the wine. We wonder why we must only marry one person instead of living in wonder at the existence of sex.

No restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself…keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman…It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. ~ Chesterton

What a beautiful change of viewpoint! To look not at the limitation but at the wonder of the permission. To not complain about being asked to keep our words pure but to wonder at the startling glory of language. To not gripe of not being allowed to eat all that we desire but to be astonished at the wild and vast expanse of color and taste of food. To look upon the dazzling, wild, fantastic vision.

In Christ, all is made sacred, so search for Him everywhere. Look for Him in the stories and fables, in the myths and fairy tales that you read. You will find Him there.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credits: Fairy Tales by Jessie Willcox Smith; Fairy Tale Barnstar by Arman Musikyan; In Fairyland by Richard Doyle; A Fairy Tale by Dorothy M. Wheeler; The Fairy Tale by Walther Firle

edited from the archives

A Psalm of Collective Lament

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Elizabeth

Lord have mercy.

We are lost, are broken, are despairing.

Our world is wandering in darkness.

Our churches are falling into division.

Our hearts are mired in filth.

Rise up, O God!

Defend your people!

Rescue your world!

We are lost without you.

Lord have mercy.

Thee we adore.

You are goodness and beauty.

You created all,

flinging the stars into space and crafting the ladybug’s wings.

You are power and strength.

With your right hand, you held back the seas.

With the breath of your mouth, you took down city walls.

You are love and mercy.

You took the very powers of sin and death into yourself so we wouldn’t.

You forsook the companionship of your Trinity so we could be with you.

Thee we adore.

Into Thy hands.

Though the world grow dark,

I know who you are.

I remember what you have done.

Though my heart be filthy,

I trust your heart toward me and our world.

I know all the reasons I adore you.

Whom have I in heaven but you?

And there is nothing on earth I desire but you.

Whether you come to the rescue today

or wait for another thousand years,

Into Thy hands.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credits: Grief by Bertram Mackennal; Children at Prayer by Antoine Édouard Joseph Moulinet; Risen Christ on the Lake of Gennesaret by David Teniers the Younger