I have to admit that whenever I think of you, I cannot help but feel this warmth
Hovering over my Heart.
This feeling I want to express, but cannot.
I think of what you came to do-- how you came for this rescue.
A rescue from a kidnapping that we had been too numb to realize.
You came to bring the feeling back into your fingers and our toes--
The tingling of the lifeblood, flowing back.
In In In.
Your blood flows.
You open our eyes to see colors we have never seen, touched us with a touch we have never felt.
But always longing for it. I feel compelled to write in Red becuase it is the closest I can come to communicating the warmth of this Redemption
The blood that flows out of our unquenchable soul for me.
For Us. Your Children. Your Lost Ones.
Something vivid. Something Beutiful. An Oasis of Grace.
An awakening from a death we were too dead to experience.

But then suddenly, as if a light, something opened.
A great rush of air. A flood of water engulfing our parched souls.
We wanted to soak it all up but found our little human hearts too small.
And maybe a bit too full of the turkish delight of this world.
And so we long for the day when our hearts will be empty of all but this passion.
We dance with all our might,
Move our bodies as violently, as passionatley, as beautifully as we know how
Until our energy is used up on you.
We breath deep and attempt to exhale it all again-- it is the only worship we know.

We long to embrace you. Drink deep your strong arms.
Fall as fully-- the full weight of our heavy souls into your body.
Leaning as hard as we know how, dropping our heavy loads into your Creator Hands.
Your Creator Hands.
This life we know not how to fathom.
Sing these songs we can only feel as deep as our tiny earthen bodies have been dug from the ground.
Only breathing in as much as our little balloon lungs can hold.

And so the best way, it seems, to convey our worship is through this deep, red longing.
This deep, uncontainable desrire to bleed with you, to feel your burning passion.
This passion of love, of gratitude, or Redemption.
This Return to our Creator
This natural state that we know can be only so right. This Bloodred Longing.

I have decided that I want to spend this year reading through the gospels and so have begun with the book of John. I've been wanting to post something about the things that have been rushing through my heart as a result of my focus on this book, but have not quite had the words. The other night, I had some time to spend alone with the book and just began to write through what a particular passage was saying to my heart becuase my mind was getting in the way of thinking through it. And I found that a comon chord was running through this particular passage, the account of the blind man healed on the Sabbath in chapter 9, as I am finding to be throughout the book. It seems that John is emphasizing the sort of metaphors that Jesus uses to describe his purpose in this world. He uses the ideas of living water, bread of life, light of the world, and in this account, blindness.

Here, Jesus is commenting on what it means to really be blind. In the midst of this event, the religious leaders are debating if Jesus can really be the Massiah if he is breaking certain laws, and I love the blind man's response: "I do not know if this man is a sinner or not. All I know is that I was blind and now I can see."

The deeper I plunge into this book, the more I see that the restoration that God is desiring to do in this world involves a new sort of fresh life-- ample air to breath, water to drink, food to eat. He came to fulfill our searching souls. And imagine this blind man. At the beginning of the story, Jesus explains to his disciples that the man is not blind becuase of anyone's sin, but becuase God has a purpose to show something deep and profound throug him. This man has never seen anything in his entire life. He has never see a sunset, never experienced color, has never been able to put an image with the feelings, the scents, the sounds all around him. Image the first time he opened his eyes. I cannot help bu think about color. How he was not only living without color, but without images at all. And Jesus brought this totally new sort of life.

As I think about this God, there can be no other way to really understand or describe him. I've been thinking a lot about my life and the gospel lately and how even though I grew up in a home that somewhat ackowledged God in some way, it was not until just a few years, if even that long, that I have begun to see. I have not seen color for a lot of my life. I used to think that following Jesus meant living this numb sort of life under the rule of this God simply because that is what you do-- it's the right thing to do. But what if it was something so much more? Water for the parched throat, food for the belly that has never eaten, sight for the man who has never experienced color.