Second Week of Advent: Love

All of my pretenses have gone threadbare,

Or perhaps they always were. 

I look down, toward the floor, yearning to lose all of my imperfections,

But all I see there are the rags of the beauty that was never there to start with.

I want a heart that is not spotted, blemished like a rejected lamb,

I want to look there and know full well that I am worthy to be loved,

Yet I am not, and so I put on pretty dresses,

And let my heart skip a beat when someone looks my way,

As if I could somehow make something of these broken pieces,

Something someone would want to win.

But I am not blind to the malformed flaws that paint me a cripple.

My eyes are wide with the knowledge of evil,

Yet I forget that I also hold the knowledge of good.

I am looking for love in a foreign place,

In the wilderness of my fickle heart.

I am a deserter, a thief, a traitor, and a liar.

Who could love me?

I have seen my own love wither and die as the heat of conflict breaks upon it.

I know that it cannot withstand any kind of trial or weather any storm.

It is the kind of love that is drawn in the sand when the day is mild,

But the tide quickly carries it away.

So my heart cannot fathom the love without bounds that I see in front of me,

Like a warrior, like a king, like a lion,

But also like a lover, who longs to behold me.

I am nothing! And yet—

Here I am where all of my pretenses have gone threadbare,

Yet I am not uncovered, for I am wrapped in righteousness freely given.

What is love?

I do not know it, not intimately,

For I have run from it for too long,

But I know this—

It is not earned.

Thank God, it is not earned.

You love me. I know it deeper than I know my own shortcomings

Because I have known it before I was even born,

For there, in the depths of the earth as I was being formed,

I was claimed.

It is true that I was a slave to sin, bound to death by chains my hands had formed,

That I belonged to a brutal master,

And that I was plunging headlong toward destruction.

But I was bought by blood shed two thousand years ago.

This is love, that while I was filthy in sin,

You died. 

For me.

This is no longer a question of how deep, how wide,

Just how endless your love is,

Because there is no limit, there is no end,

There is no brokenness that can tear a way out,

A loophole that you somehow missed,

A last coin that did not make it to my old master,

So that the price was not fully paid,

You did not make a mistake.

So can I call you a liar? Can I make you imperfect?

Surely not.

Therefore when you call me yours,

I am forced to know that it is true.

So when you dress me in your rich robes,

And place upon my head a beautiful crown,

On my finger a ring of promise,

I shall not take them off to replace them again with my rags,

Only to cast them at your feet in worship.

I shall not return again to the blood from which you drew me,

Only shall I remain drenched in your perfection.

I shall not again return to the streets to find cheap love, as if I were not claimed,

Only shall I speak your precious name to the broken.

For I am loved, and I cannot escape it, nor can I ignore it,

For it is blazing like holy fire, and it is consuming me, but I am not afraid,

For your name is mine and even death cannot part us.