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In preparation for writing about my expectations, I found myself listening to “Worlds Apart”. If the entire Christian experience can be summed up in a song, this is it. I find these lyrics holding truths I desperately want revealed in my own life. I could find no better way to speak of my expectations than through these words.

Worlds Apart

by Jars of Clay
 
***
 
 


I am the only one to blame for this
Somehow it all ends up the same
 

So much of my life has been spent in struggle to accommodate the guilt I heap upon myself. So much of the time I never let grace be the enough that it is. So much of the journey, I shoulder all of my shortcomings, allowing them to marinate my soul a stained rancor that I convince myself I deserve. The result of this self-inflicted martyrdom is inevitable failure, the kind that takes all the balm in the world to soothe before I can even stick my head out of the hole I’ve dug for myself.

My Expectation: To learn to let grace be enough
 
 
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Soaring on the wings of selfish pride
I flew too high and like Icarus I collide
With a world I try so hard to leave behind

 

I try to leave behind me things that drag me down, things that desire to sever the connection between myself and God, and yet, as Paul, I consistently find myself doing the things I hate. I come crashing into this depravity right after I deem my actions as holy, forgetting I am a filthy rag before the Righteous One.


My Expectation: To be humbled unto desperate degree

 
 
***
 
 
To rid myself of all but love
to give and die
 
 
 Truly, I desire to be ridden of pride, arrogance, hypocrisy, even value, to the point that my life is poured out as one unending stream of love. And yet I find myself so often magnifying the discrepancies between my fellow man and myself, listing reason after reason to be selfish, withhold affection, abandon forgiveness. I forget that the guilty man who deserves to die is not the child molester on death row, but myself.



My Expectation: To let God-love fill every hateful gap within me
 
 
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To turn away and not become
Another nail to pierce the skin of one who loves
more deeply than the oceans

 
 
 Lately, I find myself overwhelmed with grief for my sin. Indeed, Jesus may have said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, yet I don’t feel blessed. Rather, I feel like an unfaithful wife confronting her husband at the end of night, confessing all the other arms she’s lain in. Each time I feel more destitute, more broken for my sin, maybe by realizing every time I cheat on Heaven’s Light, I invite that Light to become darkness, reinforcing the need for Christ to suffer.



My Expectation: To fall so passionately in love with Christ that the thought of hurting Him destroys me
 
 
***

More abundant than the tears
Of a world embracing every heartache

 
 Sometimes I have to cry because of what I see in the world. Prostitution for the sake of money is an assault on human respect, but the type of prostitution that breaks my heart is the emotional kind, the sort that digs meat hooks into another person, merely for the sake of being loved for a night. The emptiness in her eyes is tangible by 8am on Friday, reading over W.B Yeats in the seat beside you but never really stepping foot inside the classroom. Oh God, but haven’t we all been prostitutes?

My Expectation: To reach out healing hands, unafraid of the reactions

 
 
***
 
 
 

Can I be the one to sacrifice
Or grip the spear and watch the blood and water flow

 When confronted with that moment before sin, how often I willingly go in, sure that God will forgive! I want, more than anything, to give Him that moment of temptation time and time again. I want to sacrifice, even if I have to be humiliated to do so. I want to offer my body, mind, and soul as a living sacrifice to Christ so He may do with all of me as He wishes!

My Expectation: To eliminate every vanity, desire, obsession, and luxury to the glory of my God, and allowing my remains to be used as a walking arrow pointing straight to Him!
 
 
***

All said and done I stand alone
Amongst remains of a life I should not own

 

 

 

I have so often come to this point where I give everything I’ve held back to follow God completely, and I stand at this moment where, like overlooking the valley from a mountaintop, I can survey the wreckage and debauchery that has been life according to the Gospel of Me. If I could let go of the façade I call righteousness and embrace humility, my secret sin wouldn’t follow me everywhere, like a lost puppy, like a shadow.


My Expectation: To let God demolish the traps that have ensnared me for my whole life.
 
 
***

It takes all I am to believe
In the mercy that covers me
Did you really have to die for me?

 

My best friend told me yesterday she didn’t understand why God was blessing her with new opportunities and second chances after all the ways she’s hurt Him. As we lay, sunning in the grass and talking, I threw aside my church-armor and admitted that I, too, have no idea why God loves the way He does. I have been a recipient and even giver of this love, yet it still completely eludes me, like a mathematic formula I can recite but hardly apply.

My Expectation: To receive and become an ever-giver of this raw, consuming love.
 
 
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All I am for all you are
Because what I need and what I believe are worlds apart

I’ve been an armchair sympathizer, I’ve been a spiritual fraud, I’ve been a soul who desperately wants to find the God that found me nine years ago, yet I seem to continually hit the glass roof of American Christianity, of the go-to-church-every-Sunday salvation. I have a hypothesis: Jesus’ Love is enough to change the world. The Jesus Love I’ve seen so often is limited to the difference between the numbers on Levi’s and the smell of your clothes and mine. Jesus Love is transforming, so why are we not?

My Expectation: To hold dirty children and hug the homeless, to pray with prostitutes and heal the leper, all in the breathing form of Jesus Love.
 
 
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To love you – take my world apart
To need you – I am on my knees
To love you – take my world apart
To need you – broken on my knees
 

These presumptive ideas, preconceived expectations, discriminating notions, prideful assessments… Smash them, Lord. Take my world apart as you enable us to take our world apart. Fill me with a hunger for justice, a passion to declare Your healing to the sick. Set in us a fire so blazing that countries will come to watch us burn. All for You. Destroy my arrogance, pride, hypocrisy. Take me all apart.

My Expectation: That God answers this prayer.
 
 
***

I look beyond the empty cross
forgetting what my life has cost
and wipe away the crimson stains
and dull the nails that still remain



To rise, take up my mat, and walk…

 
 
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more and more I need you now,
I owe you more each passing hour
the battle between grace and pride
I gave up not so long ago



…To meet Jesus and be done with everything else…
 
 
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So steal my heart and take the pain
and wash the feet and cleanse my pride
take the selfish, take the weak,
and all the things I cannot hide

 

…To be ruined for Christ, for all other desires, for all other efforts, for all other endeavors… 
 
 
***

take the beauty, take my tears
the sin-soaked heart and make it yours
take my world all apart
take it now, take it now


…To cry my eyes out for the lostness of this world…
 
 
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and serve the ones that I despise,



…To love the men who buy sex in Thailand…

 
 
***
 
 
speak the words I can’t deny,

 


…To say, “In the name of Jesus, you are healed”…
 
 
***

watch the world I used to love
fall to dust and thrown away

 

 

…To never be able to go back to who I was before…
 
 
***

take my world apart, take my world apart
I pray, I pray, I pray
take my world apart

My Expectation:

For Christ, to…

Take My World Apart