How to be His

Geese fly over Hinterhaus and call as they drift by. I mention it because it moves me so. I run to the window then out the door to catch a glimpse if I can. I watched them in the cemetery walking in their awkwardly beautiful gate. I took pictures as they flew, I made videos, I marvelled. There is something there to see. The rooster grinds out a morning cockadoodle. There is something wild and primal in his throat. He’s not trying. In himself, he is at rest.

My dogs killed a groundhog in this town yard a couple of months ago. It was an all afternoon ordeal. The neighbor left a well written, angry note telling of all the barking and the blood while I was away at work. She had reached over the fence and shot the varment. Her letter was signed, “You’re welcome.” I wasn’t angry with my blood-drenched canines as I know instinct is their guide. I wheeled the body to the back of the property and tipped the wheelbarrel to let it slide out onto the ground. In the morning, a company of vultures picked at mere bones as I left again for work. I felt the ease of instinct as I backed out of the drive, and the rhythm of the natural world. They simply are, and that is somehow intoxicating to me, a lifelong “trier”. Maybe it is instinct that moves me. Their guiltlessness, their ease at being makes me ache inside for something. I’ve been searching awhile for why.

Someone wrote that there was an anguish is the pursuit of knowing God. I wondered why he said that, until I realized I feel the anguish too in things I want to understand, in longings yet unfulfilled. I felt it watching the geese in the cemetery and the pelicans on Gar Creek in February as they rested, floating on our murky waters. I felt it for years, waking with the morning rooster. And I can’t get past it just yet.

I review my life and see how I’ve tried. I have tried so hard with no rest, no ease of being like these, except maybe far back, as a little child. And I like that little girl I remember. She hadn’t perfected the heavy art of striving in one’s own strength yet. She hadn’t learned to try to please people yet and appease a tough God.

I found the words, a week or so ago, for this ache and anguish. I’ve given it almost no rest, waking and sleeping, since.

“You say that you love me. Don’t say that you love me. Cause I don’t know how to be Yours. You say that you want me. Don’t say that You want me. Cause I don’t know how to be Yours.” I still act like an orphan I guess
My hard heart breaks to confess
That even while You hold me
As I cry on the floor
I still dont know how to be Yours–lyrics to How to be Yours, Chris Renzema.

Is this too raw? Is this too honest? The birds don’t sing things like this, they know how. But I have and I do. And it seems someone had to say it cause some of us have felt it so deeply, yet with no words to console ourselves by. But these last years, I have been unravelling into some peace like the pelicans and the others. These lyrics have appeared in my final departures from a striving heart that tries hard to be someone God could want, could love. It is my emotional fairwell song as the ache is yielding ever so slowy. And my morning song, too, sounds uncontrived like the instinct of the song birds….like a song sung free.

And low and behold, it seems it is not in the scrutinizing of self that brings this rest, but in the gazing at God, and my simple instinct is to love Him back.