Poem: Struggling Before Prayer

I wrote this poem in 1999 and dug it up recently. It's about those moments when we're pretending with God, but He sees right through that to the exact thing we need. We see, in those moments, how very weak and human and vulnerable we are. We see the futility of life without God's help. God wants to hear our anger and be with us in our despair. His compassionate strength rescues us when we are at rock bottom.

Struggling Before Prayer
By Summer Black

There is only one response required
When God’s endlessness
meets
the selfishness
of me.
With a rocket’s ambition and
a snail’s pace
my will and my knees
are bent before God.

The asking, at first, seems meaningless.
God knows what I want
and how far away from Him I am willing to go
to get it.
He knows what I need
and that, above all, I don’t want that.

Like a worm who craves dirt
but needs water,
I keep digging—
thinking that before long
I’ll hit something that sounds
like earnestness and feels
like communication
only I’m really just moving lips,
not moving nearer
to God at all.

The distance between
my full height and the floor,
where I should fall prostrate,
grows longer and taller
as I rebel.

While I fight with Him
He uses me
and I become a tool
in my own re-making.
Even then I prove His life,
His purpose,
And the pit I would be without Him.

“Lord, help me find the spots that should be clean
and I will wipe them up again.”
Even as I speak these worthless words,
I kneel in pools of sin
too deep for me to swim in,
much too dense for me
to hold it all together.

I wave to Him while drowning,
not to ask for help,
but to give a sign that I’m alright.

I scream so that I know I still have my voice,
my opinion,
and my vote in what happens to ME,
without acknowledging that God hears—
pays very close attention to every plea,
never
leaves me alone, and yet
sees me very differently.

Fortunately, the heart in me—
with all its desire to be right
and well
and free
on its own—
is very close to having
His will instead.

Soon I will see that
I need no voice when it is His
who wakes the morning up.
I want no strength that gets me
places where he is not.
Pain my grip me hard
and a fallen world may pierce me,
but my pretending is what harms Him most.

Even so, He always defends me against
myself and other enemies
because eventually,
I honestly ask the Lord
To take everything that is me,
forgive it, and make it whatever He wants.

Desire then ceases to be longing and
becomes action, the cousin of fervor,
who, in turn, is closely related to peace.

Thankfully, grace is won without a fight.
God saves even those who want to look
beautiful while drowning.
He shortens the distance between
our pride and His majesty by
providing a way for us to reach Him
any time.

When we crave Him,
His wisdom and His voice,
We need nothing else.
God spent His entire human lifetime
That we might know the truth of that.