God. Sweet Spirit. I am here with You. Just You. And just me.
Help me to build my identity in these spaces when I am with You, and I know you regard me just as I am. No judgment from people who don’t know the whole story. No contempt and sneering born more out of someone else’s insecurity than out of my failings. No bad advice from ‘the friends of Job,’ given more to make the giver feel important than to help the recipient gain clarity. No comments from uninvested onlookers.
Let self-concept form in these moments when I understand that Your love doesn’t most often look like saccharine antics of affection or sweeping acts of vindication. When I understand that Your love most often looks like . . . a steady gaze.
A gaze that never turns away but looks and keeps on looking. A gaze that never shows surprise or contempt and never seems confused or incredulous. A gaze that never looks right past me or right through me. A gaze that never finds me too small to be seen. A gaze before which I am never hidden by the crowd, nor by the circumstances, nor by the emotional baggage of the onlooker.
Your silent gaze confers dignity. Or does it simply concur with the innate dignity that is a birthright?
(Dignity, a birthright, however contested by mobs of imps–usurpers, who have no jurisdiction to contest dignity or worth, but who parade around practicing law without a license. They con the crowds–we con ourselves–to believe these judgments are valid.)
Before Your clear-eyed gaze . . . I am.
I am never too perplexing to be understood. I am never too infuriating to be countenanced; I am never too embarrassing to be looked in the eye. I am not too far gone, but I am not particularly impressive, either. Nevertheless, I am never such an inconvenience that this Divine parental eye cannot find the time to meet me. When I am with the I Am, I just . . . am.
My New Year’s prayer? Let me grow in the consciousness of this gaze. Let me live more and more in the steadiness of Divine love. I pray, sweet Spirit, that as I contemplate your comprehensive countenance, I will accept your acceptance and stop fighting to be seen and understood. I pray that I will drop my defenses and that, being unafraid, I will look around me to truly see and accept those all around me, who also bear Your image and the light of Your clear-eyed gaze.
The Lyrical Realist 