When you kneel down at adoration and immediately start trying to have your say, when you feel like you have a hundred things to tell him but your brain is a mess and all of them are tangled together like shoelaces emerging from the washing machine, and you can’t form a single complete thought, even just one, He speaks like a drumbeat or a pulse in the back of your head, a rhythm to calm your thoughts and ease your every fear, an unignorable beat, beat, beat, beat. He says, “Rest.” And you do.
When you’re in the last hour of a four-hour concert and the fourth and final band is playing, and the music is ambient, and there are no words, and the crowd is moving like one single organism in the vast, symphonic landscape, and you’ve become separated from your friend and you feel simultaneously alone and at peace and alive and floating and lifted up and anchored and stifled and free, He speaks in beautiful words, love-sodden words drawn out of lowercase, impressionist noises. He says, “I am always with you.” And He is.
When you’re sitting in the chapel, and you feel wrung out, brung out, twisted-squeezed-drained dry, when you’ve caught yourself worrying about things utterly outside your control, when you’ve found that you’re attached to things of this world that should have no bearing on your heart, but they do, when in a hundred little ways you fail, and fail again, and you want to slump to the chapel floor and more than anything to fall into His embrace and let him hold you, He speaks in the silence, directly into your exhausted heart. He says, “You are my beloved one.”
And you are.
In Your Embrace 