More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it…
I give you what is unbounded…
I give you the life I have let live for the love of you…
I give you my love.
Wendell Berry, “The Country of Marriage”

And the Lord says: What is this little life you are living? The earth goes hurtling around the sun at breakneck speed—can you feel the turning beneath your feet? Do you see the way the light gathers and spreads, shimmers and shines each morning? Have you chosen to go without food or drink to know—to know—what that kind of alive feels like: that sharpness, that desperation, rather than this heavy, cushioned, comfortable stupor? Do you know the shape of foreign sounds on your tongue? Have you fully inhabited the creativity I have given you? Are your eyes open? Are your hands ready to receive? Do you live your days wide-open and vulnerable, like a sail, catching the slightest breeze upon the surface of the waters, like a camera lens and your heart the film? Oh alive, alive, alive—are you alive and do you know it? Are you more alive than all the world?

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Oh I love You, Jesus, so I speak to every dead and dormant shadow in me: “Come alive, come awake!”

I unbind all that is within me, let my passion loose.  No, I refuse smallness and the mundane; I refuse to live what is not life; I refuse to endure the hours like a slave to time.

You draw me with Your many-splendored love; You stir up dreams of destiny in the secret places of my being. And I know—I can embody Your hope for me. I can make Your dreams for me reality.

Yes, I will dare to let this life You have given me live. I will dare to let my little life be like a comet, exploding the darkness in gold and fiery blue. What does it matter that the light will only last a moment? You are the One my heart loves–I will spend every last ounce of my being in a gesture that wild, that bright, that extravagant, all for love of You.