A candid God for a candid person.

A lot has changed over the last few months. A lot. My relationship with God has changed. The changes are hard to describe. The only easy change to point out is the difference between how verbal our relationship use to be. He and I had a very verbal relationship before. It started off with me talking and suddenly merged into conversation. But now I'm finding Him more and more in the silences.

We were told to pray tonight, so I dutifully knelt down and if God had been an actual person, I would be able to say I stared at Him in silence for the next 5 minutes.
I don't actually know how long it was, but almost everyone had quit praying when suddenly I broke my silence with a simple "You've given me more than I can handle."

There wasn't anything else to say. Nothing to add. No complaints, or reasonings, no listing of the burdens or problems, just a simple "It's more than I can handle."
It was enough to get me through. When I stood up the burden was lighter, but I felt a strong check later in the evening from God about the need for me to keep returning to Him. Suddenly that old poem "I had so much to accomplish, I didn't have time to pray" that ends with "I had so much to accomplish, that I had to take time and pray." - while always understandable - that poem became real to me tonight. Without that time with God, crawling into a deep fulfilling place with Him each and every day, the crazy stress and burdens just pile up until you're literally buried in them, with no hope of daylight in sight.

We (and by 'we' I mean "I") tend to put off the necessity of God. It's easy to say you need salvation, you need God, you need hope, your need peace blah blah blah. Those things are justifiable. Even to the world to some extent. But at some point the need to talk to God has to trump my need to get a couple of loads of laundry done, my need to vacuum the house, my need to read a book to Little One, or play the piano. It would be nice if when that overwhelmed feeling started rising and blocking my airway, if right that moment, everything else got cast into 2nd priority under talking to the only One who can get me safely and sinlessly into the next hour.

I say sinlessly, because once the world climbs onto your shoulders and you attempt to carry it uphill, in the snow, against the wind... lets just say your patient demeanor tends to go down the toilet. You start fighting for every inch. It's like a relay race with Jesus jumping up and down next to you saying "I'll run next!" only you're too busy fighting for another inch to realize you're losing the race because you don't want to take a second to pass the buck to Someone who can take it.

Tonight when I told God He'd given me more than I can handle, He didn't come back with a reassurance that I could handle it. He didn't tell me things would be alright. He didn't tell me people would stop being hurt or that He'd ease the pain. He didn't, at least to my knowledge, work any huge miracle. But, He was there. And it got me through another day.