This is you. You are tired, you are weak. Occasionally, for maybe three days, you are filled with a surge of energy in all directions. You will do all the things - you will get all the things done that you have been meaning to and then you will be free. It must be those things making you feel like this. Once you do the things you will feel who you are more keenly, you will feel the things you are about - you will swell in your capacity to create, you will be unoffended by things that have nothing to do with you, instead of feeling like that is a capacity you should have, or have instead of the ones you do. You will suddenly be unmoored from all your comparisons, the strings tying you down to some potential identity will suddenly be cut - those strings tying you to many things, because you can't find a plumline vertically down to the solid rock, solid rock you know would feel better than "at least I'm not this", "I'm better than that", "I'm a little bit more nuanced than that'. You think you feel above all the people who know who they are - or who's personhood is so clear to you, the borders and boundaries of it - but really, all you feel is floating.

You miss your old self. Power, vigor, compassion, quiet - PEACE. A humming stillness of found in the identity of God. In truth if you look at it, you didn't used to know better who you were - you knew who God was. And it was personal. And it was personal to you. That was part of the meaning of the Love of God - the personal-ness of the personhood of God. The man Jesus was personal. Not only did he hunger and thirst, get frustrated or feel elated, feel grass, or the sheen of dust, or the temperature of wild water, or the myriad of currents in the eyes of his friends and the strangers around him - he walked with you in your life. He shared your nights of hopelessness, I held your hand in introductions to heaven, in books or dreams or actual travelling there. He was responsible for your Joys. Now, in a bitter resignation that knows it cannot really blame God for anything, he is the author (or silent witness to) all your lacks. This you know is not the true God. But you never really look the lies in the face to shut them out - its a feeling- the foundation belief of which you try to avoid examining.

You struggle to forgive - over and over again. There is a hard tin taste in your mouth. You live from a poor poor place. Poor towards everyone and everything.

Hard and beautiful gusts of wind come in - the voice of wisdom familiar in those who give it. You mother, your two friends - your advisors. No one is responsible for your life. Especially not your inner life. You know this is true.

You are Rilke's Swan on the Land, and no water in sight. You pray hard in fits of truth - to have the discipline for all the structures of devotion, to make clay pots, oil pots for God to fill - to actually pray, actually make a quiet space of medication, to sing a song frankly adoring God, from your belly from your throat. To read the Bible. When it comes to it, you always read about 3 sentences and completely fail to understand what is going on, what about God this is, or about you. You can make it through a song or two and its wonderful, and then you are back in your own presence, feeling alone, having stretched like a rubber band and come back to the same place.

The third man who buried his talent keeps ringing in your head. Not because you see where you are digging your life in, but because you recognise the attitude. That you know. You feel like that. You are loathe to give to God what you feel he hasn't done anything for, in your life. God himself!! Really?! But you feel like that.

Everything runs dry. You know, more clearly than ever, that all your springs are in God - because looking somewhere else has made you tired. The younger son has to be in it with the pigs before he'll go home to what was his all along - what was his while he was away from it too, what was not part of the deal when he asked for what was not part of the current deal. If you inherit from your father, that inheritance does not include how long he would have looked after you well - with friendship! - while you worked for him. (I'm sure he didn't hire the servants to keep you company. I'm sure you didn't get as huge a chunk of work as you felt tired you out). He doesn't take it away from you to give it to you later. A father is giving enough for now, and a great amount later.

If there's anything you've felt, its the 'not enough'. Boredom talks to you all the time - making you think there is a thing you are waiting for in emptiness. You've got to get through this to get there - and the "this" is something then that isn't enough, and a kind of life you don't have enough for.

You are reminded of the Spirit of God - loving, happy, patient, kind, gentle, faithful, good, full of peace, expressing all these through peace. There's an internal law that resists these - horrifyingly, that law lives in you somewhere, forbidding life. Some legalistic standard saying that something must be achieved first to have these.

So you have cast out that Pharisaical standard, a demon telling you your life is not enough, that you don't have enough, making you hopeless of an impossible standard.

But still, you don't want to be empty and free.

You want to be in love again. Young like that, free like that. Full like that, serene like that. In love, right in it, like in the water, in an on and through it, travelling, gliding. Like Rilke's swan.

There is the little ember - you want to be in love with one man, with one God.

He is real this God, sovereign, he must be able to gather all the lost sheep of your mindless, soulless distraction across the planes of your life, your perception of it, your thoughts. He knows you. He has loving arms. If he has been counting the hairs that have remained on your head, the years that remain in your head, and if He is the land of plenty, the loaded table between you and your enemies, he can sit with you, and eat with you. He is rest by still waters of love, green with forgiveness and new life, and in the right purpose paths. And you can be just a sheep - not beset by all these doubts of God's capacity to be a shepherd.