A Prayer from the East to the West

It’s difficult to know what to say at a time and place when I am so full and so distracted and so completely disarmed. There is little more powerful than stories, stories of success and of failure and the most important, which are all of those words in between.

I keep pondering what success is, what fulfillment is. I keep begging to know if I’ve failed or if I’ve passed. I am disarmed utterly and completely, in learning, in beginning to grasp that these two poles, these two ends that we flee to and from are hardly more than whispers. They are the east and the west and while we fly towards one the other does not recede. I am, we are, held in the balance. Not because failure and success both pull at us, begging us to grasp at them, keeping us strung somewhere in between. No, because they are not true ends.

We are, here and now. There is no goal that I will attain that will leave me with rest, and there is no failure so low that I can go no lower. There is this, telling from beginning to end and finding that stories have begun before I knew them and that endings have not yet been. There is always more, and I am not some being, some undefined entity who can be either this or that.

 I wake in the morning, begin a new day with my love beside me, and depart to begin the work of my hands. But the work I began upon waking, that is, loving and learning who my husband is and how I can create even more between us, does not end when I walk out of the front door no less than it ends when I fall asleep in the evening.

And the people I labor for and with in my office, their stories do not begin when I arrive nor end when I close my laptop for the day. I am not saying we should not strive for certain things and certain people and certain places, or that we should not celebrate all things that point towards life. And I am not saying we should cease to mourn when things are lost. But to sum such joys and such aches into something so finite as success or failure is to rob us of a real and true glimpse of being alive.

 When we read the unfathomable and comforting truth that our sins are as far away from the Father as the East is from the West, we must know that our lives cannot be summed up in our striving, cannot be defined by success or failure. We are more, our labor is more. These carrots and prods have been thrown from us, thrown as far as the East is from the West.

Our standard for our worth has been destroyed and instead replaced with a terrifying truth that our souls cannot be summed up as pass or fail. It has been given a new name, our souls, beloved. It has been judged and found without blemish. And now the stakes are much more terrifying than success and failure. It is life or it is death, and it is not determined by the work we do or have not time or heart to do each day.

 It is powerful and it is about stories, and it is about speaking and creating life. And it is about knowing the source of life and believing that we are not strung between the East and the West, and we cannot capture the East or the West.

 It is often said you can tell what or who a person loves by the way they labor for it, and yet we are told we are able to love and to labor for that which we love, because YHWH loved us first. He labored to create us and labored to begin a work in us. And he will not cease.

 So we work and we labor each day, not to secure failure or success in our workplace or in our relationships, but to affirm loudly and with passion that we accept the love given to us and cannot help but labor to create greater reflections of it in everything we touch.

 Again and again throughout my life I dream about stories and I write stories and I live stories and am unable to escape that all things came before me and more will come after. And I am not diminished by this great East and West which cannot touch, I am comforted that I must never reach them.

 I must labor because I have been loved, and I must choose to let the love and labor of Yeshua cover all that I have done, failed, or accomplished. Oh YHWH, I delight in the love that reaches and has touched both the East and the West.