Christ the Lord

Christ the Lord

Once you were not, but now you are.

I treat “Lord” as your name, but more truly it is your role in my life,

The position you have attained – or, rather, the role I aspire you to have,

The one that you should always have had.

Not that you are not Lord, for you are always Lord, whether I acknowledge you or not,

But I should have made your lordship more of a reality in my life,

And for this, Lord, I am truly sorry, and wish to rectify my fault now.

Please will you become Lord to me?

I invite you to take charge of my life,

To fill me with your presence,

But not with my usual desire that I should know transcendent joy,

But in order that you might be all in all to me.

Not that you have not been such to me;

You are Lord because all love and truth meet in your heart,

All power and justice is expressed in your actions,

You hold perfect peace as your gift because you are poised in perfect balance between glory and service.

Your sacrificial love is the perfect antidote to all the world’s ills;

All our distress and sorrow, our pain and suffering finds its reconciliation in your own suffering.

When all else fails; when no-one else can carry through on their promises, you fulfil yours,

And this is why you are Lord: you are life transformed and radiant.

And it is so, and it has always been so, and it will always be so,

For me and for everyone.

And I know it.

Yet I confess now that there are areas of my life that I have not allowed you to touch, let alone transform.

I have equivocated and thought to love you with my whole heart – yet kept back something for myself –

And so not truly loving you with my whole heart after all.

Or – because I should show your own kindness and understanding to myself – I have truly loved you, but not fully taken to heart what that entails,

I have not allowed your love to infiltrate into every corner, to overturn deep patterns and assumptions of life,

I have treated life with you as something which is attached to my natural life, rather than as new life,

That life in the Spirit that makes all things new.

For you to be Lord, fully and truly Lord, is my prayer,

That all things might be integrated, natural and spiritual,

Into life shared with you,

Christ the Lord,

My Lord.