This song feels like the weighted blanket I desperately need right now.

In the 10+ years since I first wrote this song, my faith has shifted and evolved to embrace doubt, the gray, raw honesty about the messiness and challenge of attempting to live a faithful life in God’s presence.  (How I even define and imagine “God” has shifted and changed.)

In her final book Wholehearted Faith, author and public theologian Rachel Held Evans often prefaces a theological insight with “On the days when I believe,” immediately followed by “And then there are the other days.”

Today is an “other day” for me.

I want to believe, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

I want to believe God has a “perfect” plan, that somehow [in what today feels like some magical, impossible, cosmic math] the obscene mess of this world will be redeemed, “all things working together for good” and all that.  I wish.  I hope.  I pray.

But who gets to define “God’s will” TODAY?  Who gets to decide what or who to claim in the name of God?  What horrors and atrocities have been done (ARE TODAY being done) by those who claim to be acting in “God’s will”?  [Excuse me while I rage and primal scream into what today feels like the void. WHO EVEN ARE WE?!?!  WHERE EVEN ARE YOU?!?! @&$*@#&%(*#&%#]

So today.  OOF.  Today I need someone (and Someone) to help me believe. To help me see. To let me curl up in a ball on Their lap and watch the Light dance through the window of my discouragement and disbelief, to help me recognize the beauty always present, illuminated, even in the mess.  Especially in the mess.  [And what a  #%^&@*$ mess.]

LORD, have mercy.  Help me see. Cover me.

And then help me get up and do something about it.