"God is at His best in the chaos"

Matthew 11:28-30  "Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

Dear Jesus,

I hear Your welcome invitation to come. I bring the hurried, harried strain that all too frequently defines my life. I am working hard. I feel the burden. Sleep is all too often disrupted, and restlessness reigns in its place. The yoke chafes. The burden weighs.

My friend, Hubert Harriman, says that "God is at His best in the chaos." I believe it. Show up. I need You in my mess.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: "For he has called all his people who are weary and burdened. He has not made his circle narrow. He has not gathered around himself a spiritual-religious aristocracy. Rather he has made the circle as wide as possible, so wide that actually not a single person could say in good conscience that Jesus' invitation was not meant for him or her because there were not among the weary and burdened" (A Testament to Freedom, 234).

I qualify. I need You to lift the load, carry the burden, heal the chafed spots, and lead me down the path to which You are calling. I feel torn from competing directions. Everything screams "NOW!"  The strain, the confusion, and the contradiction would seek my collapse.

E. Stanley Jones wrote: "Jesus sat and watched the confusion and strain in men's hearts and said: 'Your souls are the meeting place of contradictory currents. You want mutually exclusive things, and in the end you get nowhere--nowhere except into worse confusion.' He would simplify life into oneness of desire and purpose, so that it might take on calm and poise and power. For as long as life is balanced between competing ends there is weakness and inward collapse and lack of outer effectiveness. So relentlessly he puts his finger on the places where we ail." (In The Christ of the Mount, 1931, p. 202).

Touch the places in me where I ail. Speak order into my chaos. Speak rest into my strain. Speak the consistency of Your perfect will into the contradictory demands that seek to shred me. Unify my desire with a laser-like focus upon Your perfect will. Point me with precision through the divine guidance system of Your Holy Spirit. Sustain my spirit within, and grant me effectiveness without.

I love You. I trust You. I lean upon You. Be at Your best, so that I may be at my best for Your glory.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Amen.