It starts
with a warmth, like
fingers spreading thick in my belly
slowly making its way up, up, up
tickling my throat and
warming every inch of this body until
there’s nothing I can do to stop
my lips from parting
my hands from raising
my feet from dancing

How beautiful You are.

Joy.
I feel it radiate, it seems to
vibrate from a well that’s deeper
than I’ve ever known
leaving me without words
and when I find them, they
dance.
The words
dance.
And I feel fire.
My heart swells,
and my bones breathe.
So this
is what it means
to be in love.
And I am so
in love.

How beautiful You are.

Here
I
am.
Walls torn down
pride crumbling
dry and broken
but I know
You’ll still draw me in, so here
I am
standing stunned at…
How do I begin to describe You?
You
whose lips burst forth light
and carved out mountains with precision
set the earth’s cornerstone in position
shut snowstorms in their storehouses
fastened galaxies in their places
You who
breathed out
morning stars.

How beautiful You are.

The sun sets, sinking
in colors of warm honey and
tangerine
I feel You smiling down
on me, and You whisper,
“Child, this one’s for you.”

How beautiful You are.

And my mind just can’t wrap itself around You
and how You
command the clouds to roll like the sea
guiding lightning as it strikes soft earth
and how You
are so much bigger
than I could ever understand
but still are mindful
of man, how
great You are in
perfect faithfulness.

There is no end
to Your love, and if I
were to live and die
a thousand times, and if
the heavens fell
and the seas swallowed up the earth
and the sun stopped rising in the east
and the birds ceased their morning songs
still Your love would
endure
And Your grace
which goes beyond my shame,
I’ve run out of similes and metaphors
to describe how vast
and amazing is this grace
You have that never seems to
run dry no matter how far I run
no matter how hard I fall
no matter how stone-like my heart’s become
Your grace carries me
telling me I’m still Yours.
And I
am forever Yours.

How beautiful You are.

Savior,
Your heart bled at the sight of us
longing for a way to close the gap
millenniums of our pitiful good works
couldn’t close.
Merciful,
in promising to never again
wipe out the face of the earth despite our
stubborn souls sinning the same sins,
saying sorry while we slipped
blood money into our back pockets, we
don’t
deserve
anything.
Yet You
gave
Your
everything.

Overcomer,
Death itself couldn’t keep You prisoner
I still can’t imagine how
Someone like You would
willingly lay His life down
for someone
like me, and I fall to my knees
remembering how
on the cross You
crucified my sins
in the grave You
buried my past
at last
we are free
we are redeemed
we are Your children,
chosen and forgiven
waiting until You
come again.

And if I come to You
before You come to me
and I’ll be running
finally
straight into Your arms,
I don’t know if I’ll even have the
breath to say,

“How beautiful
You are.”