I watched a newborn baby snuggled tightly to her mother’s chest in perfect peace amidst the noise and chaos all around. I sang with all I had in worship to my father, the author of all I am, the one we so often forget to acknowledge. We pursue Him in word and song, praying He will meet us where we are. We pursue the strength of His arm to sweep in and lift our heads from the weight of the burdens we insist on carrying.
The baby before me needs her mother’s arms to carry her. She gains her sustenance from her mother. Without her parents or someone to care for her, she will not survive, let alone thrive. Yet we act and live as if we are somehow independent.
My prayers changed in that moment.
I don’t want to long for an encounter with God or for His strength to meet me and carry me through moments I cannot handle on my own. I want to NEED Him! I realized He is faithful to meet us in the place of our need. I pray that I will need Him in everything. I pray I will worship Him from a deep knowledge that without Him, I cannot hold my own head up. Without Him, I am thirsty and hungry. Without Him, I am bound by the impossible weight of this world. Without Him, I am weak and broken.
In Him, I am alive. In Him, I can breathe deep and inhale the wonder before me. In Him, color awakens to brilliance. In Him, shadows flee, questions have answers, light and hope fill the places once occupied by darkness. In Him, I love and am loved. In Him, there is joy unexplainable. In Him, I live and move and have my being. Everything I need, He has given. My desires become captured by beauty and purpose. Meaning takes on new meaning.
Lord, I pray that I would be consumed by a passion and a need for you. I pray that I would continue to decrease making more room for your glory in my life. There is no greater joy. I am enamoured and captivated by you. As I seek you and find you, I realize that I can’t get enough of you.
INSPIRED BY THE COMFORTER 
I am reminded of the quote that is attributed to Augustine, “Love God and do whatever you want”. If we are loving God with all that we are then we are going to want to be love by God, consumed by God above all else. Thanks for the reminder.
JD
I am by nature a dreamer, a thinker, a ponderer of imponderables. Hardly the best recommendations for the mother of five! I do manage to focus during emergencies. I handle crises pretty well. But the myriad of trivial challenges that make up practical daily life can throw me into a tailspin. My husband made fun of me for praying about what cereals to buy.
But being a natural klutz has a lovely upside: I have to pray constantly. I am not only consciously and specifically depending on God in everything, I am then thanking Him just as profusely. It’s actually a blessed way to live…..humbling certainly….but blessed!
So yes! I get it. Our need is our redemption.