Advent is a time of longing. As you long for God’s coming, consider how much more he longs for you.
Yearning
Category: Artists
The New Nakedness
by my friend, Strahan. An insight into the true nature of our intimacy with God.
prayer is seeing the one who sees us
Oct 13, 2025
Prayer is vulnerability,
a willingness to live in
naked abandonment,
and in agendaless gaze,
never turning back.
This person is a divine radical.
They are totally unafraid to be seen, and have given up all fear of rejection and control. They are utterly free. Truly and totally.
Why? Because they have nothing left to lose. They have already bared all before God and been found not wanting, but embraced by perfect love. They have learned in prayer that they are accepted, and not to be afraid.
This person is untouchable by the world because they have found a home where they are never rejected, never turned away, or left alone. They are stable, immovable now. They have been “filled with the fullness of God”1 so much so that they burn with enough love to give away endlessly to all they meet.
They’re not self-protective. They, like Christ, are able to be seen as they are before the world unclothed in pretence or inhibited by shame because they have come to see their weakness as the very power through which God is more clearly seen and love more tangibly experienced.
This kind of peace is miraculous. Truly, it is. No self-help books can get us there, no affirmations are enough. Just telling ourselves we’re loved can get us some way, but not in the deep places where we know how broken we truly are. For that we need God himself, doing surgery in the deep self.
No, we must gaze eyes open and unashamed into the very burning heart of Love Himself and have Him tell us we’re wanted, we’re healed, we’re enough. This Truth is relational, personal, real. God is not a set of wishful affirmations, He is the Person for whom we were made.
We may not reach such perfection in this life, but we can grow exponentially in it. Daily living more and more from love rather than for it. Slowly relenting our insecurities and discovering confidence. Gradually becoming more like the God we see and know.
Don’t be afraid. If there’s reason to worry God will reject you in your brokenness then what was the cross for? Did God go to all this work simply to keep you at arms length? Do you think Christ himself would endure torture, humiliation and death just so you could continue to wonder whether you’re wanted, loved, and accepted?
Of course not! Don’t forget that it is God who loved us first, who made the first vulnerable move2.
Why not open up, be poor with God, and let him see all of you. Why not refuse to divert your eyes, gaze into his love, his pursuing desire of you, let it affect you, fill you, transform you. It is enough for God to see you each day like this to make you an entirely new person. One who is alive, and totally free, no longer afraid.
Then you too may pray the ancient prayer, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”3
It’s always with “unveiled faces” that we’re invited to “contemplate the Lord’s glory” in communion. Anything less steals from God what he desires most: our naked abandonment to his presence.
Amen.
Ephesians 3:19
We love because he first loved us.” – 1 John 4:19
Genesis 16:13
The Final Shore
I’m going to begin a playlist for myself called “Songs I want played while I’m dying.” These two will be on it.
Now and Not Yet
This is our current status, living a life of now and not yet. We taste of the things to come but do not yet know them fully.
“Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” (1 John 3)
God’s Grandeur
I came across this in Plough Quarterly. Such a marvelous rendition of Hopkins’ wonderful poem: God’s Grandeur: A Poetry Comic
A comic artist illustrates Gerard Manly Hopkins’ classic poem.
By Gerard Manley Hopkins and Julian Peters
from Plough Quarterly
Stay
I have a friend, Strahan Coleman. I know him mostly as an author because we met after I discovered his writing on IG, excerpts from his Prayer Volumes. Here’s an excerpt from Volume 3:
But what I wanted to share here is from his music, which just now, I am starting to listen to. So profound.
Stay
There is a whisper,
A quiet invitation,
Beckoning me to come,
A hand of kindness,
A good and trusting one,
A hand that will never fail.
My bags are packed but I’m glued to the phone,
Cause I’ve got nowhere else to go,
So I stay.
I have a mind that will wait for war to take it’s toll,
Before it will still itself,
But I’ve seen the face of love,
A chest that warms and welcomes,
A table that never fails.
Oh I’ve been running’ I’ve been fading to grey,
But I hear you calling my name,
Your voice is singing out like fire in the rain,
So I stay.
Oh you’re not finished yet,
This can’t be where it ends,
Come kick this barrenness out into the grave,
You promised better yet,
So I’m lookin’ at you my friend and I stay.
Check out Commoner’s Communion.
Hold onto him!
I must confess that I have always been bothered by Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, telling her to not hold on to him. I’ve read many commentaries on that passage but still find my heart protesting. How can you ask her–how can you ask me–to not hold on to you? But then I came across this:
“Yes, by all means, hold on to him! Grasp his cloak or grasp his legs, or throw your arms around his body and hold him tight! But you must do this in the right way, for he cannot be held by merely human arms. Rather, it is the love of your heart which alone can hold him, the faith and hope that impel you to surrender yourself trustingly into his embrace. You can hold him when you let yourself first be held.”
(Joshua Elner)
A prayer for Holy Saturday
I found this prayer somewhere–sorry, I have no memory of where–and since then we have prayed it together in our community every Holy Saturday morning.
Lord Jesus Christ, in the darkness of death; in the abyss of the deepest loneliness abides now and always the powerful protection of Your Love; in the midst of Your hiding we can by now sing the Hallelujah of the saved. Grant us the humble simplicity of faith, which will not be swerved when You call us in the hours of darkness and abandonment, when everything seems difficult: grant us, in this time when a mortal battle is being fought all around You, enough light not to lose sight of You; enough light that we can give it also to those still in need of it. Let the mystery of Your Easter joy shine like the light of dawn on our days; grant us that we may be truly men and women of Easter in the midst of the Holy Saturday of history. Grant us that through the bright and dark days of these times we may always with a light heart find ourselves on the path towards Your future glory. Amen.
Kisses
I want to share one more thing this Good Friday from almost twenty years ago when I was meditating on this painting by Giotto.
As I prayed with this image, I placed myself at the feet of Jesus, my heart so deeply desiring to venerate his most sacred feet, even in his death, but feeling so extremely unworthy. This is the prayer that I then prayed:
“I will kiss your feet while your Mother kisses your Holy Face–and You will be so wholly taken by her kisses that you will mistake mine for hers and be so perfectly comforted in your Passion that you will not notice those of your betrayers . . . Jesus, I offer you her sweet kisses. Be taken by them. In the company of the myriad of those who kiss your hands, your handmaids who have gone before me, those you have lifted up by your favor. We will cover you with kisses . . . Who am I that I even dare to touch your sacred feet with my sullied lips? Yet I give you my poor little kisses; your sacred flesh will purify them as does a hot burning coal (cf. I 6:6-7)”
Addendum:
In the years since then, the Lord has shown me clearly how much he values my kisses. And, to be sure, yours as well.
Smite a rock
Good Friday
Am I a stone and not a sheep
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross,
To number drop by drop They Blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?
Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the the thief was moved;
Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon–
I, only I.
Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.
Christina Rossetti
Witnesses to Hope 