I am often afraid, though Your word says, “Fear not.” I have been told that my fear offends You, that my anxiety is a rebellion You cannot abide. I am told that I am not to rely on this brain You’ve given me, so limited in its purview, so primitive in its ability to decipher; but instead, I should relinquish the boundaries of my own intellect and allow Your presence to invade that which my instinct tells me to protect and to closely guard.

I do not know, I do not know, I do not know what I know.

So, come. The kingdom I’ve erected is crumbling. I am willing to let You reign. I will quit the deteriorating palace and take residence in a hut at the foot of the hill, until You re-establish all that my hand has failed.

This does not mean I will be an unquestioning subject. It will be difficult to see all my work dismantled: the education I fought so hard to attain, through debt and jobs worked well after midnight, to finance what exorbitant loans could not; the home I scraped up just enough to rent, by teaching twice as many courses as a full-time professor, at three different colleges, while sleeping on the sofa of relatives; the car I waited 13 years to own, 13 years to be able to drive, after droves of attempts at earning a license.

These will not be easy losses. And though I know that I only attained these things because You allowed me to, I still do not want to let them go.

It is terrifying to trust. And it is terrifying to plead into the silence of a dark room for deliverance from a disaster of my own making. I do not like the idea of needing things I cannot supply for myself. Basic things: food and shelter and transportation. It is too cliche a fate, to be pressed into trust by the vices of under-employment and poverty.

But if such pressing is what is required, I submit myself to the stocks.

We have been here before. And I know that we are here again because I did not learn how to trust You implicitly the first time. We are here because there is a point You need to make. We will come here again, and again, if need be; we will return to this isle as often as it takes me to accept that I am not You.

On this isle, there is a scripture in the sand, just beyond the reach of a rising tide. It is the first I ever learned, the one I hoped I’d never truly need, though I recall and recite it for even the lightest afflictions. It is the one I’ve never needed quite as much as I need it today:

Make haste, O God, to deliver me. Make haste to help me, O Lord.

I learned it when I was eight, and somehow it still carries me. It is the raft and the oar, when I am tossed from the oceanliner into the sea. I say it when reason betrays me and the sky closes under Your eyelid and the water of an unrelenting rain is all that is keeping me alive.

Hurry, it says. And wash me back to the shore of choice. I will choose differently, this time. I vow I will choose only You.