Victory Prayer

Sometimes I wonder,
Given all that’s happened between us,
All our long history,
Can it really be different?

What is a reconciled world
Really like,
With all our half-hearted attempts at love
Standing in the middle?

The middle isn’t a place of reconciling,
It is the place of compromise.
The place of treaties that not everyone
Will keep.

No, the middle will not do.
Even if we could get there,
It will never be enough
To wash away the seas of blood.

We need His Blood to wash us
Down to the core,
Past the systems and the systems of solutions-
To the heart of it all.

Our clothes soaked from within,
Bleached from the center out into the world;
Lives aligned, not with the proper verbiage,
But with the Victorious King!

There is no small power in His victory secured.
Therein lies the will to let go
Of the desires we call rights
And embrace that which brings Life to ‘the other’.

Next to this enduring work of the Lamb,
On whom we are built together,
Babylon’s great victories of chaos come weak and wispy,
Mere visions of dissipating smoke.

Oh, teach my soul to embrace Your victory!
And then I am content to be
Anything.
Only let me take my place with joy.

Let me be found near your voice,
Among the servants or the leaders or the martyrs;
An obscure wanderer of desert hearts,
Building highways to the Kingdom of Life.

Keep Your throne always before me
Your glory burning in my mind’s eye-

Unseen reality floods
The fading darkness as it runs for cover.

© 2019 Jacqueline Tisthammer. All Rights Reserved.