Blue Like Jazz

What great gravity is this that drew my soul toward yours? What
great force, that though I went falsely, went kicking, went disguising
myself to earn your love, also disguised, to earn your
keeping, your resting, your staying, your will fleshed into mine
rasped by a slowly revealed truth, the barter of my soul, the soul
that I fear, the soul that I loathe, the soul that: if you will love
I will love. I will redeem you, if you will redeem me? Is this our
purpose, you and I together to pacify each other, to lead each
other toward the lie that we are good, that we are noble, that
we need not redemption, save the one that you and I invented
of our own clay?

I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.
I went looking, I wrote out a list, I drew an image, I bled
a poem of you. You were pretty, and my friends believed I was
worthy of you. You were clever, but I was smarter, perhaps the
only one smarter, the only one able to lead you. You see, love,
I did not love you, I loved me. And you were only a tool that
I used to fix myself, to fool myself, to redeem myself. And
though I have taught you to lay your lily hand in mine, I walk
alone, for I cannot talk to you, lest you talk it back to me, lest
I believe that I am not worthy, not deserving, not redeemed.
I want desperately for you to be my friend. But you are not
my friend; you have slid up warmly to the man I wanted to be,
the man I pretended to be, and I was your Jesus and, you were
mine. Should I show you who I am, we may crumble. I am not
scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.

I want to be known and loved anyway. Can you do this? I
trust by your easy breathing that you are human like me, that
you are fallen like me, that you are lonely, like me. My love,
do I know you? What is this great gravity that pulls us so
painfully toward each other? Why do we not connect? Will we
be forever in fleshing this out? And how will we with words,
narrow words, come into the knowing of each other? Is this
God's way of meriting grace, of teaching us of the labyrinth
of His love for us, teaching us, in degrees, that which He is
sacrificing to join ourselves to Him? Or better yet, has He
formed our being fractional so that we might conclude one
great hope, plodding and sighing and breathing into one
another in such a great push that we might break through
into the known and being loved, only to cave into a greater
perdition and fall down at His throne still begging for our
acceptance? Begging for our completion?

We were fools to believe that we would redeem each other.
Were I some sleeping Adam, to wake and find you resting
at my rib, to share these things that God has done, to walk you
through the garden, to counsel your timid steps, your bewildered
eye, your heart so slow to love, so careful to love, so
sheepish that I stepped up my aim and became a man. Is this
what God intended? That though He made you from my rib,
it is you who is making me, humbling me, destroying me, and
in so doing revealing Him.
Will we be in ashes before we are one?
What great gravity is this that drew my heart toward yours?
What great force collapsed my orbit, my lonesome state? What
is this that wants in me the want in you? Don't we go at each
other with yielded eyes, with cumbered hands and feet, with
clunky tongues? This deed is unattainable! We cannot know
each other!

I am quitting this thing, but not what you think. I am not
going away.
I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter
any longer. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will
discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery,
save God's own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will
keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber
where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my
death, and to death it may bring me.

I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the
power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding
your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will
simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do
it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before
I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again.
God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And
together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only
then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.

-An excerpt from Blue Like Jazz By Donald Miller