Dear God, have I been a good son?
Have I cried and bled and sacrificed enough? When will it be enough? When my knees crack and bleed from hardwood floors and my voice quiets to just a whisper. Rasped and ragged at the cost of prayer after prayer.
Dear God, do I deserve to see another day? Is your light all that’s left in the world, is each breath I take a reminder of your endless love? Or an unforgiving curse. Will you breathe for me, when my heart grows tired and my lungs begin to burst from the pressure. Will you be enough?
Dear God I can feel my thoughts splintering, like a fork in the road my mind spends so much time drifting; further and further away from you. I see a light where I thought there was once none, yours?
Or just an illusion? Hope is everlasting and ever binding, holding onto me, keeping my withering heart strong and firm. I can see it now. It’s almost there but there’s something else.
Dear God I’m almost there now and it appears you are not, I didn’t know such a thing could be so. Such a thought foreign and unknown defiles my mind; eating away at faith I hadn’t known I had. My every waking action lays naked in front of me, every choice every step one, two, then three, away from you. I feel naked and bear before you, I want to run, I want to scream.
Dear God I think I know what I must do, I think I have found a light outside of you. I hate you, I hate you, I love you, my faith has become fractured and broken in my hands at the cost of you. Is this life I’ve chosen worth it if not to please you? I think it may be to put pieces of myself aside so I can hold onto you. In this place I am in this cannot be, I cannot be that here, my soul won’t let me.
Dear God, my knees have healed now, my heart has found a new reason to beat. My breaths come in rapid and joyful, I have found a home here. This light once so unknown has become mine, something separate from you yet sacred all the same. Do you understand this? I say this final prayer and as it leaves my lips it feels different. For I am not praying to you God, for once this prayer is to myself.
Marko Anthony Grant is a third year Marketing journalism minor, MGrant426@wcupa.edu