Mine

There are moments when reverence is not the word.

Not because God has become smaller.

Because suddenly, He has become mine.

My God.

My Father.

My King.

My world.

My everything.

And I know how that sounds.

Entitlement.

Possession.

Arrogance.

But it isn't any of those things.

It is the strange, fierce entitlement of a child who knows who her Father is.

Not You belong to me because I have earned You.

But:

You claimed me first.

And because You called me Yours, something in me rises up and answers:

Then You are mine too.

Mine.

Mine.

Mine.

Not ownership.

Belonging.

There is a difference.

I don't own the ocean because I love it.

I don't own the sky because I stand beneath it.

And I certainly don't own God.

But I can belong to Him so completely that when I discover He is real, my first response isn't merely awe.

It is recognition.

There You are.

You were there when You asked me to strip myself bare.

Not physically.

Deeper than that.

You kept going until there was nothing left to hide behind.

Past the identities.

Past the defenses.

Past the stories I had built around myself.

Into the fiber.

And I surrendered.

I said yes.

And then You spoke.

And now I look backward.

And the realization is almost unbearable.

You were real.

Not an idea I constructed.

Not a metaphor I needed.

Not a voice I invented because I couldn't bear the silence.

You.

And suddenly every place where I thought I was alone becomes occupied by the possibility that I was never alone at all.

The fire makes sense now.

Of course it is fierce.

How could it not be?

How could the realization that the God I surrendered myself to is actually real arrive quietly?

How could my spirit encounter the possibility that the One who called me His was actually there and respond politely?

No.

There is something almost primal in it.

Something that wants to shout:

MINE.

My God.

My Father.

My King.

My world.

My everything.

Not because I have made Him mine.

Because He made me His.

And perhaps this is what I didn't understand about surrender.

I thought surrender meant losing my claim.

But somehow, at the deepest point of surrender, I discovered belonging.

I let go.

And found myself held.

I emptied my hands.

And discovered that they had never been empty.

I stopped trying to possess my own life.

And found that I belonged to Someone.

And now I cannot stand outside that realization and speak about God as though He is merely God.

Yes.

He is God.

The God of everything.

The God beyond comprehension.

The God who needs nothing from me and owes me nothing.

And still...

He is my God.

That sentence is almost too intimate for the size of the One it names.

The infinite.

Mine.

The King.

Mine.

The Father.

Mine.

The One who made everything.

My everything.

And perhaps that is why this feels less like reverence and more like fire.

Because reverence can stand at a distance.

But love runs toward the throne.

Love doesn't merely bow.

Sometimes love throws its arms around the King and cries:

You are mine.

And somewhere beneath that cry is an even deeper one:

And I am Yours.

That's the whole thing.

That's the fire.

That's the terrifyingly beautiful part.

He claimed me.

And I claim Him right back.