love is always painful

My prayer is this:

Forgiveness.

Homelessness.

The incarcerated.

All those things I lost.

All those times I was lost.

Gratitude.

All those times I was found.

All those really hard lessons.

Life is so fatalistic, and it's the one bridge no one crosses. No one is willing to take that plunge lest they fall into deep despair. Even the diehard determinists will pull back from that cliff. "Oh we don't mean that". They will say. 

You see it threatens the foundation of our lives, begs to rob us of the meaning we have found here. 

I'm alive today to tell you that you need not fear it because in it is the perfection of your pain. A theatre macabre will appear before your eyes, billions of lives drenched in pain crying out for rest. Reach into that pain, however, and you will pull out a sense of universal brotherhood. 

You need not fear that your fate was sealed long before you were born. You see, I lost everything, my heart was wrung at the foot of the cross. My soul was set on fire as I watched the promise slip between my fingers and almost disappear. Every kind of despair there is, I felt. Years went by without hope. Then as time went on and I put some distance between me and my failure I looked back upon that ocean of pain and I saw God in his infinite love had created something beautiful out of my travail.

Someone needed to experience what I went through. It could not be omited. What if it had?