(CLICK HERE to listen to “Come Lift Up Your Sorrows“)

If you are wounded, if you are alone,

If you are angry, if your heart is cold as stone,

If you have fallen and if you are weak,

Come find the worth of God

That only the suffering seek.

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Come lift up your sorrows

And offer your pain:

Come make a sacrifice

Of all your shame;

There in your wilderness

He’s waiting for you

To worship Him with your wounds,

For He’s wounded too.

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He has not stuttered, and He has not lied

When He said, “Come unto me,”

You’re not disqualified:

When you’re heavy laden, you may want to depart,

But those who know sorrow are closest to His heart.

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In this most Holy Place

He’s made a sacred space

For those who will enter in

And trust to cry out to Him;

You’ll find no curtain there,

Nor reason left for fear;

There’s perfect freedom here

To weep every unwept tear.

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© 2005 Mole End Music (ASCAP)

Words and music by Vance Taylor and Michael Card

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Beloved,

I am on the Faith and Sharing retreat this week down by the River at Marywood. This song is from an album by Michael Card called “The Hidden Face of God”. I put the CD into my car radio around 5 am in the third hour of my 17 hour, journey home from LITTLE PORTION. Jesus was waiting for me in the wilderness of my long drive.

The words became my words, deep in my soul. “Come worship him with your wounds, because he is wounded too.” The album is a song of lament. I encourage you to check out Michael Card. He looks at the Scripture with an uncanny and richly deep manner. I relied on his music while in Iraq. “I Will Bring You Home” was a song I sang to the troops while out there. It is true; the wilderness is the best place for God to find us. During the retreat, Michael Card sang and taught us…and he encouraged us to sing with him. After the weekend of the retreat, I had the great opportunity to spend another week at the home of the Brothers and Sisters of Charity mostly in silence. The center of my existence was, and is, the EUCHARIST.

My prayer for you is not exactly what you may desire. I pray that you are driven into the desert of your souls where you must trust in God ALONE. It will be painful, but remember that God will never give you a cross you cannot bear.

However, if you believe that God has given you too much and you are falling…before your knee hits the ground please know that God will catch you. God is hopelessly in love with you and me. That is the only thing I am sure of.

I leave you with a few words from THE SILENCE OF GOD (words and music by Andrew Petersen)

It’ll drive a man crazy, it’ll break a man’s faith,

It’s enough to make him wonder if he’s ever been sane

When he’s bleating for comfort from Thy staff and Thy rod

And the heavens’ only answer is the silence of God.

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…This yoke may be easy, but this burden is not

When the crying fields are frozen by the silence of God.

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…Then what about the times when even followers get lost?

‘Cause we all get lost sometime…

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There’s a statue of Jesus on a monastery knoll

In the hills of Kentucky, all quiet and cold;

He’s knelling in the garden, as silent as stone

All His friends are sleeping, and He’s weeping all alone.

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And the Man of all sorrows, He never forgot

What sorrow is carried by the hearts that He bought;

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So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God,

The aching may remain, but the breaking does not,

The aching may remain, but the breaking does not,

In the holy, lonesome echo of the silence of God.

I pray that you have a wonderful and noisy week filled with silence. You are so loved. You will find God in the silence. Go to the Beloved. Your greatest gifts to bring to God are your wounds and your tears.

Love, joy, peace,

Father Ron Moses +

www.tearinthedesert.com

Check out Michael Card at www.michaelcard.com

I also loved “To a Broken God” and “Older than the Rain”

The unwelcome tears that

They never had known

Coursed down their fallen faces

In surprise;

All they ever had seen

Was the light of His face,

But now that sin had entered in

Their tears would fall like rain.

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…And so we all were driven

From His presence and His peace

To stumble all along

This long-lamenting race;

From the deepest darkest shadows

He joins us on our way,

And we recognize our fallen tears

Upon that human face.

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