The Flowers of Love

Are You in Need?

Jesus lay down beside me
Lay down and rest your troubled mind;
Jesus lay down beside me;
Lay down your worries, all behind.

Where you wept a million tears, LORD;
for the truth has fallen on deaf ears, LORD;
But don't despair. I am prepared.
 
Are you in need?

Jesus, lay down beside me
down at the dark end of the day;
Jesus, lay down beside me, let all your sorrows fall away.

When the night has grown so dark, LORD;
And the flowers of your love LORD, sweet LORD - refuse to see, in a world full of greed.

​Are you in need? Are you?

When the night has grown so dark, my LORD;
And the flowers, the flowers of your love LORD, refuse to grow,  lORD let me know.
 
Are you in need? 

This song appeared on my phone yesterday, divinely pasted in a text I was writing... on a day wherein fear and resentment had bullet-riddled my Spirit, rendering it beyond human aid. I had realized my state the night before and asked God to take me beyond myself, my worries and fears related to the well-being of my two daughters. The manifestation of the song was the answer to that prayer, perfect medicine. 

I was so self-centered that at first I heard the song as asking for solace for me. But the song hears the suffering of Jesus and invites him to lay down to be heard and loved; "are you in need, Jesus?"  It reminded me that there is so much suffering and amidst it I am a flower of his love that can slip into blindness in my need for my own way.

So yesterday, just when I thought I had every right to be self-centered because of the enormity of the brain surgery our little family faces and the complexity of all our cauldron of emotions, I prayed, wrote out my 10th step inventory of resentments and fears and gently embarked into the world with the intent to be there for Jesus' need; it was a day of magical choreography wherein people were put in my path and I was able to be there for them, not from a "better than" place - but rather from a  place of bone-level, "surprised-by-joy" humility, watching the cosmic choreography, the results of a spiritual experiment play out. Will this "design for living" work in this time of hard-going, too?

For example, I shared at an AA meeting and could feel my words resonating for the man opposite me. Then I walked to pick up a package and ran into a young woman I had met a week ago who was looking for a sponsor at that time. We reconnected. The thought then came to take a yoga class. I was in the "wrong" room and ended up sharing with the teacher of the class that had just ended about 12-Steps.... 

​Mavis took something from head to heart for me yesterday; there are just no excuses for self-centeredness; its price is too high, insanity or death, literally. 

Yes, He is in need. 
​
"Truly, I say to you, as you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me." (Matthew 25:40)

"It is in giving that we receive."
It is in understanding that we are understood.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life."
(Prayer of St. Frances)
​
"Simple but not easy; a price had to be paid. It meant destruction of self-centeredness. I must turn in all things to the Father of Light who presides over us all."
(Big Book page 14)

​I slept hard and long last night and woke in peace.