Forsake Me Not

God, please don't leave me. Please don't leave me. The familiar thought met me as I pressed my face into the pillow, praying my way into the day. Or maybe I was just seeking to sanctify my procrastination against the demands awaiting me, the stock of everyday tasks and terrors piled in the semi-darkness of predawn.

Some things heartened me in those groggy moments after sleep. I liked wakening to a praise song stuck in my head. Since the day my dad prayed that I would wake up with a song in my heart, those unbidden melodies have seemed like direct and explicit kindness from my heavenly Father. But the words of my waking prayer--and the mode of their coming--bothered me in my saner moments. Did I really think God would abandon me? Did I carry that fear so intently that it verbalized as the first offerings of consciousness?

I suspect, now, that the fear of doing something to ruin relationship with others is my persistent companion. There is, perhaps, nothing quite as awful to me, and the days when I have felt I would eventually, inevitably cause more harm than good have been days threatened by despair. The death of my relationship with God would be the most horrible manifestation of this fear. And yet, especially of late, I feel a stronger confidence in God's ability to take pity on me and lovingly shield me even from my own capacity to self-destruct. Maybe the alternative is just too awful to contemplate. But I think there is more to it than that. John says in his first letter, "And so we know and rely on the love God has for us" (1 John 4:16 NIV). God's love is reliable, and sometimes we are given the grace to sense this is so.

These have been my thoughts concerning the why of my early morning prayer. But regardless of these speculations, I find comfort in finding an expression of my own plea in the Bible--and an answer to it. In Psalm 27, David cries out to God, "Hide not your face from me. Turn not your servant away in anger, O you who have been my help. Cast me not off; forsake me not, O God of my salvation!" And then he answers himself: "For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me in" (v.9-10 ESV). Here the heart cry, the human brokenness, the reassurance, and the welcome.