A Prayer of Getting Lost in God

*Toward the end of this poetic reading, I borrowed heavily from the song "Be Born In Me" by Francesca Battistelli to the extent that it's 98-99% copying & pasting (because I did tweak the lyrics just a bit) - I just wanted to give credit where credit was due so it didn't seem like I was plagiarizing!  This reading was read at our wedding by a friend of mine over a live instrumental performance of "Be Born In Me" (that song speaks powerfully to me - it's about so much more than Mary, the mother of Jesus).  It arose from journaling exercises I did in Dannah Gresh's book, "Get Lost," which I mostly did before I began dating my husband.  That book helped me turn a crucial corner without which I would not have been ready for my husband or for marriage.  

I hope you're inspired to pursue God in deeper ways for having read this.  Blessings to you.

*

Usually we don’t consider being lost a good thing

It is poetic, but it is never practical 

And in Christian jargon, being lost means sin

It means you have fallen off the path

Or fallen off the wagon

Being lost means Separation from God

Because, “Oh…that person lost their way…”

But what if you were lost IN God?

What if you knew only your destination and your Guide?

That your destination was worth any suffering and everything you think you want

…That your Guide has been and always will be perfectly trustworthy

…That your Guide has always loved you and fiercely desires you to have joy?

What if you were lost IN God?

God’s way is narrow

And His daylight is blinding at first

As light always is after so much darkness

But God’s way is also an adventure and a pleasure

A voyage into YOUR unknown with the God who knows ALL

To get lost in God and to stay lost in God

Is to finally experience that heartbreak can be peripheral

That pain can coexist with peace and joy

That despite what losses occur, you are still genuinely grateful for God

Because you know that to lose Him is to be ruined for anything less

To lose God is the most profound suffering there is

To get lost in God and to stay lost in God

You must open your heart and keep it open

No one can take surrender away from you

And so I offer to you this prayer I have learned

That rose from the ashes of getting it wrong so many times

This prayer I prayed over and over again in the last few months I was single

This prayer that made me ready for the man God had for me

This prayer of losing myself in my Maker

And returning to my First Love

A prayer of getting lost in God

Dear Jesus,

I’ve gotten attached and fallen in love so many times.  I am so sick of this vicious, violent cycle.  Even when I tried to stop, Satan still found a way to sneak weeds into my resolve.  Jesus, I know that You are the only Person who can help and that I need You desperately – in greater amounts than ever. 

My soul has been greatly endangered by all the loss I’ve known.  I need You more than ever, yet all my addictions have handicapped me.  All of them didn’t help me.  They only made me farther away from the healing I need and less able to receive it. 

I know that meeting someone new won’t help – I finally know that.  Just saying it revives bitter soreness.  I am so good at turning to things besides You, Jesus.  Have mercy on me.  Help me.      

God, I want an appetite for Your love above all other loves.  There will be no marriage in heaven, though You have created it as a divine institution and holy blessing for us here on earth now.  Help me to desire You whom I need before I can ever be married and whom I will alone assuredly have should something happen to my marriage.  My relationship with You is the most important thing about me – about my life.  Everything I love and want is only possible and only comes from You, Lord.  Clean my heart.  I want to crave You more than I crave a mate. 

Holy Spirit intercede for me… 

It seems as if I can’t do anything for very long without needing to withdraw and numb myself.  I am horrified to realize the things I let into my bleeding soul rather than You, Jesus, when I had been hurt.  Brutal honesty with myself and with You is how I need to cope with life.  I need to get over my unrealistic and neurotic compulsions to look as perfect as I can.  I need to risk rejection from the world around me or I will never heal.     

Jesus, I commit to coming to You honestly, and to not believe the lie that I have to be presentable for You to love me.  You love me even though I’m not perfect.  I promise to fall on You pathetically sobbing rather than turn to a soul-numbing counterfeit.  I promise to give my tears to You rather than seeking out some form of a fix.  I promise that when something gives me genuine joy, I will praise and thank You and not forget that You are the source of everything good. 

And I promise that when any and all reminders of different losses try to make me take my eyes off You that – instead – I will pray to see with Your eyes and to be still and open my heart to be known by You and to open my hands to let fly the losses like birds. 

I am afraid of the pain of humiliation and of abandonment.  I’m afraid of sharing Your new life inside my heart in the wrong way and succumbing to insidious sabotages and continually miscarrying the dream You put in me.  I’ve lost so many second chances You’ve given me so graciously and generously.  But I know being consumed by Your unselfish love is the life I want, Lord. 

Be born in me, Jesus.  All other gain is loss compared to knowing and experiencing You.  Consume me, body and soul, oh Lord.  You are my desired haven.  Invade the cells of my very being.  On my own, I can only love You like a friend, but I pray that my longing will be for Your heart in time. 

Everything inside me cries for order

Everything inside me wants to hide

If You are pleased with me, why am I so terrified?

Somehow help me see with Heaven’s eyes

And before my head agrees, my heart is on its knees

You are holy and I am blessed

Be born in me

Be born in me

My heart is trembling

But somehow I believe that You chose me

I’ll hold You in the beginning

You will hold me in the end

Every moment in the middle

Make my heart Your Bethlehem

Be born in me

All this time I’ve waited for Your promise

All this time You’ve waited for my arms

Did You wrap yourself inside the unexpected

So I might know that Love would go that far?

I am not brave

I’ll never be

The only thing my heart can offer is a vacancy

I’m just a girl

Nothing more

But I am willing

I am Yours

Regarding pain

Pain is the body's physical and emotional nervous system that communicates when something is wrong, when things are not in harmony, when the designed working order has been violated on whatever level.  Like, when you stub your toe, bruise your leg, cut yourself or get shot, there is pain because the harmony of your body has been disrupted or violated.  When you find out you've been lied to, when you're being emotionally abused, when someone calls you a terrible name, there is pain because we were made in the image of love and it is a violation of that design for us to treat and be treated in those ways.

Compassion is essentially the desire to alleviate pain.  But if we were compassionate in the most holy way, in a deep and spiritual way, we wouldn't only - merely - want to alleviate pain.  We'd want to either heal or eradicate what causes the pain signals to go off in the first place.  We'd want to eliminate what's wrong and then there'd BE no pain.  (Of course we know that this world will never be pain-free until Jesus comes back to take us Home and annihilates sin eternally)

Pain is not what's wrong - pain is only the messenger.  Pain always tells the truth about sin, which is why pain always hurts and sometimes feels unbearably overwhelming because of the responsibility that truth brings about how we should view the past and how we should proceed in the future.

Making a choice that causes a human being pain is not necessarily the sin.  It's the choices that make pain possible (either in the causer or recipient of the pain) that contain the sin, because pain is a messenger of when something is wrong - pain is not the wrong thing itself, though it definitely, absolutely hurts.

Take some time to absorb those last 2 sentences...

Often, sins have no pain in the moment (many sins give immediate and intense pleasure)...but they vividly cause pain later.  All the searing sensations of pain are telling us how morally WRONG the event was that occurred, which eventually (or immediately) caused the pain.

Also, pain could just as easily be a reaction convicting us that we are in the wrong when someone tells us the truth, which causes the lies we've embraced to bleed.  There are so many angles to understand pain from.  I think it's safe to reason that where there is pain, sin is not far away, whether we are the ones who have sinned or whether we've been sinned against.

Where there is pain, there is sin.

"It is a mistake to entertain the thought that God is pleased to see His children suffer." (Ellen G. White, Steps to Christ)

I believe it's a mistake to entertain such a thought because God is not pleased to see His children experiencing sin.  We know He's not pleased when we sin, and He's still not pleased when we experience the pain sin inevitably causes.  This is because He loves us and He wants us to live holy, uncluttered, cathartic lives of pure joy...!

Pain stands to teach us and shape us for the better if we'll let it.  If we don't let it, then we cause ourselves to become misshapen, constricted and bent.  And I believe it is because pain is always a litmus test for the presence of sin, that we must suffer for Christ and with Christ, because if we're true Christians, we are living and working for Him among the ranks of needy, lost sinners - many of whom don't yet feel a burden to change and might very well rebel against necessary changes, even if it'd mean saving their life eternally.

Pain being unavoidable because you're a Christian can be understood like spending your life working with what you're allergic to, with what is guaranteed to cause reactions.  And to make it clearer, what you're allergic to is also partially allergic to you - people who have adapted to their sin (especially people who love their sin) will not respond ideally to the truth about sin and our need for God's transformation.  And so the allergy metaphor goes both ways.  The presence of sin (especially when you're fighting it with the truth) causes pain to the saved and lost like the allergen causes an allergic reaction.  If we are true Christians, we will always be working directly with sin issues and so there will always be some experience of pain bubbling up in our lives.  To be sure, there are oases of revival, but we will not get a permanent break from sin and all its miserable pain until heaven.

I think that the experience of pain and suffering is a given if we're pursuing God's will, intimacy with Him and sanctification to become more like Him, because those things necessitate fighting sin constantly.  And where there is sin, there is pain.  Where there is pain, there is sin.

If we are to be truth-tellers and lifesavers amidst sin, there will be pain.  Plain and simple.

People who struggle with codependency like me need to stop being afraid of the inevitability of causing pain, we need to stop dreaming that there's somehow a way to do God's work without pain.

But lest you think that I'm all for spiritual masochism and sadism, let me close with this quote from EGW's Ministry of Healing:

“[Paul] made them understand that it cost him pain to give them pain.” (MH 166.5)

Just because we need to stop being afraid of causing pain and become more realistic doesn't mean that we are EVER to become desensitized.

We should become the most sensitive people in the world.

These realizations should make us both stronger AND more sensitive.
This is just one more instance of carrying our cross like Jesus carried His.

Our secular world seems to polarize those two (strength & sensitivity), as though you can't have strength and sensitivity together, because of the opaque way they interpret the two definitions.  But with God all things are possible, and I've already experienced quite intimately that peace and pain can inexplicably coexist together in a human heart, so I am prepared to trust that strength that sustains us against how pain makes us cringe and writhe can coexist with a sensitivity that bleeds when others bleed.  We must remember that following God means we won't always understand, but be we can always trust.

If God were small enough for our minds to always totally comprehend Him, He would not be great enough to always merit our total trust.  He is infinite, we are finite.  We cannot encompass Him, but we can trust that He can encompass us, enable us and empower us for what He asks us to do.

Musings on Writing

I just downloaded a free eBook thanks to Lysa TerKeurst called "The 7 Secrets You Need to Know As a New Writer: Wisdom from 30 Authors and Bloggers Who Have Been Where You Are."

Early on, one of the pieces of advice is to write daily - that writing is a discipline.  That you don't have to crank out lots of words each day, but that you do need to write words of substance daily.  Some days you'll feel like it, other days you won't - like the way some of us (myself included) relate to exercise.  And speaking of exercise, writing daily is about exercising the "writing muscles" in my brain.  I also think writing more often is important for me, because it keeps me from drying up & from getting shallow.  I wrestle with Facebook these days.  I'm in a place where I'll take huge chunks of time away from it (up to 40 days), return for just a few days, and then go away for 40 more days.  As I've been recovering sensitivity and peace in my soul, I find that social media grates those qualities and covertly funnels them out of me.  After my first 40-day social media fast in years - this past summer, June 19-July 28 - I had made radical changes in less than 24 hours.  Reintroducing my social media apps into the routine I'd developed in those 40 days felt like my inner quiet was being attacked, and I knew quite quickly that I neither needed nor wanted my Twitter or Instagram accounts.  I deleted them.  On Facebook I can post statuses as short as I want them to be (or as long) and I can do pictures.  Twitter & Instagram are simply unnecessary, technically, but they do serve to pose as extra sources of getting attention & affirmation and boy can you lose hours getting mindlessly distracted in their labyrinths.  My husband calls it "getting caught in 'the scroll.'"  He can tell when I'm scrolling mindlessly on my phone or on my laptop - when I'm not actively thinking (or when I'm avoiding actively thinking?).  A part of me resents when he gets on my case, but these days I just need to choose which resentment will let me sleep at night, because if Russell doesn't get on my case & I scroll until I feel literally fried, then I'm upset at myself and resent that I wasted those fistfuls of minutes (sometimes hours!) being "caught in the scroll," accomplishing nothing.

One thing I know is that as social media became more important to me (especially after I finally got my first smartphone), I began to journal less and process less on paper, in private.  I was processing with the rest of the world on Facebook.  Yet, on Facebook there's this unspoken filter where you have to keep in mind that people will read what you post, see what you "like" and make judgment calls about who you are and comment however freely they desire (sometimes this freedom is still shocking).

Facebook simply is not free territory.

I'm much more aware than I ever have been of a pressure I feel in relating to Facebook.  Sometimes when I'm away from it and life happens, I have a strong urge to go and post about whatever the ripple was (or the insight the ripple caused), rather than processing more freely in private like I used to.  It's as if Facebook began replacing my journal, but instead of cathartically articulating with the authenticity of being in a safe environment (on the pages of a private journal), I was cultivating statuses calculated to sound quippy, snappy, quotable & well.......likeable (pun intended).  I think that spending lots of time on social media siphoned depth out of me at a time when I needed it badly to deal with some emotional traumas in 2011 that gave me C-PTSD, because it drew me so constantly to be shaping and sharing my thoughts with others in mind, rather than with no one in mind but myself and God.

I can remember when prayer journaling gave me a clarity that empowered me to not need others' approval, that gave me strength to internally rebuff their disapproval if necessary.  But now...all the recent years of social media overuse has only breastfed my tendencies towards codependency.  And if you know anything about codependency, you know it's a brutal and unforgiving, predictable cycle that you can only combat by simply cutting ties with it.  Some of those ties can be so old and strong that they're like tree trunks, but they can still be cut out of you, but the healing will take a great deal of time.  I'm in touch with too many overseas & long distance friendships through Facebook to get rid of my account entirely, but I'm in a season where I'm on social media less than I ever have been & when I get on, I'm acutely aware of my impulses to bury myself in it, to get lost in it.

On positive notes, though, these spurts of getting away from Facebook and only using my FB Messenger app (like a texting app) have helped me re-dig some new depth and get back into reading and writing.  I have an independent study that I've begun and it has nothing to do with school.  I'm between undergrad & grad school - I am enrolled nowhere.  This independent study is just for me (though I'd like to see if it could go somewhere when it's finished).  I have several written irons in the fire that I work on a little at a time.  I'm combatting old habits by making charts for myself and scheduling a certain amount of chapters to read every day from the Bible and elsewhere.  I'm really enjoying the self-imposed structure!  It feels like it's adding a bit more personal purpose to my life underneath being a pastor's wife, and it's not too ambitious or too miniscule.  I've lived so much of these last few years without structure from the inside out (vs. structure given to me by being in school or having a job) that pursuing it now feels stabilizing & healing.

So... I'll tie off here because it's 10:35p and my husband and I are getting up to exercise with the students at 6:30a (as in we need to be there at 6:30a, so we have to get up closer to 6), and I am not a fan of mornings and I tend to need more sleep than Russell.  But that's another topic for another time.

My First Publication: Adventist Review

This is something I’d originally prepared for Adventist Review.  I was asked to write something 1200 words long, so I decided to see if one of my biblical paraphrases would fly.  It did - under the title "Love Must Be Free" - but not exactly as I’d foreseen, though I am thrilled to have been published for the first time.  What changed is that only about a sentence or two of all my background paragraphs was used (they changed the location and could no longer use all 1200 words) and my paraphrase from Romans was slightly abridged, but still unedited.  Here is the original 1200 word piece in full.  I hope it is a blessing and inspires whoever reads this to give their Bible another good long try on faith, to pray that God will help you creatively fall in love with His Word like He helped me.

*

Worship Through Words

By Chloe Murnighan

I love words.  Due to my personality, I encounter fairly regular feedback about how much I talk and write.  Pruning my verbosity is one of my growth areas.  Words are not cheap to me, yet they pour out of me.  They’re crucial for connecting with people and vital to me in worshipping God through journaling and reading.   

An enormous portion of Christ’s earthly gospel ministry was through words.  Then it was preserved by word of mouth and writing, which is how we now have the Holy Scriptures – God’s heart conveyed through words – in such plenteous availability that people can take it for granted vs. previously being murdered for its mere possession.  And up until December 2013, I also took God’s Word for granted. 

Before then, I’d read portions of my Bible, being a lifelong Adventist.  But while I wasn’t a stranger to Scripture, I didn’t feel the personal impact from it that I did from other books that had nurtured my relationship with God.  And the following concern would occasionally occur to me: I am a Christian who loves God personally.  Why do I get more excited about devotional books than the BIBLE?  The full answer is another story but here is how I grew to love the Bible: word studies over a backdrop of pain.  I’ll explain. 

Earlier in the fall of 2013 through a hermeneutics class, I was exposed to Strong’s Concordance and to how easily accessible it is via websites like biblehub.com.  My personal method of word studies was kindled in a classroom but is essentially of my own construction; it’s not fancy and doesn’t deal with grammar.  I simply take one Bible verse and look up each of its words in Strong’s Concordance, writing everything down as I go.  As I write and see the multiple meanings unfold that just one Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic word can have, and as I do this for all the words in just one text, a sentence becomes a paragraph.  It makes the verse become abundantly three-dimensional and invigorating. 

Word studies of Scripture were also healing.  In the same semester as my hermeneutics class, I’d dissolved the one official dating relationship I’d had before my husband.  The painful memories of our mistakes made me feel as though shattered glass was embedded in my heart and stomach all the time.  Such was the unrelenting backdrop for the first verse I ever did a personal word study on: Acts 3:19.  It spoke of repentance and “times of refreshing” – experiences I craved.  As I wrote it all out, the shattered glass sensation was temporarily smoothed.  I did many more word studies that Christmas break, and gradually my suffering dulled.  I am no stranger to coping mechanisms both healthy and unhealthy, so I say this with no naiveté: studying the Bible soothed my pain. 

But beyond that, word studies greatly bolstered my gratitude for the richness of God’s Word as they stimulated my mind to appreciate the myriad of ways a single verse could be understood and applied to one’s personal life.  Eventually, I was moved to painstakingly construct deepened paraphrases of Biblical passages to hopefully convey the newly robust and intricate implications that personal word studies had brought home to my heart from Scripture.  I pray that whoever reads this will be encouraged to fall in love with God’s Word like I did.

Romans 12:9-21

            “Love must be free from hidden agendas.  You should not be blindly seduced by persuasion to deviate from the standard of love; instead you should be aware of and repulsed by the inevitable agonies and miseries that always go with evil.  Make yourself intimately bonded to what is truly good, like a wound absorbing medicine, whether others understand it or not.  Be tenderly present and affectionate toward one another with the cherishing love of a loyal family member.  Trust God’s grace by taking the lead to willingly give higher value to other people rather than drowning in your own needs as though God did not die for you as well.  Never be reluctant about the best you know you can give, but instead feed the flame of your spiritual ardor so that it is always at a boiling point, ever-ready to serve God by ministering to someone else’s heart.  Choose to stay conscious of God’s grace whenever you must wait on Him.  Endure it when you feel all options are stripped away.  Do not let difficulty separate you from constantly asking God to exchange your wishes for His desires and for more persuasion to trust Him.  Participate in both the crises and mundane chores of your fellow believers and be unwaveringly fervent about sharing your hearts and homes with people who are strange to you.

            Even when you are bullied, provoked, and hunted, deliberately speak only what is good and kind about your persecutors.  Be gracious and do not pray for anything negative to happen to them; pray for Jesus to happen to them.  Affirm the gladness of people who have something to celebrate; do not rain on their joy.  Smile, laugh, and be exuberant with them!  Validate and respect the grief of people who have suffered heartbreak and loss; do not criticize their tears.  Hold them in your arms.  Cry with them.  Be still with them.  Do not abandon them.  Live with such intentionally sincere love so that no one feels like a dissonant note in the community, but knows they are valued and would be missed if they were gone.  Do not exalt yourself, but instead work to understand and identify with people who rely on God, rather than leaning on their own understanding.  Do not spend time praising your own intelligence. 

            Never fight fire with fire, ever.  Instead, take thought beforehand to respond to injustice and cruelty with choices that look beautiful and noble to everyone, not just your fellow believers who understand the same things you do.  Live so that witnesses are forced to conclude you are blameless and internally absent of self-serving motives.  Whenever you have the option, choose to depend on God’s strength and wisdom – rather than your own – to figure out ways of living without causing conflict both to believers and unbelievers alike.  Never try to get even when you are wronged, but instead give God opportunity to put His redeeming, sinless anger into action on your behalf.  Remember what has been written in the days of our fathers: God has said, “Retribution is my responsibility and I will make it happen perfectly.”  Your call is to nurture, not avenge:

           ‘If the person who hates you and cannot reconcile with you is clearly hungry, dole out some morsels, but do not waste what cannot be recognized; if this person is in a state of restless desire, irrigate his heart with kindness.  Once you have done this, it will weigh down your adversary’s internal conflict with coals that burn with the fire of God, which will help to melt their internal fissures closer to a state of wholeness.’  Never allow your heart to be subdued by what is wrong, but win the fight and protect your heart with God’s goodness, whether others understand it or not.”

Psalm 143 Prayer (Paraphrase based on Hebrew)

Dear God,

You are the Lord of all true spiritual soldiers.  You are the divine Master of all who cling to You fervently amidst the anxieties of the great controversy.  As we believers grow closer to You and are refined and made new, You are the power both behind and in our becoming.  We owe You everything.  I owe You everything I am today.  Yahweh, I pray that You listen to the audible, intervening plea of my heart, as I humbly and desperately seek to intrude upon what has been happening to me by breaking through to Your throne of grace.  I also pray that You comprehend the meaning of my crying appeal for the sacred kindness of Your merciful intrusion into my circumstances and feelings.  Holy Spirit intercede and convey with Your divine groanings; please perfect the prayer of my soul that I am trying to communicate to You.  From the source of Your enduring stability – though I am so predictably unstable – and because of the uncluttered wellspring of Your sparkling merits – for I am nothing without You – answer my heart with some kind of response!

                  O Creative God, I am but a bond-slave of love to You.  All I can do is humbly yet boldly beg that You will not bring to pass the justice that the sum of my life’s choices deserves, because no one who’s ever lived or ever will live can be proven good-hearted in comparison to You, let alone apart from You.  Without You I have no hope of goodness.  Without You I have no purity, no claim on You.  I recognize what I deserve.  I recognize my limits.  I recognize my need for You.  I am nothing without You. 

                  I feel hunted in my soul by messages that are ruthlessly hostile to my relationship with You – by sensations that attack my faith so that I feel trampled and crushed into the ground where there is almost no hope to help me keep functioning.  I feel like my soul is being forced against its will into a union with darkness that would decay and kill my heart as dead as people who have been rotting for centuries.

                  My inner spirit is inhaling more and more feebly, Lord.   My inmost heart feels like a desolate particle of waste because of what I am going through.

                  Despite all of this, I have and will actively bring my mind back to the chronicles of ancient histories and of how You have led me in my own life story; I am choosing to think about the whole symphony of all Your individual works and I am focusing on the good fruit of Your divine authority in contrast to the disheartening rot of evil.   

            I am baring before us both my paltry capacity to control my life and myself when I am separated from You.  I am under no illusions.  O God, my soul’s very life is gasping for You to drench and nourish me like famine-cursed ground aching for water.   

            O Master and Lord of my life please respond to me without any more suspense; it feels like my courage is at an end…!  If you withhold Your presence from me any longer I will dissolve into a state of bondage, yet it is You that I want!   

            I pray that the breaking of this darkness will finally allow me to experientially encounter your love in all its soothing faithfulness, because I have chosen to trust You without caution, without reserve.  I am relying on You and no other.  I also pray that You will cause me to intimately know which course and mission I should set my heart to desire and act upon, because I am bringing my soul to You as an offering, as a sacrifice.  I am investing my identity, purpose and abilities completely in You and no other. 

My life is Yours.

            I pray that You will plunder the strongholds of Satan because he is the nemesis of Your quality of life in me, the enemy of my very soul; plunder the cancerous addictions, degeneration and lies he has grown in me with the ardor of Your love, with the transformation of Your holiness, and with the living blade of Your truth.  Plunder every stronghold of evil in my life and strip their remains from me, for I am burrowing myself into Your righteousness with all my strength and nothing evil can coexist with Your goodness in me – it has to be one or the other, and I choose You, my heavenly Lord and Master.

            God, I ask that You teach me to become an expert at pleasing You, for You are my Ruler and I love being under Your wings.  I ask that Your beautiful Spirit will lead me on Your straight and narrow way, set apart from the rutted misery of the world’s confusion. 

            O God of all healing, for the purpose of increasing Your renown, live in my life and through my life in order to save it and remold it to Your preference.  Lord, I pray that You make an appearance in my affliction out of Your heart that is just and honestly good, in all Your holiness, and carry me away from these anguishing straits of spiritual privation that Satan has deceived me into entering.  

            Because You are a God overflowing with deeds of kindness, beauty, mercy, unwavering love, favor and sheer goodness, I passionately pray that You exterminate the intimidating, unholy, unloving emotions I am experiencing.  Annihilate the perfect entirety of the feelings and tendencies I have that harass my ability to receive Your peace, that attack my trust in You, that pressure me to not surrender to You because You are who I belong to, I am bound to You, I am Yours.