Who are you?

Struggling with the God whose persistence I find exhausting, whose very will requires me to relinquish my own, I dare to ask. "Who are you?" I want to shout, "And what do you want from me?"

French philosopher Michel de Montaigne writes of that which we know to be true of life, "There are triumphant defeats that rival victories." Along the road to surrendering to God, the battle is an unavoidable illustration. And there is much truth in the notion that surrendering to God is a battle that begins again every day as if nothing had yet been done. But it is in this great surrendering where we find, as Fredrick Buechner observes, "the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God."

(slice)