Catching up

People have always told me I'm very mature for my age. My own mother has mockingly called me a forty-year-old midget since I was about nine, which I have nearly always taken as a compliment. But the more I 'catch up' to my mental age, the more I realize how much I never knew, never understood about what it means to be an adult.

I've been thinking about this a lot, in terms of the relationships I have built around me in the current phase of life that I'm in. My friends, for example, are no longer just the social 'hang out' type of friends that I had in high school. My truest friends now are the ones I share more than the surface of my life with--they know the details of my heart. Not only that, but they care about the details of my heart.

I have this problem, though: I don't like people to know the details of my heart. I'm afraid of it.

I don't really know exactly what one thing spawned this whole 'anti-trust' issue, but for the past several years I have clung to it religiously, almost as if I am afraid I will drown without it. I don't really think it was just one thing...but perhaps a category of things, titled "broken promises". Those always do tend to make one a bit cautious.

It's not really fair. The people who are in my life right now have done nothing to deserve my walls, my caution...my brokenness. They have broken no promises to me, have abandoned no trust. And yet, my fight or flight risk takes over time and again when faced with someone who wants to penetrate my heart, if only to better know me and come to love me.

The Lord, He has broken no promises to me either. He has never taken a piece of my heart and returned it in a worse state than it was given. He has loved me, unconditionally, and has given me no reason to hide--and still I do. From Him, and everyone else as well.

Father, forgive me for my hesitation to let You invade every space of my heart. Your Spirit, a great cloud which used to dwell in a holy building, now resides in the hollows of my body. If You are already there, why do I fight against Your loving presence? Why do I resist the presence of my friends in my heart? Why do I run when Nate pries into my thoughts, lovingly and carefully? I have no answer, Lord, except that I am scared. Please help me to trust Your presence in me, and so learn to trust Your presence in the rest of Your children. And help them, Lord, to have patience with my brokeness. I love You.