Oh Jesus Drink of Me

For our Spring choir concert, we sang a song called "If Love Should Count You Worthy." The lyrics are from a poem, and it has been sticking with me and my mind has been chewing on it for awhile. So I thought I'd share.


If love should count you worthy,
And should deign one day to seek your door,
And be your guest,
Pause! Ere you draw the bolt and bid Him rest,
If in your old content you would remain.
For not alone He enters:
In His train are angels of the mists,
The lonely quest,
Dreams of the unfulfilled and unpossessed
And sorrow, and life's immemorial pain.
He wakes desires you never will forget;
He shows you stars you never saw before;
He makes you share with Him forevermore
The burden of the world's divine regret.
How wise you were to open not!
And yet, how poor if you should turn Him from your door.
If love should count you worthy...


Are you worthy to love? Not are you worthy of love, but are you worthy to love? Would love count you worthy of its task? Can you handle love's burdens and be valiant to fight for its cause? Every day, every person you come in contact with gives love the opportunity to knock on your door. And you have a choice: do you let love in or do you leave it out? Of course, everyone says that they would choose to let love in, because everyone perceives love as warm and wonderful and easy and as a feeling of being on top of the world. But it's not. Love is messy. Sometimes, love is the worst pain that life offers. Are you worthy of experiencing that pain? If you want to stay where you are, safe within the walls of comfort, complacency, and ease, by all means, leave love out. Fake it and safeguard yourself. Keep your distance. Live to exist. Live to meet your own interests, live so that if you achieve happiness, your life's goals will be accomplished. But if you want something more, if you dare to face the challenge of love, then open the door. Love can enrich your life and may warm your heart, but it will also tear you apart. Love brings smiles and tears and warmth and torment.

Love can be lonely when it requires doing what's best rather than what's easiest. Love can be lonely when it requires allowing others to hate you. Love can be lonely when you are the only one fighting for its cause. Love hurts when it allows you to see the world's potential in contrast with its reality. Love hurts when it allows you to desire the best for others despite the fact that it may not ever be attained. Love is the part of you that knows that there is something better, something more, something good. And it's this same part of you that aches when you see the world and know that it's not what it should be and never has been. But it's the part of you that knows that someday, it could be. Love is that piece of you that just can't let it go. The piece that holds on to ache. The part that won't let you settle for what you know isn't what is best or the most. Love allows you to see pieces of others in yourself and allows you to see the hole in your soul in the eyes of another. Love allows you to see beauty where you thought it impossible to see, or just simply never thought to look. Love calls you to ignore the actions of a person, and rather to look at the circumstances that must surround that heart in order for such actions to be justifiable to them. Love is that thing that compels you do the opposite of what you want to do. You rarely, if ever, will actually truly want to love. Love makes you run in when you want to retreat. It makes you hold your ground when you want to give in. It makes you surrender when you want to fight. It makes you hope for what is hopeless. It makes you get closer to what you want to be farthest away from. It causes inner conflict. Oh how hard that battle can rage.

Love was never meant to hurt. There was never supposed to be this great divide between what is and what should be. They were supposed to be one. But they're not. The world has experienced a taint that will not fix itself, but spreads. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Oh if only we could go back and redo the part where we broke it. If only we could undo this contamination. If only we could make it right. But we can't. So what do we do with this contamination? If you don't want to fight for love, its easy. Accept the emptiness and continuously try to fill it. It'll never work. You'll never actually be full. More or less distracted, but never truly full. You don't have to bear the burden, just pretend it isn't there. You can probably fake it well enough to even believe it sometimes. Or you can choose love. Love brings more holes. Holes that hurt. Holes that are heavy. Holes with pain. But somehow, the more holes you allow, the fuller you get. The holes are never easy, but they fill a life with meaning. Meaning that is rich and deep. Love doesn't make you take it on alone. You share the burden, but somehow, it's a burden worth sharing.

How wise you would be to cast love away. Avoid it. You don't need it. You can make it by just fine without it. If you want something that makes sense, don't choose love. How could you ever get what's best for you by giving the power over your life and your heart to others? Love strips you of your power. How wise you are to grasp onto that power with all of your might. Why would you ever choose agony over happiness? Vulnerability over protection? Risks over safety? Misery over numbness? You don't want the burden of that regret. You don't want to be capable of experiencing that pain. You don't want to experience that kind of vulnerability. It is, of course, the most logical thing to do. The safest, easiest way to get through your span of inhalations and exhalations is to firmly shut the door on love.

Oh! But how this robs you! How this restrains your life from being more than an existence that may be very wide but not deep. There is so much to experience in the layers of the depth. Yes, there is a cost. But love is what saves. Love is what restores. Love is the source of life and meaning. Love took you from your dark state and filled you with light. It will take you, broken and empty, and will make into something that the Savior can use and delight in.

Oh, Jesus, drink of me! Break this foul body and heart and mold it into something that is worthy to fight for Love's cause. Take this wretched heart and make it into a treasure. For love calls for beauty, and beauty is created from destruction.

Some choose to love when the cost is low. They can be used on special occasion. Used for minuscule and convenient purposes and then put back on the shelf. But some truly fight for its cause. Some are truly worthy of wearing the cause of love on their heart. They are scraped and beaten and bruised and used day after day after day. They are thrown on the front line and they don't give up. Even when it hurts. Even when it's hard. Even when there aren't results. They have been molded for love's ordinary use. But how deep their life goes. And how the Savior delights in them. So what about you? Are you worthy to love? Would Love count you worthy of its cause?

"How wise you were to open not, and yet how poor if you should turn Him from your door..."