When You touch me

I’m coming to the cross again (When You touch me)

I’m coming to the cross again
The place where all the sin and shame
Of what I do
Was squarely placed on You
The pressure’s more than I can take
I’ve tried to walk in my own strength
I lay it down
Before your thorny crown

I’ve tried so hard to be someone
That You’d be proud to call Your son
To earn the love
I know I don’t deserve
When I think I’m standing tall
The greater height the bigger fall
Now all I see
Is my futility

But when you touch me
I feel the burdens slipping down again
And when you touch me
Can’t stop the tears from falling down like rain

I feel the shame of shallowness
The kind of measured holiness
That seems to fit
The life I want to live
How much of this is wood and straw
I want to work for something more
Than piety
Respectability

When the words cut like a knife
And harsh rejection haunts my life
I tell myself
This was the pain You felt
You walked this road a thousand times
The victim of the cruellest crimes
And left for dead
By every friend You had

When the accusations came
You refused to play their game
No words of hate
To set the record straight
And when they taunted at the cross
If You are God then save yourself
You set Your face
To free this fallen race

(c) Stuart Townsend 1999

I treated myself to a new CD. As I was peeling wallpaper off the bathroom wall I was listening to it. I just felt when I got to this track that God did some peeling off of His own!

It is the kind of poem that I wish I had the sensitivity to God's Spirit to write - the honesty of admistting that I am not where I should be, and that a lot of what i do that I pass off as holiness is just "wood and straw".

And then God touches me. I wept as I thought of God's grace towards me. Even when I think I am standing tall, God knows so well that in reality I have fallen over and still He comes to restore.