Sanctum

If I’ve been defiant, it’s only because I’ve loved the world too fiercely to kneel before those who feared it.

I have never sinned against You. Only against those who drew trembling lines in dust and dared call them law. Against those who mistook their fear for Your voice, who fenced off Your fire and begged us to kneel before the ashes.

If I burn, let it not be in wrath but from standing too near to something unbearably true. Let my ruin not be punishment but revelation. Let the flame be proof that I came close enough to matter.

Because I have lived. Fully. Foolishly. Sometimes even beautifully. And in every feeling that threatened to undo me, I felt You.

You never came to me in doctrine. You arrived in sensation. You spoke through desire that stilled me, through sorrow that reshaped the day, through joy that made no sense and asked for no explanation.

You gave no commandments only consequence. And in that, I knew You.

They warned me against chaos. Taught me to fear what stirs in the chest what brings a body to its knees not to pray but to tremble.

But You made the sky wide, the ocean wild, and called it good. Then men told us to fear that same wildness in ourselves.

But I don't. I won't. And I believe that makes You smile.

Because maybe the defiance isn't the sin. Maybe the defiance is the holiness. The dare itself. The sacred pull to see the line and not flinch not out of rage, not out of pride but because something real begins to stir quiet but certain like a knowing that arrives without words.

Cross. Go. Become.

What else is faith, if not movement into the unknown?

I was never made to be still. I was made to burn through this life slowly to let every part of me be kissed by beauty broken open by love remade by grief.

I do not want heaven if it requires me to dim to enter. I do not want a seat at the table if it comes at the cost of my voice.

You have met me more often in shadow than in sanctuary. In songs I wasn’t meant to love. In people I wasn’t meant to hold. In rooms full of sin and sincerity where no one pretended to be whole.

You were never in the spectacle. Never in the polished guilt of penitent performers. You were in the mess in the trembling hands of those who have broken things and dared to keep reaching anyway. In the ones who have wept in stairwells shouted into steering wheels wanted and wandered and still opened their hearts.

Not the ones who perfected obedience but the ones who kept loving even when they didn’t know how. The ones with dirt under their nails and something honest in their eyes.

And You were already there. Uninvited but unmistakably present. I recognized You in the weight of what mattered not because someone said it was sacred but because it felt like it was.

It’s always in the mess that I meet You. Not in the silence of sanctuaries but in the noise of what I wasn’t supposed to feel. In the tension. In the want. In the wildness I was told to fear.

And still, You were there. Not above it. Not after it. Inside it.

So how could I sin against You? The All-Seeing. The All-Holding. The Presence that leaves no corner untouched.

How can I betray what already knows me? What never needed me clean to be close?

You are not shocked by what I carry. You are not threatened by my longing. You have never asked me to disappear to be worthy of You.

If I’ve ever lost sight of You it was only when I tried to become someone else to deserve You.

But when I stopped performing when I stood in what was real in what was raw in what I was told to hide You didn’t look away. You met me there. And I understood:

This was never sin. This was where You live.

Because I cannot live inside something that asks me to be holy when I was created to be beautifully, tragically human.

To feel without apology. To touch with reverence and hunger. To love beyond what is allowed. To desire without shame. To ask questions that don’t have answers. To rage when the world betrays beauty. To seek what cannot be explained only experienced.

If holiness means disappearing I want no part of it.

If heaven requires I leave parts of myself at the door I’ll stay outside with the wild things with the real ones with the moments that make us ache and laugh and burn.

Because I believe You are there too. Not asking for perfection only presence.

While the world shrinks from You folds itself small in performance and piety begs for Your attention with trembling obedience I will not.

I’m answering Your dare. I will cross the line. Not to escape You but to find You where You’ve always been.

Just beyond the fence. Just past the rules. In the freedom they told me to fear. In the fire they said would consume me.

And if I burn let it be from standing that close to You.