Grab your phone, tap on YouTube and search for Benedictus by Karl Jenkins. Brace yourself and get past the inevitable adverts of how to get rid of your debt in 5 seconds or being shown the latest gadget that will greatly enhance your muscle tone. With that out the way: close your eyes. It will take a short while for the first strings to drown out your inner voice shouting at the noises in your head. Do not give up. Hang in there. Eventually, the strings will monopolise your mind and penetrate deeper than you had ever imagined.  Seven minutes and 34 seconds of it.

Surrender control and allow yourself to fall down the abyss of a lonely violin against a background hum. Resist the urge to figure out the hum, just go with it, each phrase of music – more tender than the previous as it gently cottons you in emotion that words can not define. Waiting for a crescendo or an explosion, which when it comes is so gentle that you fear you may have missed it, but for the easy to miss repetition of the music. A gentle rhythm that draws you in deeper. Safely into a Hand so protective that it is difficult to believe that this gentle touch could be the hand of God. It is not the strong grip you imagined, this so takes you by surprise that you almost miss the voices slipping in. Until they are there. So unexpected that you want them to leave, but they captivate, gently nudging into your subliminal. Your inner voice object- not used to such gentle words, wanting to make itself heard. It is not used to being out sung. Until unexpectedly, the explosion of sound you have been waiting for. So loud. So powerful, so all embracing washing over you in waves. Surges of pain, emotion, deeply suppressed memories. Feelings of being lost and found. Blind but now I see. A saved wretch. And then the lonely violin pulling you back from that abbess of ecstasy and reminding you just how short 7 minutes can be. It also reminds you that next time you may want the track to loop, simply because you need to stand at the door of heaven just a few loops longer.

God loves you. Three words that can sound so hollow. So out of place. Please do not tell me that God loves me when I so deeply despise myself for something I have said or done. God did not send me his only Son when I can’t face a world beyond this moment. My sins are so many. How can I confess those sins when they were justified in the moment of committing them. Those sins that are so satisfying that you do not want to confess to them. No. I do not want God to forgive me. I need my sins to flagellate myself into waking up tomorrow.

And then surrender. Surrender to the tears burning the back of your eyelids. Surrender to the emotion gripping your throat. Surrender the feelings of not being worthy.  Surrender control to a Hand gentler than you ever could have imagined. Voice more comforting than a cup of hot chocolate on a cold day. Cooling as a wave lapping at your feet on a beach. Soft as the feathery touch of your regrets slipping from the palms of your hands.

And as your inner voice dies down, silenced by the beauty of hearing God’s voice soothing your turbulent thoughts, His hand resting on your painfully tense shoulder muscles, just know this: God loves you.

Benedictus, seven minutes, and 34 seconds.

A lifetime of knowing that Grace will lead me home.